The Children of the Revolution and the 6th Communist Party Congress in Cuba

"They make a desert, they call it peace." - Tacitus, The Agricola


Address on March 31, 2011 to the Committee for Free Trade Union Conference on Cuba



The late leftist Argentine writer Julio Cortázar made an interesting observation in his book Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: "All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate."

Fidel Castro inaugurated the Fifth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party on October 8th 1997. These Congresses were supposed to be held every five years. Its been over 13 years and now in a few days the Sixth Cuban Communist Party Congress will be inaugurated with great fanfare. Raul Castro announced the congress in November of 2010 along with "general guidelines" to be approved at the Congress.

This party congress will re-arrange some of the window dressing of the dictatorship in the economic order to preserve its brutal nature but it also serves another important function and that is to create distraction and buy time. The first demonstration of this is that the discussion of internal party issues and leadership renewal will not be discussed until the end of 2012 at a National Conference of the Cuban Communist Party. The party congress will only address economic issues. There are a number of factors for the timing but will touch on three and focus on the third:

1. The main export out of Cuba is nickel and has suffered a fall in prices combined with rising food prices internationally and an inefficient state-run economy that has forced the dictatorship to cut imports over the past two years. In September of 2010 Raul Castro announced plans to lay off one million state employees.
2. Unwelcome, for the dictatorship, increased international scrutiny on human rights in Cuba following the death of Orlando Zapata Tamayo, the hunger strike by Guillermo Fariñas Hernández and the brutalization of the Ladies in White raised the profile of Cuba's nonviolent democratic opposition movement.
3. Cuban youth are unhappy, disillusioned and want change.

The regime has sought through their official bloggers and through their government daily Juventud Rebelde as highlighted in its November 13, 2010 article titled "Las líneas del futuro" [The Lines of the future] in which Cuban youth are called to participate and that their opinions and contributions will be greatly appreciated in the rich debate. ( Is it possible that the title also offers an ironic look into the future with the continuing long lines of the past?)

As mentioned earlier the last party congress was over 13 years ago and this presents an opportunity to divide the youth between those who having lived through the process and have no illusions and those undergoing it for the first time that will participate in the gatherings leading up to the congress with the illusion that it will make a difference.

Children born under the dictatorship old enough to remember the previous party congress have a different perspective and through cyberspace are expressing themselves. For example Yoani Sanchez, old enough to remember her first political activities as a young pioneer in the 1970s shouting insults at President Carter has written thoughtful essays on the subject of the congress on her blog Generation Y.

On November 10, 2010 in her essay, The Art of Speaking Without Speaking, Yoani offers a concise description of the meeting's guidelines:

The Draft Guidelines for the Communist Party’s VI Congress is a good exercise to sharpen our senses, a model example to evaluate the practice of speaking without speaking, which is what state discourse is here.

Its more than thirty pages of text contain only economic proposals, more appropriate for the Ministry of Finance than for the compass of a political party. It’s true that it lacks the language of the barricade, resolving everything based on slogans, but it suffers from being a sugar-coated list of what could be done if the system really worked. For those who think my skepticism is exaggerated, take a look at the points from past congresses and check to see how many of them really came to pass.

Claudia Cadelo wrote in her blog Octavo Cerco (The Eighth Circle) in her December 8, 2010 essay What Changes?:

With great effort I’ve managed to read the eleven pages of “The Transformations Required in the Public Health System.” I have the impression that if we took out all the ideological apologies -- such as, “the direction of our glorious Party,” or this one, “the immense historic responsibility we have for the future of the fatherland” -- the text would only be three pages. Sadly, the ability to synthesize has never been a virtue of those who govern us.

To make matters worse, in the meat of it there’s not much there, other than a shifting and rearranging of equipment and personnel from here to there, the well-known and prioritized “internationalist” work, and a strange insinuation that there is a surplus of doctors -- I say it’s strange because it’s true but I didn’t expect them to say it.

In another blog entry titled These Peculiar Guidelines, less than a month later on January 10, 2011 Claudia writes:

But people are tired. People stopped recognizing socialism, even in books, long ago, because the history of the Revolution seems too much like the history of a 19^th century capitalist monopoly. In parliament no one has been classified as “unqualified” or “unreliable” (as they have been on the layoff lists), and not one delegate to the National Assembly has been laid off under the concept of inflated payrolls. It is in the neighborhoods where 500,000 CDR members are going to be left “unoccupied.” So the spirit of the meeting is tense; even the poster announcing it reminds us: “Attendance will be taken.”

Although there is an attempt to strictly control the content of these meetings people are beginning to lose their fear and are frustrated. Later in the same essay Claudia describes what she has heard concerning the tension at this gathering:

My friends tell me (the meeting in my neighborhood hasn’t happened yet) that things got hot. One retiree said it was time to see young people leading the country, another said he was tired of discussing planning and reforms that never changed anything, a lady announced she is retiring because as long as they aren’t talking about raising wages they can’t count on her, and the Party member murmured, ending the meeting, which would be the last time the core would be called together. Raul Castro’s government has reached out to a people who are tired and skeptical, and bored with seeing the same movie over and over.

In her January 31, 2011 essay titled "Unanimity" Yoani Sanchez describes one of the regime organized meetings prior to the congress to discuss the document:

He cleared his throat before explaining why they were meeting, in the sober drama that is rarely seen anymore. In his hands he held, like a script, the blue booklet with the guidelines for the Sixth Communist Party Congress, and behind the table those present included municipal and provincial officials. Before yielding the floor, he stressed that they should stick to what was written on these pages and only discuss economics. He stressed this last word to emphasize it, to ensure that they didn’t claim their right to “free association” or demand that they be allowed “to freely enter and leave the country.” E-CO-NO-MICS, he stressed again, widening his eyes and raising his eyebrows to emphasize it again, while staring directly at the most troublesome employees.

Later on in the same essay Yoani Sanchez describes the aftermath of the meetings and its significance for the April congress:

The next day the workplace had returned to its routine. A mechanic who had been sitting very close to the president no longer remembered a single one of the guidelines. The girl from the warehouse summed up the discussion of the previous afternoon for her friends with a simple, “Ah… more of the same.” And the manager’s chauffeur skeptically shrugged his shoulders when a colleague asked what had happened. Many experienced that day as sample of what will happen in the Conference Center next April, a sneak preview of the Cuban Communist Party Congress. In just a few months they will see the same staging unfold on their TV screens, but this time it was they themselves who were the actors, raising their hands in unanimity before the stern gaze of the director.

In the case of the Castro regime over the past 52 years the ability to engage frequently in profound distractions has opened the door to its own survival. Unfortunately, Cuba observers all too often have followed Cortázar's advice and allowed themselves to be distracted when unable to concentrate. The same phenomenon was also seen among Kremlinologists who never saw the collapse of the Soviet Union as a possibility.

When the dictatorship announces the layoff of a million state employees because they can no longer pay them they call it reform and a good part of academia goes along with it. At the beginning of 2011 the regime began to lay off workers. When people power movements erupted in Egypt and Tunisia capturing the imagination of the world the regime slowed down and suspended the layoffs out of fear of creating conditions for their own demise.

If there is one lesson over the past 52 years it is that political considerations have priority over economic considerations in order to preserve the regime. When it is convenient to decentralize in order to survive the regime will do that as it did in the early 1990s and as it appears to be doing today. At the same time when things improve and regime survival depends on the re-centralization of economic control at the expense of economic growth as was the case in the late 1990s and through the 2000s they will do that as well, but the important consideration is that the Cuban people are tired of this regime and want change.

Thank you very much.

In Defense of Mohandas Gandhi and the efficacy of nonviolent resistance

A saint who considers himself superior to a sinner forfeits his sainthood and becomes worse than the sinner, who unlike the proud saint, knows not what he is doing. - Mohandas Gandhi

I have never, even in my dream, thought that I was mahatma (great soul) and that others were alpatma (little soul). -Mohandas Gandhi


Andrew Roberts’ March 26, 2011 Wall Street Journal review titled “Among the Hagiographers” of Joseph Lelyveld’s book "Great Soul" about Mohandas Gandhi is more of a polemic against both the Indian independence leader and the power of nonviolent resistance then a book review. There is much to respond to in the review but will focus on criticism of Gandhi’s claim that nonviolent resistance could work against the Nazis. In August 6, 1940 Mohandas Gandhi published a letter from “a Dutch friend” in which his friend argued that:

“Through Nazism, the German youth has lost all individuality of thought and feeling. The great mass of young people has lost its heart and is degraded to the level of a machine. … A friend of mine, whose work it is to cross-examine German prisoners of war in England, was deeply shocked by the spiritual narrowness and heartlessness of these young men, and agreed with me that non-violence could not be applied with any success against such robots...”

Gandhi responded to the letter pointing out that the author had sent his name and address but that he (Gandhi) withheld both out of fear that harm would come to him if they were made public. Gandhi responded:

“Non-violent action, if it is adequate, must influence Hitler and easily the duped Germans. No man can be turned into a permanent machine. Immediately the dead weight of authority is lifted from his head, he begins to function normally. To lay down any such general proposition as my friend has, betrays ignorance of the working of non-violence.”

University Academics Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in their 2008 study "Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic on Nonviolent Conflict" compared the outcomes of 323 nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006. They found that major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with just under half that at 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns. Finally there study also suggests “that nonviolent campaigns are more likely than violent campaigns to succeed in the face of brutal repression.” This also depends on the nonviolent opposition movement having a strategic vision and maintaining its non-violent posture even under the worse repression.



Looking back there are two high profile examples that indicate that Mohandas Gandhi was right.

Between 1940 and 1945 under the Nazi occupation of Denmark many Danes were able to organize an effective and completely nonviolent resistance that undermined German war fighting capability and successfully blocked efforts to deport and exterminate its Jewish population to the Nazi death camps by first hiding Danish Jews then ferrying them out to neutral Sweden.

An equally dramatic case took place in Germany in February and March of 1943 when German (non-Jewish) wives married to Jewish men and their relatives organized mass demonstrations in Rosenstrasse Street in Berlin to protest their husband’s arrest and deportation escalating until the men were released and returned home.

Both episodes indicate that nonviolent resistance to Nazism was possible and raises the disturbing question of what horrors might have been avoided if Gandhi’s call to non-violent resistance to the Nazis in the 1930s had been heeded:

"But the Jews of Germany can offer satyagraha under infinitely better auspices than the Indians of South Africa. The Jews are a compact, homogeneous community in Germany. They are far more gifted than the Indians of South Africa. And they have organized world opinion behind them. I am convinced that if someone with courage and vision can arise among them to lead them in non-violent action, the winter of their despair can in the twinkling of an eye be turned into the summer of hope. And what has today become a degrading man-hunt can be turned into a calm and determined stand offered by unarmed men and women possessing the strength of suffering given to them by Jehovah. It will be then a truly religious resistance offered against the godless fury of dehumanized man."

The attacks against Mohandas Gandhi continue because his political philosophy is relevant in today's world and offer's individuals the insight into the real nature of power which is that of the individual giving or denying his or her obedience to a central authority and the great power that signifies over tyrants and dictators of all ideological stripes.

In reality Gandhi needs no defense because as Michael Nagler points out at the Metta Center blog: "Gandhi had a genius for turning apparent setbacks in to opportunities. I have a feeling he’s going to do the same with this one."

Gene Sharp: Why Burmese Resistance Has Failed So Far

Gene Sharp, 83, is known for writing about nonviolence. (Photo: AP)

He has been called the man who toppled Mubarak, a description he says demeans what he sees as a wholly Egyptian uprising against authoritarian rule. Before that, he was the victim of a whispering campaign in which his work was alleged to be a US front for regime change in the guise of citizen uprisings. He calls those allegations “a joke” and reminds that he went to prison in the US for civil disobedience there.

From Dictatorship to Democracy is perhaps his best-known and most-influential work. Renowned as a handbook for strategic non-violent protest around the world, it originated in Dr Sharp's work with Burmese opposition and ethnic groups in the early 1990s, and was intended as a blueprint for the liberation of the country from military rule.

With the army in control since 1962, and seemingly entrenched behind a parliamentary makeover, the challenges facing activists and opposition groups in Burma are among the most daunting anywhere. Now 83 years old, and with a CV that dates back to working with Norwegian opponents of Nazi/Quisling rule during World War II, Dr Gene Sharp shared his thoughts on the recent events in North Africa and the Middle East with Simon Roughneen, as well as outlining why he believes that resistance in Burma has failed to dislodge the military rulers of that country.

Question: Dr. Sharp, your interest in Burma and the pro-democracy movement there goes back a long way. Can you tell The Irrawaddy readers about the history of your engagement with Burma?

Answer: I was brought to Burma by Robert Helvey, a former US military attache in Rangoon, who became sympathetic to the groups opposing the regime, particularly the Karen. I was asked to write some articles for Khit Pyaing, a Burmese and English journal based in Bangkok, and run by the late U Tin Maung Win, and those eventually became part of the publication known as “From Dictatorship to Democracy.” I also visited Manerplaw a few times and met with Burmese exiles in Thailand.

Q: Why in your view has non-violent resistance failed, so far, to undermine military rule in Burma? What are the factors differentiating Burma from recent changes in Egypt and Tunisia, as well as older examples such as the Color Revolutions in the former Soviet bloc, Serbia in 2000 and the Philippines in 1986?

A: I think there are a few explanations for that. For a start, many of the opposition groups, the various nationality groups such as the Karen, Mon and others, they all had their armies and mini-armies, and they thought they would be weakened by departing from those and going over to non-violence, or “political defiance” as it was known in Burma. Other groups, such as the All Burma Students Democratic Front (ABSDF), had their mini-army, and people in the camps, though temporarily agreeing to switch over to just political defiance, reversed that after a couple of years. All the various armed groups thought they could defeat the Army, but I think that was a foolish judgment on their part, as the Army was bigger and stronger and had more weapons.

The so-called National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, which isn't really a coalition government at all, with headquarters in Washington DC—not very close to Burma—they had their own ways, they thought, to get independence and defeat the government, but they didn't show much signs of learning something new.

And, Aung San Suu Kyi, for all her wonderful qualities, and her heroism and inspiration for those who believe in democratic rights and the rights of Burmese people—she is not a strategist, she is a moral leader. That is not sufficient to plan a strategy.

Although “From Dictatorship to Democracy” was written for Burmese, there were no Burmese groups who really took that analysis seriously or used at as a strategy for the liberation of Burma. People got arrested and sent to prison for carrying it, in Burmese and other languages, they could organize very powerful and brave demonstrations in Rangoon and elsewhere, but they did not plan a grand struggle. If you don't plan, if you don't have a bigger strategy, you're not going to win.

Q: Do you see any change in Burma since the elections last November and the convening of Parliament on Jan 31? Is there now a viable outlet for non-violent opposition to express itself in Burma, without having to take to the streets, without having recourse to some of the methods you have outlined over the years?

A: I am not sufficiently up to date on the details of the situation to comment, I am sorry.

Q: Moving away from Burma, what do you say to conspiracy theorists who allege that your ideas are a convenient intellectual front for US or Western interference or intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states, a sort of power projection masquerading as locally motivated non-violent resistance?

A: It is a big joke. We have had no support from the US government or military or from intelligence agencies. Our office is very small. We have very little money to operate. Someone is trying to discredit the analysis we have offered, and that is all there is to it. Such charges are false.

Q: Some of the critiques of your work, by seeing an external or meddling hand in what might be local or nationally focused events, are themselves guilty of a sort of colonialism of the mind, implying that Burmese or Egyptians or whoever the case may be are incapable of taking action autonomously, or reacting themselves to the conditions in their own country, without a guiding hand from outside.

A: I think that is a good point, and a key thing to remember when people try to discredit the analysis I offer, which is based on work over decades in many countries, and contact with freedom-loving people in many parts of the world.

Often it is people who believe in violence who attack us, because they want to weaken peoples adherence to non-violence, and to the practical usefulness of a strategy of non-violence. Look at those people and ask what do they offer? Genuine criticism is always welcome, but proffering false charges is ridiculous.

For those who want to make such allegations, to say that I am a tool of the United States government, they should remember that I spent over 9 months of a two-year prison sentence for civil disobedience and for criticizing the policies of the US government.

Q: Your work has come back into public focus due to events in North Africa and the Middle East. One newspaper headline went as follows: “Gene Sharp, the 83 year old who toppled Egypt.” What is your take on that?

A: I may or may not have provided some analysis that fed into the actions taken by the people there, I have no confirmation of that, but the Egyptian people deserve the credit for toppling the Mubarak regime, not me.

Q: Since Tunisia and Egypt, the protests in the region have changed. Libya's uprising has become an armed revolt. Do you feel that—even with UN Security Council and Arab League support—it is right to intervene in Libya at this juncture?

A: It is not the course of action I would have chosen. I think the Libyan democrats did not do their homework in advance like the Egyptians did—in Egypt, they appeared to have a plan and studied quite some time in advance to develop a program of non-violence without fear, which brought them victory quite quickly. In Libya, this appears not to have been the case. The Libyans have gotten in over their heads, and should have expected the type of repression that Gaddafi is capable of.

People who are realistic about the power of political defiance know that if it is a threat, the regime will see it that way and will fight back. The regime will jail and beat and kill, and that is a sign that what you are doing is threatening the regime.

Dictators can beat you with violence, if you fight on those terms, and of course the rebels cannot defeat the Gaddafi regime on the level of armed force. So they are left to call in help from outside, which cannot give them the empowerment or victory they seek.

Q: Do you think that when legitimate peaceful protest—such as in Burma—is met with state violence, the protesters then have the right to self-defense? To fight back? To seek alliances with sympathizers in the country's police and army? To appeal for international military support, as the Libyan rebels have done?

A: I think it is an unfortunate choice that people make. It is predictable that your opponent will have the means of violence, the means of oppression. If you get someone else to come and help you, they will come with their interests, and potentially turn your country into a battlefield. Even if they help defeat the oppressor, it will not result in empowerment. People will not be ready to fight the next oppressor who tries to take over the country. In contrast, if the Egyptian military tries again to take control, the people know how to counter this, they have the sense of empowerment, of their own power.

Ultimately, in any non-violent resistance, you have to plan, you have to study. You have to know what the hell you are doing.

Q: You have been credited with influencing the actions of thinkers and doers around the world. But who has influenced you?

A: I have learned from the many people I have met around the world over the decades, but have no single guiding light. I learned from Gandhi, that is, Gandhi as a shrewd political strategist. I learned from the Norwegian resistance against the Quisling fascist government during World War II. I learned from the non-violent resistance undertaken by Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—whose governments also read some of my work. I don't have any political doctrine, no political messiah, just my own thinking and learning, for the most part.

http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=20981

So Long… Forever… Juraguá Nuclear Power Plant

by Yoani Sanchez Generation Y

In our little room, he told us that morning about the time he had spent in the USSR. He’d only been in Havana a few hours, after an Aeroflot plane had brought him back from his long sojourn in the land of Gorbachev. The gothic letters on his diploma showed he’d graduated from the university in some kind of engineering my childish mind couldn’t understand. It was the first time I’d heard about the Juraguá nuclear reactor, which was built in Cienfuegos in 1983. The recent arrival’s voice described an enormous VVER 440 reactor located in central Cuba as if it were a live dragon breathing its whiffs on us. Hundreds of young people, trained in research centers nearly 6,000 miles from home, would work there as atomic scientists. Millions and millions of rubles arriving from the Kremlin helped to construct what would be the pinnacle of our “tropical socialism,” the fundamental pillar of our energy independence.

Later I learned that this young enthusiast never worked as a nuclear engineer. The Soviet Union was dismembered just as the first of two planned reactors was 97% complete. Grass covered a good part of the site, and exposure to the elements broke down everything from pieces of the core, to the steam generators, the cooling pumps and the isolation valves. Juraguá became a new ruin, a monument to the delusions of grandeur left us by Soviet imperialism.

With his graying temples, while cutting metals in his new career as a lathe operator, the one-time expert told me now, “It was lucky we didn’t start it up.” According to what he and his colleagues had calculated, the chances of an nuclear accident at Juraguá were 15% more than at any other nuclear plant in the world. “We would have ended up with the island cut in half,” he said dramatically. I imagined a piece of the nation here and another over there, while a stubbornly smoking hole changed our national geography.

Now that the plant in Fukushima is spreading its residues, and with them fear, I can’t but rejoice that the Cienfuegos reactor has not awakened, that under the concrete sarcophagus a nuclear reaction hasn’t started. Thinking about all that has happened, all of our current problems seem small to us, insignificant trifles compared to the horrifying spread of radioactivity.

Original Spanish essay

Amnesty International to Cuban Regime: Do not force activists into exile as a condition for their release

Cuba frees prisoners of conscience

23 March 2011

Amnesty International has urged the Cuban authorities not to force activists into exile after the final two activists from a group of 75 detained in March 2003 were freed.

José Ferrer and Félix Navarro were released early on Wednesday. They were each serving a 25-year prison sentence.

The men are among 52 released in a deal struck after talks between the Roman Catholic Church and Cuban President Raul Castro last July.

Some of those released have stayed in Cuba serving the remainder of their sentences outside prison while others have been forced into exile to Spain.

"It is a step in the right direction for human rights in Cuba to see the release of all prisoners of conscience from the March 2003 crackdown and another detained last December, particularly considering they should have never been imprisoned in the first place," said Gerardo Ducos, Cuba researcher at Amnesty International.

"What we want to see now is for the Cuban authorities not to force activists into exile as a condition for their release and to ensure all human rights activists are able to carry out their legitimate work without fear of threats, harassment, further arrests or unfair trials in their own country."

Seventy-five people were jailed in a massive crackdown against the dissident movement around 18 March 2003 for the peaceful exercise of their right to freedom of expression.

Most of them were charged with crimes including “acts against the independence of the state” because they allegedly received funds and/or materials from US-based NGOs financed by the US government.

They were sentenced to between six and 28 years in prison after speedy and unfair trials for engaging in activities the authorities perceived as subversive and damaging to Cuba.

Prisoner of conscience Néstor Rodríguez Lobaina was arrested on 9 December 2010 and has yet to be brought to trial. He is set to be released in the upcoming days on condition of leaving Cuba into exile.

Read More

Repression of Cuban dissidents persists despite releases (News, 16 March 2011)
Cuba must release prisoner of conscience on hunger strike (News story, 11 March 2011)
Cuba urged to release jailed activists (News story, 7 February 2011)

http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/cuba-frees-prisoners-conscience-2011-03-23