A Rebuttal of Dean Dettloff's "The Catholic Case for Communism" Part One.

 Recovering some facts from the memory hole.

Cuban revolutionary Carlos Franqui (middle of the picture) was flushed down the memory hole.

This is the first in a series of blog entries rebutting a "Catholic" defense of communism authored by Dean Dettloff in the Jesuit magazine America on July 23, 2019 that downplays the crimes of communism much like the perpetrators.  Counter-intuitively, the counter-argument will begin at the end and work its way to the start.

Others have outlined the theological problems with Mr. Dettloff's argument, the horrors committed against Catholics, the large scale loss of life over the past 100 years, the communist alliance with the Nazis, and they should be widely shared.

The point of this rebuttal is to set the record straight on the facts, and reject the propaganda.

This blog focuses on Cuba, the last portion of Dettlofff's essay is a whitewash of the Castro regime, referencing Dorothy Day's observations on the Cuban Revolution in 1961 without exposing the horrendous record of the past six decades. It has left the Castro family multi-millionaires living lifestyles of  the 1% while the majority of Cubans live in extreme poverty, and are punished when they protest savage capitalism in Cuba.

Fidel Castro's son Antonio Castro visited Greece in this 160 foot yacht with five suites.

The war on Christianity
Fidel Castro on January 1, 1959, praised the support of the Catholic Church and declared, “Catholics in Cuba have given their most determined collaboration to the cause of freedom.”

Six years earlier, Archbishop Enrique Pérez Serantes of Santiago saved Castro’s life after the attack on the Moncada barracks on July 26, 1953. Batista's military massacred many involved in the attack. Castro fled to the mountains with other assailants. Fearing for their lives and under pressure from the families, Archbishop Pérez Serantes went into the hills, looking for Castro and the others and brought them safely home. Despite this, the Archbishop was imprisoned along with many other priests.

When Dorothy Day wrote in "About Cuba" for The Catholic Worker in July-August 1961 that "Fidel Castro says he is not persecuting Christ, but Churchmen who have betrayed him." The systematic effort to end Catholicism in Cuba was already underway, but Castro, lied both about what he was doing and his intentions. 

In May 1961 the Cuban revolution confiscated all Catholic private schools and most seminaries to eliminate religion. 

Arnaldo Socorro Sánchez

 On September 10, 1961 a catholic youth, Arnaldo Socorro, age 20 , was shot in the back by a member of the communist militia in front of the Church of Our Lady of Charity of Cobre in Havana as he carried an image of the Virgin of Charity. But in order to fool public opinion at the time, the regime buried him with the honors of a communist militant.

On September 17, 1961 the communists at gun point collected 131 priests, brothers and a bishop, placing them on board the Spanish ship Covadonga and deported them from Cuba. 

Priests were taken at gun point and forced out of Cuba in 1961

 The US State Department 2003 International Religious Freedom Report described how the Cuban revolution turned against religious believers in the mid-1960s following the forced expulsion of hundreds of religious leaders:

From 1965-67 the Government forced many priests, pastors, and others "who made religion a way of life" into forced labor camps called Military Units to Aid Production (UMAPS), alongside homosexuals, vagrants, and others considered by the regime to be "social scum." The UMAP system ended in 1967. However, over the following 30 years, the Government and the Communist Party systematically discriminated against and marginalized persons who openly professed their faith by excluding them from certain jobs (such as teaching). Although the Government abandoned its official atheism in the early 1990s, most churches had been weakened seriously, and active participation in religious services fell drastically.

Among the jailed priests was a future Cardinal of Cuba, Jaime Lucas Ortega y Alamino.  
Sociology professor Juan Clark outlined the mechanisms used by the Castro regime to degrade and destroy religious life in Cuba in his 1998 report on Religious Repression in Cuba.

"The 1960s also saw the dawn of a more subtle, but very effective, indirect repression. This less visible form of repression used education and the work place as its main vehicles. It begun as early as grammar school with simple questions posed to schoolchildren practicing their faith, in an attempt to ridicule them in front of their classmates. Students have a Cumulative Academic Record that supervises "ideological integration" and the religious involvement of students and their parents. This involvement would constitute a "demerit" on their record and would be used to deny access to the university or to careers with social impact to those who had that blotch in their record. This indirect repression followed Castro's religious policy of "making apostates not martyrs," and thus began the slow process of gradually attempting to choke off the religious community."

Fidel Castro canceled Christmas in 1969 under the pretext to prevent work shortages for the 1970 ten million ton sugar harvest but continued the ban until 1997, and sent mobs to intimidate Cubans who attended religious services. Three Kings Day and Easter were also abolished. Priests who stayed behind often paid a terrible price.

In 1976 the Castro dictatorship adopted a constitution which turned Cuba into an atheist state. 

Today, the Office of Religious Affairs (ORA), an arm of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, still oversees religious affairs in Cuba, and exists to monitor, hinder and restrict religious activities. 

The Catholic Church was not clinging to Batista regime in the 1950s, as some communists claim. It was a Catholic priest who saved Fidel Castro's life following the disastrous July 26, 1953 assault on the Moncada barracks. Castro portrayed himself as a Jeffersonian democrat who would restore the preexisting democratic order.

Communist morality

Fidel Castro at the time was repeatedly claiming that he was not a communist because he knew that speaking the truth would lead Cubans to abandon him. On December 2, 1961 he explained his reasoning.

"If we had paused to tell the people that we were Marxist-Leninists while we were on Pico Turquino and not yet strong, it is possible that we would never have been able to descend to the plains."

Years later on March 26, 1964, after announcing that he had always been a Marxist Leninist, Fidel Castro explained: "I conceive the truth in terms of a just and noble end, and that is when the truth is truly true. If it does not serve a just, noble and positive end, truth, as an abstract entity, philosophical category, in my opinion, does not exist." Jose Ignacio Rasco, who knew Fidel Castro from school and afterwards concluded that the Cuban revolutionary had been a committed communist by 1950.

Castro is copying Lenin. The first leader of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin on October 2, 1920 in a speech to Russian communist youth stated:  "The class struggle is continuing and it is our task to subordinate all interests to that struggle. Our communist morality is also subordinated to that task. We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society." He also addressed the necessity of the lie observing: "'To speak the truth is a petit-bourgeois habit. To lie, on the contrary, is often justified by the lie's aim."

These lies in the service of maintaining and consolidating power in Cuba can be seen in the contortions around human rights.  In the 1950s and early in 1959 the Cuban revolutionary spoke of restoring human rights and civil liberties. He did this at the same time that he was unleashing a campaign of revolutionary terror in 1959 and threatening, then shuttering newspapers. In the midst of this on July 17, 1959 Fidel Castro announced, "I am not a communist and neither is the revolutionary movement, but we do not have to say that we are anticommunists just to fawn on foreign powers." 



Twenty seven years later Castro, in a 1986 interview in Havana, claimed that universal human rights were alien to the Cuban experience dividing them between revolutionary liberties and bourgeois liberties. 

This rejects the Latin American tradition, which was best expounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that there are basic human rights that are universal and not separated by politics or ideologies.  It also ignores prior Cuban constitutions and the critical role that Cuban diplomats, from the democratic era, played in the drafting of the declaration. Not to worry. History is rewritten and all has been airbrushed out of existence.

Preserving the Castro dynasty in power is the "just and noble end" that turns a lie into a "truth that is truly true" according to the communist mindset.

Antonio Castro, Cuban dictatorship's point man for baseball business

To preserve the elite communist's lavish lifestyle does not come cheap. The Castro regime exports workers abroad and gets billions of dollars a year with this practice. In 2014 the Cuban dictatorship forecast "$8.2 billion from sending doctors and nurses abroad." In order to achieve these results the health workers are paid miserable wages and as a result some defect, and are denounced as traitors.  Worse yet some of the workers have sued for being victims of human trafficking or worse yet subjected to conditions of forced labor without pay.

This also leads to questions about Cuba's healthcare system. A subsidiary of the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) was being paid off by the Cuban government using Cuban health care workers in what amounted to human trafficking.  These are the organizations that report Cuban government health statistics as legitimate. 

Totalitarian regimes often times make outlandish claims of great successes in particular areas in order to justify or rationalize repression and political terror elsewhere. It is true of North Korea and it is also true of Cuba. The only difference being that Cuba has a much more effective propaganda apparatus than their counterparts in Pyongyang and they have invested heavily in their education and healthcare claims.

Katherine Hirschfeld, an anthropologist, who wrote the book:  Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898 described in it how her idealistic preconceptions about the Cuban healthcare system were dashed by 'discrepancies between rhetoric and reality,' she observed a repressive, bureaucratized and secretive system, long on 'militarization' and short on patients' rights. There is a health care system in Cuba which is decent for regime elites in good favor and tourists with hard currency and another one for everyday Cubans that is a disaster. With regards to the public health system the priority is the good image of the dictatorship not the well being of Cubans or visitors. 

In 1997 when a Dengue epidemic broke out in Cuba the dictatorship tried to cover it up. When a courageous doctor spoke out he was locked up on June 25, 1997 and later sentenced to 8 years in prison. Amnesty International recognized Dr. Desi Mendoza Rivero as a prisoner of conscience. He was released from prison under condition he go into exile in December of 1998. The regime eventually had to recognize that there had been a dengue epidemic.

The same pattern repeated itself in 2012 with a cholera outbreak, but this time it was an independent journalist jailed for breaking the story on mishandling of medical aide by Cuban officials. Calixto Ramón Martínez Arias was recognized by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience and the organization described how: 

"He had been investigating allegations that medicine provided by the World Health Organization to fight the cholera outbreak (which began in mid-2012) was being kept at the airport instead of being distributed. Since then, he has been detained in various detention centres. He has been held at Combinado del Este prison since November 2012." 

If you have to lock up journalists and doctors to cover up problems in your healthcare system then its probably not a great healthcare system and outsiders should be a little more skeptical with official claims. Medical neglect led to scores of psychiatric patients dying of exposure and hypothermia in Cuba in 2010. There are also consequences to believing the lies of the Castro regime for foreigners visiting Cuba.

The publication New Scientist reported on January 8, 2019 in an exclusive report that "thousands of Zika virus cases went unreported in Cuba in 2017, according to an analysis of data on travelers to the Caribbean island. Veiling them may have led to many other cases that year." This was reconfirmed in another study involving Spanish travelers returning home from Cuba with Zika in 2017 that was reported in the press on July 21, 2019.

Massacred by the Castro regime on July 13, 1994

The body count in Cuba
Glenn Garvin wrote an important essay in the Miami Herald on December 1, 2016 titled "Red Ink: The high human cost of the Cuban Revolution" and in it addresses the question of how many extrajudicial executions have taken place in Cuba and cites an authoritative source.

"University of Hawaii historian R. J. Rummel, who made a career out of studying what he termed “democide,” the killing of people by their own government, reported in 1987 that credible estimates of the Castro regime’s death toll ran from 35,000 to 141,000, with a median of 73,000."

Extrajudicially executed on July 22, 2012

On October 31, 2003 in a letter to former Czech president Vaclav Havel, the late Cuban Catholic layman and founder of the  the Christian Liberation Movement, Oswaldo Payá addressed the existing reality of communism in Cuba.

Oswaldo Payá spoke out against the fraudulent change that sought to perpetuate the rule of the Castro family. Some believe that this was a contributing factor to why he and Harold Cepero, the youth leader of his movement, were killed on July 22, 2012.

Communism is an exclusionary regime. This is not theory. It is the living experience of these regimes from the moment of their inception to their demise. When communism comes to an end, it leaves a dispossessed majority without property, money, resources, labor unions, parties, or social organizations capable of protecting anyone. It leaves behind a corrupt legal system that negates the basic principles of the rule of law, it kills off the work ethic, and it institutionalizes corruption, turning the economy into a hybrid of a collectivist concentration camp and savage capitalism. This is “savage communism.” To describe it fully would take too long, but let us note that in the European countries where communism once held sway, it has left behind a few big capitalists who, until just the day before, had been officeholders or otherwise very powerful figures within the communist regime. These “new rich” had previously been the “only rich,” as under communism there can be only one of everything: one party, one doctrine, one opinion, one union, and one governing individual. In Cuba, where people are told “Socialism or death,” these powerful regime figures will also become the “only” capitalists, the future business class. 

The extreme violence against those who peacefully dissent has been well documented as recently as the 2015 machete attack against Sirley Avila Leon, a dissident who had been purged from her government post trying to keep a school open and later joined the opposition.

The late Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas in his autobiography, Before Night Falls, observed: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream." 

One final anecdote. Years ago in a television studio in Lima, Peru I heard a spokesman for the Maoist Shining Path movement on a television panel denounce Fidel Castro for betraying communism Cuba. This true believing communist denounced him for not executing two million Cubans at the start of the revolution.