Mick Hartley

Paul Berman, typically, finds a new angle on the death of Castro: the left-libertarians of Cuba, who were crushed just as mercilessly as all the other "enemies of the people":

All over the world during the course of 1959 and for several years to come, well-meaning people continued to believe ingenuously in Castro’s democratic protestations and his claim not to be a Communist. But the Cuban libertarians, in their sophistication, knew the history of the Bolshevik Revolution—knew the story of how Lenin and the Communists emitted a fog of misleading slogans and meanwhile exterminated every current of the Russian left except the Communist current. They knew the history of the Spanish Civil War, in which the Communists tried to do the same. Their knowledge allowed them to see at a glance that, under Castro, the prisons of Cuba were going to swell to proportions far larger than in Batista’s day. They knew that Cuba itself was going to be a prison, along Soviet lines. They knew that Castro’s conversion of the old Cuban labor movement into a government transmission-belt was going to be permanent and that Cuba’s working class was going to lose whatever small degree of power it once could claim. They knew that, under a Communist dictatorship, their own fate was to be shot. And the libertarians right away launched a guerrilla insurgency, this time against the new dictatorship. Only, the nature of the dictatorship was not yet obvious to other people. The insurgency got nowhere. The insurgents were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured, and shot. Their unions were taken over completely, their publications shut down. And the survivors escaped as best they could, some of them to Miami, others to Caracas and beyond, where they joined what was left of the ragtag libertarian diaspora from Spain.

Here was truly a friendless group of people. All over the world, conventional left-wingers denounced the enemies of Fidel Castro as wealthy and reactionary enemies of social justice, exactly in the way that Lenin’s fellow-travelers used to denounce the exiles from Russia after 1917. In reality, the labor libertarians of Cuba were stalwarts of the proletarian left in the most classic or perhaps antique of versions—the disciples of Bakunin and Kropotkin, and genuinely proletarian, too, unlike Castro, the aristocrat—yet they, too, came under the indiscriminate denunciation. They were slandered as wealthy agents of imperialism, puppets of the CIA, proponents of every possible reactionary idea. And who, anywhere in the universe, was their friend?…

I attended occasional solidarity meetings in New York for the oppressed Cubans. I even organized a reception to welcome to New York a distinguished Cuban dissident, Raúl Rivero, the poet and journalist—a man of the left, with more modern ideas—who had just then been released from a Cuban prison. And I learned something from those meetings. The only people who bothered to attend were Cubans, with a few exceptions, as if no one but a Cuban would dirty himself by taking up the Cuban cause. At some point during every one of those meetings, one or another elderly gentleman would stand up, creaky and upright, his bones clattering like sticks, and would explain that he had spent many years in the windowless cells of Castro’s prisons, and had undergone torture, and, even so, had remained faithful to his anti-dictatorial principles—had refused to buckle to the regime—and was refusing to buckle even now. The people in the rows of seats would nod their heads in awe—some of them likewise veterans of the prisons, frail and anguished-looking—and would whisper about dignity and courage. And when the speech-making or the poetry recital was over, everyone would stumble out to the street, painfully aware that, in the wide world, the victims of the dictatorship and the exiles and the unbreakable heroes have always been reviled as gusanos, or worms, and in many places are slandered even now as the enemies of progress.

Cubans danced in the streets in Miami on Saturday. Every single thing we know about Marxist-Leninist dictatorships all over the world should tell us that ordinary people in Cuba—surely a great majority of them—must likewise have been filled with emotion; maybe not with joy, but with a tingling expectation that someday soon the shadow over their country will begin to recede. But someday is not yet.