A recent Newsweek magazine article by a former Marxist who is now firmly in the neoliberal, globalization, screw-the-workers Establishment camp illuminates the diversionary tacticts and false promises of US "democracy." It also illuminates how much our government establishment is firmly planted in the last century and not the future.
Jorge Castañeda's talking point is Cuba but his commentary says a lot about the country he champions, the United States.
A car collision of sorts is about to happen at an upcoming Organization of American States (OAS) meeting where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, representing the Cold Warrior of the 20th century, will run headlong into the 21st century present and future, which at best admires Cuba's achievements since its 1959 revolution; at worst is willing to tolerate it along with the other forms of government, even those to which one might be extraordinarily rendered. This event occasions Castañeda's piece and gives him the opportunity to hold an old friend, Communist Cuba, to a standard he would not hold his own homeland, Mexico.
The United States, for reasons peculiar to its peculiar democracy, will not leave the Cold War in the dustbin of history. It cannot for fear of losing the class war against the poor and unleashing the masses to do unthinkable things, like seize back public properties and convene war-crimes tribunals. Casteñeda deploys some verbiage that reminds me of Nixon's "war on crime," which in reality was a war on Blacks. Behold the double ententre. The US embraces the Cold War, tries to dress it up its rhetoric, as Secy of State Clinton will certainly do at this upcoming OAS meeting, and convince US workers it's all to their benefit.
Except only for the United States of America, the OAS now wants the1962 expulsion of Cuba rescinded. Revealing the uneven power dynamic in this relationship, the US Establishment is calling for a "compromise" even though it has long ago lost this debate.
Cuba avowedly will not rejoin such an organization as the OAS, which it dismisses as a US Colonial Office.
Castañeda, a former Mexican government official, is now firmly with the Establishment: Cuba should not be re-admitted, he argues in his article. The expulsion should not be rescinded. He betrays the US form of democracy by reiterating US-authored OAS directives:
"In 2001, nations in the region came together to sign the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which states explicitly that representative democracy is a condition for belonging to the OAS, and defines it as "respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms," "periodic, free and fair elections based on secret balloting," separation of powers between truly independent branches of government and a pluralistic system of political parties and organizations. Needless to say, Cuba meets none of these conditions, and thus any attempt to invite Cuba back to the OAS should founder."
How many US friends meet these standards? For generations, the US supported apartheid South Africa and labeled Mandela and the African National Congress terrorist organizations. Currently, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel, are among our closest friends with blood and torture on their hands, and no free elections.
Respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. Not only does the US itself fall short of these standards but also this is code. Human rights and fundamental freedom is not about food, land use access, and union organizing but rather the rights to exploit and corporations free from public regulations. It is a fundamental freedom of the US that the pursuit of property be its national religion.
Periodic free and fair elections. Remember this directive is passed George W Bush's first year in office, thanks to a compliant US Supreme Court and thousands of uncounted ballots.
Separation of powers between truly independent branches of government. History knows where the US obsession with liberalizing old-world regimes, like the British Empire, began. Post WWII, the US demanded Britain dismantle its empire, not because the US cared about human rights but rather because liberalized, separated governments are easy to penetrate. Truly independent is more code to simply to draw suspicion to the "hard-left" as Casteñeda calls them, from the business class, which inherently has the nations best interests at heart - that is, Ayn Rand's heart of coal.
Before we begin a meaningful and constructive dialogue about political reform in the state and the country, we must understand from whence we came. Castañeda's article draws heavy underlines under US hypocrisy at home and abroad. We must inoculate ourselves from the myth makers who speak a phony populism as if they had any depth of feeling for human rights or humanity's rights.
US policy towards Cuba succeeds where US domestic policy is dangerously anemic; there is a symbiosis. It is fashionable for ex-Administration officials to pooh-pooh the US blockade as ineffective. But the whole US rhetoric against Cuba succeeds because it has made the average American believe Fidel is a Caribbean Hitler and Cuba a gulag of 10 million people. Ergo, nothing good could come out of such a dungeon - no new models of sustainable farming, no new free education K - university models, no free medical care programs, and no democratic political reform.
Ask the average American about Cuba and they will accuse it of committing the heinous crimes actually committed by the US's most dear and trusted allies. But Cuba has long instituted workplace, neighborhood, regional, and national democracy. Try this at some of the popular union-busting companies in the US. Cuba has addressed these social ills to such an extent it exports doctors and technicians to other part of the Third World.
So while the state of California chases for the bottom position alongside Mississippi and Alabama, cutting social services to the sick, the poor, the disabled, and students, we would not collectively fathom that a poor, Caribbean revolution might have begun to address these problems two generations ago. We would not collectively imagine it because Cuba is the bogeyman of the hemisphere, and the OAS is in fact a Colonial Office of the US government.
Today we need solutions from other models, like Cuba, and not be taught more ancient lessons from the people who have failed us.
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