Pinochet is dead, and it looks certain that Fidel Castro will soon follow him to the grave. I don’t have the same visceral loathing of Castro that I feel for Pinochet, whose brutal coup in 1973 was one of the big political events that formed my view of the world, along with Brezhnev’s invasion of Czechoslovakia five years earlier.
Viewed objectively, though, the similarities between the two outweigh the differences. Any good they have done (education in Cuba, economic growth in Chile) is less substantial than claimed by their admirers, and in any case outweighed by the central fact that, to impose the policies they thought were good, they were willing to jail, torture and kill those who got in their way. And Pinochet’s gross personal corruption is matched by Fidel’s conversion of his dictatorship into a family business, to be inherited by his brother.
Moreover, Pinochet and Castro were two sides of the same political coin. Pinochet justified his destruction of Chilean democracy by the fear that Allende would turn into a new Castro. Castro used Pinochet’s coup (among many other US-backed attacks on Cuba and other Latin American countries) as a justification for repressing domestic dissenters. The world will be a better place when both are gone and, hopefully, democracy comes to Cuba.
Update Predictably, Andew Bolt defends Pinochet. It’s important to observe that Bolt is even-handed in these matters. He would be just as eager to excuse Castro’s crimes if Fidel happened to change sides (hat tip: Tim Dunlop)
John Quiggin 
The White House or the CIA should give Castro a gold medal for his tireless work destroying the Soviet economy over three decades. The Soviets wasted billions in the Caribbean: surely some Russians must still resent this.
What kind of world class health system is it that thousands of people have drowned or jailed for trying to escape it?
Cuba isn’t poor because of the northern ‘bully’. It’s poor because it belongs to the Castros.
Who has the higher score, Castro or Pinochet?
Which one killed the most number of their own citizens?
It’s clear enough that both killed thousands, but after that it gets murky. Castro has been going much longer and his prisons are brutal places where people get killed, but there’s nothing in his rule to compare with the mass murder straight after Pinochet’s coup or the “caravan of death”.
JQ
Only almost 50 years of massive underdevelopment and all that that entails for peoples lifechoices. Chile, on the other hand, is a member of NAFTA, and is, well, faintly embarrassed at the company it has to keep in Sth America. Can’t agree with you on all the HR stuff however – Pinochet did, at the end of the day, hand power back to civilians (I admit in a very conditional fashion). Raul and Fidel can’t and won’t.
On a serious ecpol note – how should a newly democratic Cuba sequence the transition from central planning to social market economy ? I reckon the Chinese way, with peasant land reform as the opener, is the obvious starter.
Gordon,
You have raised a number of interesting points not often raised in these sorts of discussions.
You wrote: Countries like Cuba and North Korea which are embargoed, abused and threatened over long periods are forced into a perpetual wartime-style regime. It is a politically unnatural state, which generates an economically unnatural state.
Governments such as that of the United States which are critical of the shortcomings of non-capitalist societies in regard to democracy, human rights and their relative lack of material prosperity fail to acknowledge their own role in having brought about these situations.
All the countries, which underwent socialist revolutions in the twentieth century suffered, at the hands of the world’s large capitalist countries, overt and covert military attacks, blockades and economic embargoes. These include : Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua, often with toll of death and material destruction on a scale that would be inconceivable in Australia.
Should we be at all surprised that considerable fault can be now be found with these societies?
From the evidence, such as shown in Gavan McCormack’s “Cold War Hot War: An Australian Perspective on the Korean War” and “Korea the Unknown War” by Halliday and Cumings, the political movement which formed the Government of North Korea had popular support, both in the North and in the South, for having waged a struggle against the Japanese occupiers and for its program of land reform. The Southern regime imposed by the Americans was largely based upon those who had collaborated with the brutal Japanese occupiers during the Second World War.
There is much evidence of the popularity of the Northern regime across the whole peninsula. This includes:
The north of Korea was turned into a moonscape by bombing on an a previously unprecedented intensity. The coastal cities of North Korea were bombarded non-stop with shells from battleships of the US Navy throughout the conflict. At one point a dam was bombed, resulting in widespread flooding and drownings and grave harm to the North’s ability to grow food. This act technically qualifies as a war crime. Let’s not forget that biological weapons were also used by the US. They obtained the knowledge from Japan’s notorious Unit 731, in return for not prosecuting them for war crimes at the end of the Second World War.
The North Korean army, together with its Chinese allies paid a terrible price for resisting the armies of the US and their allies.
As a consequence of this horrific three year conflict and ongoing state of siege it appears that the regime in the North became largely transformed into what Cold War propaganda had depicted it to be in the war. Many of the generals who had commanded the North’s armies during the war were purged by Kim Il Sung shortly after the war, according to Halliday and Cumings. This would have been one of may steps by which the North Korean was transformed from one based on a popular mass movement to what it has become today.
North Korea is the most extreme example, but the point remains valid for all the socialist governments which came into conflict with the US including Castro’s.
There is good reason to suggest that if these societies had been left alone and had not endured so much death, destruction, or at the very least, ongoing covert military attacks, sabotage and economic warfare, and if they had not been made to divert so much of their resources into facing the military threat of the United States, they would have thrived and have become examples that most in the rest of the world would have wanted to have followed.
—
Professor Quiggin, is there any reason, you know of, why so many of my posts are blocked these days? I will try, again, after this to post another post I wrote earlier in response to this post.
Professor Quiggin,
Can you tell me what is your basis for your estimate of the death toll in Castro’s Cuba as in the thousands?
The only figure that seems to have any basis, as stated in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba are that 550 were executed in the first six months of 1959. My understanding was that these were executions of rural landlords who were judged by peasant tribunals to have been brutal and exploitative. My understanding was that these executions were carried out because the peasants insisted and not because the leaders wished them to be carried out. I would suggest that the leaders of the revolution should have stopped them, and, at the very least, it was a serious error of judgement for them not to have done so, but that context should be acknowledged.
Let’s also understand that Cuba has been under attack from terrorists almost since the day this Government came to power. How many of those deaths would have been an unavoidable consequence of self defence?
Other than that, has there been any other program of cold-blooded killing of large numbers of political opponents that you can provide evidence for?
Gordon, you have raised another very pertinent point:
If the ‘small government’ advocates who post to this site, truly believe in the nonsense they espouse, then you would expect them to have something to say about this.
You would think it would think that they would have been able to show, somewhere, how the “dead hand of government control” would have hindered the struggle against the Axis powers.
In the First World War, the US economy suffered from runaway inflation thanks to wartime profiteering. In the Second World War, this was largely avoided, thanks to the firm government controls implemented by the late John Kenneth Galbraith.
I can’t decide if James Sinnamon is making the case that non-capitalist societies (ie Cuba et al) are inferior because they will fail without support from the west, or if such societies are inferior because when both they & the west are tooling up for war on each other, and quarantine themselves economically, it is the west which thrives.
steve at the pub,
I fail to see your point. If we are to judge these countries, then we should at least acknowledge the ferocious adversity that they have faced from the world’s most formidable military power, as I have pointed out before. If you hold the view, on the basis of the US’s seeming current ascendency that “might is right”, then I can’t change that, but it hardly constitutes a moral argument for removing the Castro government and handing Cuba’s wealth across to its would-be capitalist rulers.
The Castro regime was protected for decades by its big brother, the world’s other ‘ferocious regime’ and was coddled & spolit by it. The USSR disappeared over a decade ago and what has the USA done to overthrow Castro since then? Nothing, apparently. Some ferocity. Policy makers in Washington probably can’t give a damn about his regime – he’s irrelevent now.
Castro reminds me of a demented opera singer who demands a captive audience of a few million for his endless speeches. Don’t try to tiptoe out.
Will de Vere,
The US remains committed to removing Castro, whether or not he has the support of the Cuban people, just as they remain committed to the overthrow of other governments in the region, which don’t implement social and economic policies acceptable to US corporations. These include that of Venezuela, and, in the past, have included the Chilean government of Allende and the previous Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
The fact that they are not overtly at war today with the Castro government does not change that. They still suffer economic blockade. In the past the US backed a proxy invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, which they had to quickly disown after it became apparent that no significant numbers of people from within Cuba had rallied in support of the invaders. Since then the CIA has engaged in an overt war of terror and sabotage and have given aid and comfort to anti-Castro terrorists including those who deliberately detonated a bomb aboard an Air Cuba flight, killing all on board. The death toll was 79 from my recollection.
Castro may well be guilty of having delivered overly long speeches, however, I have yet to find one that I haven’t found to be interesting and inciteful. Certainly they would leave for dead the repetitve waffle and statements of the obvious that emanate every day from the mouth of our own Prime Minister every day of the week.
It’s most interesting that the argument about the evil Soviet Empire has bee turned around 180 degrees in the case of Cuba. Instead of being accused of having enslaved the people of that Island they stand accused of having mollycoddled them and subsidised them even at the ultimate expense of their own survival.
No doubt the billions of dollars of ‘aid’ that the US gave to the people of Indochina in the 1960’s and 1970’s – thousands of tons of bombs, napalm, phosporous, bullets, artillery shells and chemical defoliants – would have been far more to your liking.
‘The US remains committed to removing Castro’. Well, that’s an easy commitment to keep. They only need to wait.
Your arguments are so old and stale that they sound like a pub debate about Northern Ireland: the bloody British! Drogheda! The Famine! To happily look forward to the death of another old dictator does not require that we try to defend America’s record in Vietnam or Cambodia. Most Americans are well-enough aware of their Vietnam disaster to not need a history lesson from whining Australian ideologues.
The CIA assassination attempts on Castro were made public by the Church Committee in 1974 and were universally denounced: Ford signed an order prohibiting future attempts.
All of the CIA’s efforts in Cuba required the enthusiastic support of many Cubans who saw themselves as liberators and the recent celebrations in Miami at the news that the opera singer was about to gasp his last attest to how many Cubans despise him and his clique.
Before anyone tries to the ‘best health care system in the galaxy’ defence again, they should be reminded that every 20th century dictator has been devoted to promoting the health of ‘the people’ (those who aren’t in camps). Oppressive regimes love healthcare and sport (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980, Beijing 2008).
Your tenacious defence of the old dictator is touching.
The Church Committee rumbled successive US administrations as major terrorists. Then Ford embarrassedly banned terrorism of a specified kind against specified would-be victims.
The US has never got out of the terrorist profession.
Nor has the US overcome its compulsion to tell other people how they must live their lives, or else.
They’re still trying, and failing, to do it in Iraq.
Thus WdV, this isn’t an “old and stale” debate.
The struggle continues, because like an old alcholic with a bad case of delerium tremens, successive US administrations go back to their bottle of poison for one more “steadier”.
Like many addicts in denial, these administrations claim that because they’ve given up bourbon for scotch they’ve whipped their problem.
How wrong they are!
It’s time the US took the pledge and joined AA.
Bumping off Castro would have been a public service.
Not terrorism.
steve at the pub,
Your contribution above about is as novel and interesting as your earlier contributions which proclaimed your enthusiastic support for the impending judicial murders of Scott Rush and other fellow Australians in Indonensia, but no less morally repellent.
James Sinnamon, you find it morally repellent for criminals to meet the letter of the law?
No wonder you support people like Castro!
Please copy & paste where I “enthusiastically” support ANY murder.
“Bumping off Castro would have been a public service.
“Not terrorism.”
SATP commits the fallacy of the excluded middle. surely an act can be *both* terroristic *and* a public service.
So, what *is* terrorsm?
Don’t get me wrong SATP. I’ve got no rooted objection to many acts that a lot of folks, especially folks from the Right, get very upset about.
Terrorism, like treason, is often a matter of chronology. In other words, it’s deemed to be terrorism until the winners write the history.
Often, however, states and other actors who might be tempted to perform certain acts that are deemed to be terrorist refrain from doing so because they are afraid of retaliation.
Thus, at the start of WWII governments of both sides handed out millions of gas masks in expectation of gas attack on civilians. Yet, neither side was prepared to be the first to use gas.
If one government makes it a matter of state policy to commit terrorism and assassination, it can hardly claim moral superiority when the compliment is returned.
Then it is simply a matter of who is more resilient under conditions dictated by the Law of the Jungle. As Mao said: “All power comes from the barrel of a gun.”
And you see SATP, when it comes to jungle rules, the Yanks have for some time blinked first.
No wonder they took their bat and ball and went home in 1974!
Katz: The purpose of terrorism is to terrorise.
Terror tactics are used in times of armed conflict, however when the word “terrorism” is used, it generally refers to the possibility of an act of extreme savagery perpetrated on a very small group randomly chosen from a larger population. Eg, an airline hijack, poison in a resevoir, machine gun fire into a crowd, stuff like that. Baader-Meinhof/PLO type stuff.
The possibility of one person (the national leader) being bumped off is borderline. After all, it is only one person who has anything to fear, and the target is not chosen at random. When it is the enemy being bumped off (eg, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh) we would certainly not term it terrorism, except perhaps in a “heh heh heh” manner.
If one’s viewpoint is that for the public good certain folks require terrorising, then an act may be both a public service and terrorism. I concede.
Yes Katz, I agree that our American cousins blink a bit too much. One of the drawbacks of being a democracy I suppose. However, if they get riled, there will be no blinking.
Had Cuba been a democracy, one can imagine them taking their bat & ball home from Angola MUCH earlier than they did. Wonder what forced the eventual blinking there? Certainly wasn’t the pile of Cuban casualties suffered fighting someone else’s war on a faraway continent.
“When it is the enemy being bumped off (eg, Adolf Hitler, Ho Chi Minh) we would certainly not term it terrorism, except perhaps in a “heh heh hehâ€? manner.”
So, when Syrians knock off assorted Lebanese leaders, that’s only “heh heh heh” terrorism.
To poison a reservoir is terrorism, but to bomb the same population from the air isn’t terrorism?
“However, if they get riled, there will be no blinking.”
How do you know?
“however when the word “terrorismâ€? is used, it generally refers to the possibility of an act of extreme savagery perpetrated on a very small group randomly chosen from a larger population.”
No it doesn’t. Until the 1970s the most common and widespread use of the term “terror” in the context of armed conflict was its use in the term “terror bombing” which was the central doctine of “area bombing” developed by all major powers between WWI and WWII, but perfected by the British and the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_bombing
In the 1980s Ronald Reagan called the Mujahideen of Aghanistan “freedom fighters”. After 2001 George W. Bush called the same individuals “terrorists”. Either they were always terrorists, or they were never terrorists.
Syrians are in the enemy camp Katz. Thus their bumping off of Lebanese leaders is murder. It may strike terror into the heart of Lebanese leaders, but more likely to spark rage than terror in the average Lebanese.
A bomb from the air is an act of war.
The 1970’s were 40-odd years ago. You are showing your age.
I’ll agree that terror bombing was an effective tactic, & thank got it was used by Britian & the USA. For I am not able to type near so well in German or Japanese as I am in English.
How do I know the USA will be unstoppable if it gets riled? This is a rhetorical question, surely?
You accept Wikipedia as an authorative source? (Files away that nugget)
When fighting communism, mujahadeen were freedom fighters. When harbouring Osama Bin Laden, the king of all terrorists, they became the enemy. Simple.
Today’s friend is well & truly capable of becoming tomorrow’s enemy Katz, & without any change of behaviour on their part, this is well known by most kids who have to endure the “schoolyard”. (School nothing but a distant memory Katz?)
Yesterday’s friend becoming today’s enemy does not confer hypocrisy or lack of legitimacy upon us, only upon the newfound enemy.
Howerver this is getting away from Castro.
So why did Cuba endure so long with the foreign war in Angola?
Not authoritative SATP, simply useful. I trust you understand the difference.
Is the average Lebanese one half Shiite, one quarter Sunni and one quarter Christian?
Not simple SATP. Simplistic. I trust you understand the difference.
Why on earth do you think I want to discuss Angola?
Our agreed topic of conversation was your inconsistent use of the word “terror”, which has been proven BTW.
Will de Vere wrote : Before anyone tries to the ‘best health care system in the galaxy’ defence again, they should be reminded that every 20th century dictator has been devoted to promoting the health of ‘the people’ (those who aren’t in camps). Oppressive regimes love healthcare and sport (Berlin 1936, Moscow 1980, Beijing 2008).
I ask you a question, similar to one I had earlier put to Jimmythespiv, which has yet to be answered: Why do you dishonestly attempt to imply that Castro’s regime is as oppressive as the Soviet Regime or that of Hitler?
In any case, if it is true that the Soviet regime or the Nazi regime, for any short period of their respective histories, took care to look after the health of their people, the can hardly be condemned for having done so.
For Cubans and other Latin Americans, or the many hundreds of millions are condemned to die because of a lack of cheap affordable AIDS medication, the provision of free health care is hardly a trivial matter. If ordinary Cubans imagine that they will be better off throwing all of this away in return for the re-introduction of the ‘free market’ into Cuba, they will soon learn of their mistake to their great cost.
Your other point that some Cubans have risked drowning allegedly in order to escape from this health care system is hardly original. Clearly life in Cuba is austere in many ways, and it is not difficult to imagine that many could be foolishly enticed to risk their lives for the largely illusory hope of greater prosperity in the United States, So, because of this, should we then disregard the glowing testimonies that that many millions of others have given about the Cuban medical system in past decades?
Will de Vere wrote: “Your tenacious defence of the old dictator is touching.”
Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for your snide attempts to ridicule the efforts of a nation, with few natural resources, to build a decent compassionate and caring society in the face of such adversity, albeit with a flawed and imperfect political leadership.
I would suggest that the onus should be on those who want to remove Castro and wish to dismantle Cuba’s socialist system to explain why that would be in the interest of ordinary Cubans rather than for myself to defend it.
—
Steve at the pub, your posts are very illuminating. Those who believe that the removal of Castro will automatically lead to better human rights and greater democracy or any other moral objection to Castro’s government, should carefully read what you have written, so that they will know in which company they now stand.
I already provided a link to where you have given your enthusiastic support for the judicial murder of Scott Rush those other Australians. Here it is, again :
If you wish to maintain that these are not murders, because they are sanctioned by law, then suit yourself. However, just consider this: they are guilty of having trafficked a substance which was legal in Australia until the 1950’s At the time the AMA opposed the outlawing of heroin use. In fact, pure heroin, in the correct doses, when it is not contaminated, or if needles are not shared, does no actual harm to the body, unlike alcohol.
Nevertheless, if we judge the actions the actions of these people as criminal, I believe they have only done what a good many people, known to myself and, probably, yourself are also capable of doing. They don’t deserve to have their lives taken from them for the mistake they have made.
BTW what are your thoughts about the application of Sharia law in parts of Africa where Muslims have been able to form regional governments (in Nigeria, I think I recall). Were you also in favour of the threatened execution of that young woman who had violated the “letter” of the adultery laws in her region of Nigeria?
James Sinnamon. And the relevance of your last paragraph to Castro or Pinochet is… ?
You are just sour to have bumped up against someone who has your measure.
steve at the pub,
It is clearly relevant to your justification for your enthusiastic support for the impending judicial murders of Scott Rush and the other convicted drug traffickers, which in turn I raised because of your apparent wish for Castro also to be murdered.
So, yes, I would still be interested to know if you believe in the “letter of the law” being applied to Australian drug traffickers in Idonesia, whould you also support the “letter of the law” being applied in societies which apply Sharia law?
Given your very questionable commitment to human rights, it is very difficult for me to understand what yor principled objection to Castro’s Government is.
Gosh, what a thin thread of relevance. First druggos in asia are relevant to Castro/Pinochet, then blokes in West Africa who object to sheilas having a root are roped in to your “debate”.
Human rights don’t come into it. Perhaps I don’t believe in them at all. Perhaps I also believe in the summary execution of homosexuals (in addition to drug users). Both would give me a lot in common with Castro. [wow, I can make things more relevant that you are able, hardly a surprise!]
Please make africans shagging outside marriage & running afoul of a primitive & medieval religious legal system, ….. please make this relevant to Communism in Cuba & Fascism in Chile.
Or perhaps don’t type when on the turps.
steve at the pub,
So, what is your objection to Castro’s government?
Why do you maintain that Castro’s assassination would have been a ‘pubic service’?
Of course, I meant to type ‘public service’ in the previous post.
Below is an excerpt from an article by George Monbiot, published in the UK’s Guardian newspaper of 12 December on the abuse of human rights in Cuba today. In fact, the abuse is occuring, not on on the part of the Island under the control of Castro’s Government, rather, it is ocurring in the US naval base of Guantanamo Bay, which was illegally taken from Cuba at the conclusion of the Spanish-American war at the end of the nineteenth century. This is the same Guantanamo Bay on which Australian citizen, David Hicks has been held for nearly five years now, mostly in solitary confinement, without any charges having been laid.
If anyone ever wanted to write a book of commie fairy tales, this thread would be a great source.
Actually, some of it is pretty funny.
Steve at the pub wrote:
Perhaps you should consider the relevance of much of your own contributions to this discussion, and your own failure to contribute any substantive ideas, other than your loathing of Castro’s governmnent for reasons which are still unclear to me.
It has clearly has little to do with any concern for human rights and I woouod very much doubt if it would have anything to do any concern for the wellbeing of ordinary Cubans.
Given that you have advocated teh death penalty for ‘criminals’ in Australia, have added your voice to those clamour for the excections of Scott Rush and the other convicted
Whoops, the last paragraph in my last post should have been omitted.
J.Sinnamon said of my incisive & brilliant criticism of the tyrannical old fart in Havana:
‘Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for your snide attempts to ridicule the efforts of a nation, with few natural resources, to build a decent compassionate and caring society in the face of such adversity, albeit with a flawed and imperfect political leadership.’
It wasn’t snide and the Cuban people should be saluted for the ability to endure the economic wasteland created by the manic old opera singer who has fancied himself their voice since 1959: those citizens who couldn’t endure it any longer are now in Florida and doing very well, thanks.
By throwing themselves at the mercy of those demonic American corporations that Sinnamon is so paranoid about, most Cuban-Americans are earning 100 times as much as their beleagured cousins in the old country.
Few natural resources? Cuba was once one of the wealthiest nations in the Caribbean: it has abundant sugar & tobacco (sorry, health-heads) and its tourism would boom if tourists were there for a holiday rather than as an amateur anthropologists of post-Soviet society. Perhaps Cuba’s most lucrative export would be 1950s Buicks to collectors in Texas.
Speaking of those nasty foreign corporations, I discovered when I was in Moscow a few years that the best coffee in Russia is served at MacDonalds, and the evil hamburger joints are jam-packed with Muscovites every weekend.
Also:’to build a decent compassionate and caring society in the face of such adversity, albeit with a flawed and imperfect political leadership.'(Sinnammon, who else?). This is ridiculous: Pollyanna Marxism. That ‘imperfect’ regime has spent more than four decades maintaining a police state.
To the immense relief of millions of Cubans, Raoul Castro has offered less speech-making in future. But it ain’t over until the big beard croaks.
“…your loathing of Castro’s governmnent for reasons which are still unclear to me.”
Probably has something to do with the fact that the Cuban commies took a pretty decent country (outstanding by Latin American standards) and wrecked it, murdering tens of thousands of innocent innocent people in the process, and when they weren’t doing that they were spreading their glorious revolution (and all that comes with it) to other countries causing all kinds of problems in those nations as well.
Like ALL commie governments, the only things Castro and his thugs have done is wrecked the economy, eliminated freedom, and left a pile of corpses in their wake.
Same old story, the same story in every place that the Marxists have ruled.
Posted for James Sinnamon
Dave Surls, I have already asked Professor Quiggin to give the basis for his statement that Castro’s government “killed thousands”. Perhaps you would care to substantiate your even more gruesome and extravagent claims?
Professor R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii estimates (guesses) that the Cuban commies have murdered somewhere between 35,000-140,000 people.
Dave Surls,
Why do you accept Professor R J Rummel’s figures, rather than other estimates? Clearly forces hostile to the Cuban government have a vested interest in inflating he number of deaths attributable to it. In Professor Rummel’s case he inflated his figures by attributing responsibility for the drownings of Cubans who have atttempted to flee Cuba to the Cuban government.
I can’t find to find any hard evidence for the total number of executions much higher than the 550 executed in the first six months of 1959. Hugh Thomas, in his 1971 book, “Cuba, or the pursuit of Freedom” says it was “perhaps 5,000” but I would question if Hugh Thomas, himself, did not have an ideological axe to grind as he was a political ally of Margaret Thacher from 1979 to 1991.
The question I posed earlier is how many of the deaths are attributable to the armed struggle against those trying to overthrow the Cuban government and how many were literal cold-blooded executions of unarmed political opponents in a manner similar to those carried out by the Pinochet regime and the death squad regimes of Latin America in the 1970’s and 1980’s? I would suggest very few, if any. I have failed to find any mention of such killings in the Amnesty International reports, other than cases such as that of General Ochoa of which it was critical. It shold also be acknoweledged that Amnesty International has congratulated the Cuban government for having had in place an effective moratorium on the use of the death penalty for the past few years.
For its part, the Cuban government has catalogued a list of “3,478 people who lost their lives as a result of aggressions and terrorist actions” in a report submitted to the United Nations in 2001. These deaths include the 73 killed by a terrorist bomb on Air Cubana flight 455 in 1976 of which the CIA has been found to have had prior knowledge. I would guess that this toll would have been much higher if the Cuban government had not acted so decisively against the counter-revolutionaries. The toll, if the counter-revoutionaries had succeeded in overthrowing the Government.
Cuba has faced the threat of invasion from the most powerful nation on the planet. The U.S. had a history of meddling in the afairs of Latin American states going well back into the 19th century. This included its invasion of Cuba in 1898, ostensbly to help free Cuba from Spanish rule. It illegally sieze the U.S. naval base of Guantanamo Bay and has held onto it ever since. In 1953 it had sponored the coup against the democratically elected Mossadeq government in Iran and in 1954 it sponsored the coup against the similarly democratically elected Arbenz government and in 1965 it had invaded invaded The Dominican Republic outright. With the examples of the devastating use of U.S. military power in the Korean war and the then escalating conflict in Indo-China, the Cuban government could hardly be blamed for having acted decisively and harshly against any potential allies of the U.S. inside Cuba.
As I have argued before, the astonishing hostility that the Cuban government has faced from the U.S. has little to do with any concern with democracy, human rights or any possible corruption in Cuba. Rather, it is do with the fact that they took away the land and the factories belonging to welathy Cubans and foreign corporations and made the welath avaioable to ordinary Cubans. In other words, they did what the deposed governments of Arbenz in Gutemala and of Mossadeq in Iran were overthrown.
During all those terrible year of the 1980’s when other third world governments buckled under to demands by the World Bank to effectively take away from their people access to health care, education and other services, all these same services remained free to all Cuban citizens. Furthermore, because it has some many scientists amongst its population, it was able to find effectively http://www.landaction.org/display.php?article=337>solve by the end of the 1990’s the agricultural crisis which resulted from its oil exports being cut by 53% in 1990.
The Cuban government, whatever its faults, sets an example which puts much of the rest of the world to shame.
Some corrections to the above post:
The toll, if the counter-revoutionaries had succeeded in overthrowing the Government would have been immeasurably higher. … at the end of the fourth paragraph.
In other words, they did what the deposed governments of Arbenz in Gutemala and of Mossadeq in Iran were overthrown for having done. … at the end of the sixth paragraph.
The story about Cuba having met the challenge cause by oil shortages is to be found at http://www.landaction.org.
“…by attributing responsibility for the drownings of Cubans who have atttempted to flee Cuba to the Cuban government.”
And, rightly so. They are responsible (especially in cases where they deliberately sink boats that are trying to flee the commie paradise…but responsible in any case).
The Cuban commies have killed far more INNOCENT people than Pinochet. Pinochet and his crew killed COMMUNISTS (and friends of communists) who were trying to establish a marxist state in Chile (marxist states have murderted somewhere on the order of 100,000,000 people in the last hundred years…killing communists is a service to humanity).
The end result is is that Chile is a prosperous (if they keep going the way they’re going, they’ll be a first world country in due course) and free nation. Cuba is, of course, a despotic and poverty ridden hell-hole, that has produced many hundreds of thousands of refugees trying to flee the socialist utopia, at some risk to their lives. The vaunted Cuban commies have also gotten all kinds of people killed in other nations by trying to spread their utterly vile system through armed violence.
Pinochet and his boys did the right thing by crushing communism before it could take root, thus preventing the kind of mass murder and despotic rule that has been a feature of pretty much every commie government.
Our friend Professor Rummel sums up the benefits of communism…
“Few would deny any longer that communism–Marxism-Leninism and its variants–meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide. It is also widely known that as a result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood…”
“In sum the communist probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987…”
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM
That pretty well somes it up all right, and anyone who whacks out marxists BEFORE they can carry out their plans is doing the world a favor.
Thank you Pinochet. Good job on the commie-killing part of what you did.
(Professor Quiggin, have you read Dave Surl‘s last two posts? :
Do you think it appropriate that what appears to be an open attempt to incite violence, and worse, against people, who have political views with which Mr Surls disapproves be posted on your site?)
—
Dave Surls,
Firstly, you haven’t responded to my invitation to substantiate your claim that tens of thousands had been murdered by the Castro government. You haven’t explained why you accepted Professor Rummel’s figures in preference to other figures. Where do you suppose, for example, Professor Rummel thinks that the unmarked graves of the tens of thousands of Castro’s supposed victims are to be found on the island of Cuba?
Regarding the drownings. The Cuban Government reached an agreement to allow 20,000 per year to migrate out of Cuba in an orderly fashion. Others are allowed to depart for other countries, so how does this make Castro culpable for the drownings of Cubans who still try to leave by other means? Cuba is a country that consumes only a fraction of the natural resources that the U.S. consumes, so cannot possibly be as wealthy. As an example Cubans consume on average one eighth of the fossil fuel energy that is consumed in the U.S. (See DVD of 2006 “The Power of Community – How Cuba survived Peak Oil”) Although Cubans have roughly the same life expectancy as citizens of the U.S., life in Cuba is, nevertheless, austere in comparison to that of some Cuban expatriates in Miami and, unsurprisingly, many will be tempted to risk all in order to have a chance to achieve the prosperity.
Many people also die trying to get from many poor countries to richer countries all the time? Are you going to hold the Mexican government responsible for all those who die each year illegally crossing into the United States? Are you going to hold the Haitian government responsible for the drownings of would-be economic migrants? Who do you believe should be held responsible for the 353 drownings that resulted from the sinking of SIEV X?
As for claims that the Cuban Coast Guard sinks some boats containing people leaving Cuba, I can’t comment. Have you got specific examples? Were warning shots not fired? Perhaps, would you consider that a poor county such as Cuba would not regard lightly having a fishing boat, for example, taken away from its shores?
Secondly, in regard to the crimes of Stalin and Mao: Whilst the figures given by Rummel are almost certainly wildly inflated, have I ever excused, or tried to deny, these crimes?
In his last months alive, Lenin asked Trotsky in a written testament to remove Stalin from his post of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It is a matter of historical record that Trotsky failed to act until it was too late, and as just one terrible consequence, he, along with millions of other communists, in the Soviet Union and the rest of the world paid with their lives in Stalin’s purges.
Stalin’s own role in thus destroying much of the world’s socialist movement in the twentieth century is, in fact, well understood and appreciated by many virulent right wing extremists, including, I suspect, yourself, but, of course that won’t stop you for a moment, attempting to lumber even Stalin’s victims with culpability for all of his crimes on every possible occasion, regardless of its relevance to the issue at hand.
James Sinnamon Says: December 25th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
Plenty of blame to go around. Obviously the despotic regimes that they were fleeing from ie Baathist Iraq and Taliban Afghanistan are the ultimate cause of woe. Later helped deposed by an unmentionable Australian conservative politician.
Also, the TNI and provincial officials who pushed them onto the boat which had landed in Indonesian territory. Apparently to spite that same unmentionable politician who liberarted E Timor and put their noses out of joint.
And finally, the Australian Wets, who have constantly winked at, if not encouraged, people-smuggling and rorting of the Australian alien intake system.
But definitely not John Howard, who urged all asylum-seekers to take legal and safe channels when applying for refugee status.
‘Secondly, in regard to the crimes of Stalin and Mao: Whilst the figures given by Rummel are almost certainly wildly inflated…’
Same song and dance the left used to do in regard to the Khmer Rouge commies in Cambodia.
Dave Surls,
If your sole answer to each and every political conflict anywhere in the world today is past crimes carried out by ostensibly communist governments elsewhere in the world, then there is clearly little to discuss, is there?
Anyone political leader to whom you object, be it Chile’s democratically elected President Allende or Castro in Cuba is automatically deemed by you to be as monstrous as Stalin or the Khmer Rouge and, therefore, any possible means employed to remove them from power, is considered by you to be justified and necessary.
No other factors can possibly enter the picture: the fact that every Cuban still has access to free health care and education, the fact that every Cuban is well fed and has a dwelling to live in and that 85% of Cubans own their own homes, the fact that Cuba with 2% of Latin America’s population has 11% of its scientists, the fact that they have a higher literacy rate than the U.S., the fact that Cubans, consuming one eighth of the energy consumed by the U.S.on average have the same life expectancy as in the U.S. etc.
If you are to still insist that the Castro regime is so demonically evil, then you really should substantiate that claim, rather than to just give links to web pages of one extremely dubious authority. Again, what is the basis for your claim that tens of thousands of Cubans were deliberately murdered by the Castro government? Again, where do you believe all the mass graves are located? Why do you think that Amnesty International has thanked Castro’s government for not having applied the death penalty on a single occasion since April 2000? Why do you accept Rummel’s figures in preference to any other figures in regard to Cuba?
What has the Khmer Rouge, or for that matter, Stalin’s gulags, got to do with Cuba?
In any case, do you understand that many historians hold the U.S. responsible for having made it possible for the Khmer Rouge to power for having overthrown Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s government in 1970 and having devastated the Cambodian countryside with a carpet bombing in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were killed? Before his, the Khmer Rouge had little support in Cambodia. After the bombing campaign they became unstoppable.
Which Government was it that overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979? Would you agree that, perhaps, the Vietnamese Communists are owed any debt of gratitude for having ended the rule of the Khmer Rouge? Why was this government then punished for years by the international community for having done so? Why did Thailand give sanctuary to the Khmer Rouge?
Some corrections to the above post:
The Amnesty Internatial page, I intended to link to, as first supplied by Bill O’Slatter, is here.
The second last paragraph should have read: “In any case, do you understand that many historians hold the U.S. responsible for having made it possible for the Khmer Rouge to have come to power by having overthrown Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s government in 1970 and having devastated the Cambodian countryside with a carpet bombing campaign in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were killed? Before this, the Khmer Rouge had little support in Cambodia. After the bombing campaign they became unstoppable.”
James, I don’t think you need to worry too much about Dave Surls’ bloodthirsty posts. If he really believed this stuff, he’d be in Iraq with the Marines, instead of leading the 101st Keyboarders from Mom’s basement. And while he’s always keen to vote for this kind of stuff, his side of US politics are on the way out, and likely to stay out for a long while after the Iraq disaster.
On Castro, I tried to post a response citing Wikipedia, but it got chewed (happens to me too). The article on human rights gives lots of estimates of deaths in Castro’s prisons, all in the thousands. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch are good sources for the current situation – not as bad as in the 60s and 70s but still bad.
JQ: One may hold the belief that a good communist is a dead communist without being in Iraq. After all, the jihadis are equally opposed to the godless hordes of moscow as they are to the infidel hordes of western consumers.
Being in Iraq & perhaps killing people (jihaids) who share one’s belief that commos should be elimated may even be anathema to a dedicated anti-communist hawk.
It is a very thin thread to attempt to connect the emotion of indifference or even approval for the deaths of communists (say by the forces of Pinochet) to entering military service for the express purpose of killing some humans, any humans.
The two are probably not even found in the same people. (bloodthirsty desire to kill some people or approval of communists being liquidated)
One is a psychotic perversion of humanity, the other is (to a decicated anti-communist) a public duty.
“Again, what is the basis for your claim that tens of thousands of Cubans were deliberately murdered by the Castro government?”
I’ve already presented a source.
That puts me one up on you.
Here’s a very interesting article on the Chilean “economic miracle” by Greg Palast: “Tinker Bell, Pinochet and The Fairy Tale Miracle of Chile”.
I found it here on an Online Opinion forum post in response to an article in defence of Pinochet by David Flint.
a href=#comment-111405>Professor Quiggin,
Surely we agree that human rights should also encompass access to basic human necessities such as education, health care, water, power, nutrition and housing?
All Cuban citizens were able to enjoy these rights during the years they received generous economic aid from the Soviet Union and they were able to do so even in the 1990’s as the Cuban economy struggled to adjust to the termination of this aid resulting from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and they enjoy them to this very day, whilst most citizens of the rest of the Latin America, the Third World and many even in some advanced industrialised countries such as Australia and the United States are denied these rights.
It is a matter of record that the agencies of the “Free World” such as the World Bank have actively worked in the 1980’s and 1990’s to take away these basic rights from the people of third world as the outspoken humanitarian Canadian diplomat Stephen Lewis has eloquently described on a number of occasions. This includes forcing Third World governments to charge for education and health and to privatise government owned enterprises as notoriously occurred with Bolivia’s government owned water utilities in 1999.
Most of the deaths attributed to Castro’s government other than those (estimated 550) executed after sentencing by popular peasant tribunals in its first six months in 1959 appear to have been in the course of the military struggle by forces acting in collusion with the U.S. government. The majority of those against which Castro’s government has acted so against harshly would have certainly taken those other rights, referred to above, away from the Cuban people, had they succeeded in overthrowing his government. Given the incomparably worse savagery of Latin America’s death squad regimes, particularly Guatemala and El Salvador in the 70’s and 80’s, there is also no reason to believe that the Cubans would have fared any better, in this regard, under the rule of Castro’s opponents.
Whilst I am also critical of aspects of Cuba’s human rights record, both in the past and today, the picture of the Cuban government being guilty of the cold-blooded murder and torture of thousands of its opponents does not appear to have any basis. It largely appears to be a construct of people with vested interests in painting the Cuban government in the worst possible light in order to advance theit own goals of taking back the island of Cuba, together with all its wealth, from the Cuban people.
More corrections (ugghh!).
First sentence, fourth paragraph: Most of the deaths attributed to Castro’s government, other than those (estimated 550) executed after sentencing by popular peasant tribunals in its first six months in 1959, appear to have been in the course of the military struggle against forces acting in collusion with the U.S. government.
First sentence, fourth paragraph: The majority of those against which Castro’s government has acted against so harshly would have certainly taken those other rights, referred to above, away from the Cuban people, had they succeeded in overthrowing his government.