Vol.64/No.19 May 15, 2000
Cuba's sovereignty is the issue
BY STEVE CLARK
When five-year-old Elián González was found adrift on an inner tube off Florida last November 25, "the proper procedure would have been to immediately return the child to his country of origin," Cuban president Fidel Castro told participants in a mass rally in Havana on May Day.
That, in fact, is how Washington would have proceeded had the child been from anywhere in the world but Cuba. The Immigration and Naturalization Service would not have set off on its own to find the parents, let alone determine their "fitness." It would not have fabricated a child custody case or pretended this was an immigration matter. U.S. officials would have put the child on the next available plane and returned him or her to the appropriate government agency in the country of origin.
That's what Washington should have done in the case of Elián González last November. That has been the opinion of class-conscious workers and farmers and millions of democratic-minded individuals in the United States — as well as the demand of the Militant — from day one. And that's what we must continue to demand that U.S. government authorities do now.
But Elián González was not from anywhere else in the world; he was from Cuba. The central issue involved is Cuban sovereignty. The U.S. government for 10 days refused even to respond "to the diplomatic note presented by the Ministry of Foreign Relations demanding the return of the child as requested by the father from the very beginning," the Cuban president said at the May Day rally. "By that time, the first public protests had taken place in Cuba, and they have continued up until today."
Once Washington finally responded to Cuban government officials on December 8, U.S authorities began issuing demands completely beyond the bounds of any normal handling of such matters. The Immigration and Naturalization Service demanded to travel to Cuba on December 13 to meet with Juan Miguel González in his hometown of Cárdenas to determine his fitness as a father. What imperial arrogance! Even had there been a legitimate basis for a custody dispute — and there was none—the place to resolve it, as Castro said May 1, would have been "in a Cuban court of law." After Washington had returned the child.
When four months had passed and Elián González was still not back in Cuba, his father Juan Miguel finally decided in early April to come to the United States, having received assurances from the U.S. government that his son would be returned to his custody within one week of his arrival.
Such encroachments on Cuba's national sovereignty are part of the unrelenting efforts by the U.S. imperialist rulers to punish the working people of Cuba for establishing the dictatorship of the proletariat in this hemisphere — "the first free territory of the Americas," as revolutionists in that country proudly and defiantly point out. Washington's course after rescuing Elián González was aimed, among other things, at bolstering the reactionary 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which seeks to entice Cubans to leave the country for the United States by offering them expedited citizenship papers and assistance not granted by the U.S. government to immigrants from anywhere else in the world.
As Fidel Castro once again emphasized before hundreds of thousands who turned out for the May Day demonstration in Havana, the rescue of Elián González "would have been a simple migratory case if it had not involved a Cuban child."
Cuban sovereignty, the Cuban revolution, U.S. capital's economic depredations and aggression against Cuba, the U.S. government's refusal for 40 years to establish normal diplomatic relations — these have been the issues underlying Washington's use and abuse of a six-year-old.
Miami politics transformed
The Elián González case registers the end of an era in South Florida. No longer can an organized counterrevolutionary cadre among Cuban emigrés, whose quasimilitary formations at one time acted with relative impunity, dominate politics there.
Among the some 800,000 residents of Cuban origin in the Miami area, social differentiation, political heterogeneity, and integration into U.S. politics and the class struggle are more advanced than at any time over the past four decades.
Prominent bourgeois figures within the Cuban-American community, for example, including the chairman of the University of Miami board of trustees, were deeply involved with U.S. government officials in the negotiations with attorneys for Lázaro González.
Attitudes toward normalizing relations with Cuba are more differentiated among workers of Cuban origin. Tens of thousands of Cuban-Americans travel to the island each year to visit family members. The ideological homogeneity among middle-class and professional layers is coming unstuck.
As a result, the openings for class-conscious working people and revolutionary-minded youth — including communist workers — to carry out organized political activity in Miami around a broad range of questions are greater than ever before. Intimidation from the ultraright is less and less effective.
These shifts are a combined product of the broader sea change in working-class politics across the United States and much of the imperialist and semicolonial world, as well as the intransigence of the working people and communist leadership in Cuba in defending their national sovereignty and integrity, the socialist character of their revolution.
A turning point came in 1996, when the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, after repeated warnings, shot down two planes from a Miami-based outfit called Brothers to the Rescue that were attempting to overfly Cuban territory. Some 60,000 people filled Miami's Orange Bowl for a tribute to the four downed pilots at the time. But in fact it was a requiem for the declining paramilitary groups, and their counterrevolutionary illusions. They had sustained a blow from which they have not recovered — and never can.
That downward political trajectory has been accelerated over the past five months by the sustained mobilization of Cuban working people and youth demanding that Elián González be returned to Cuba--and by the increasingly broad popular assent that demand has received among working people in the United States.
What's more, the refusal once again of the Cuban government and people to bend in face of Washington's pressure is precipitating a further shift in bourgeois public opinion in the United States. In recent weeks, more and more voices within U.S. big business and among their paid propagandists have been saying that it is simply no longer productive for Washington to maintain its bar on all trade and diplomatic relations with Cuba.
Irreconcilable classes
The Militant received a good many letters about last week's editorial and the article by this writer condemning the INS assault in Miami as "a blow to the working class" — more than the editor has room to print even in an expanded, full-page letters column. The Militant also received reports from discussions at Militant Labor Forums in cities and towns across the United States, as well as on conversations with working people and youth during sales of the paper on street corners, on the job, and elsewhere.
To clarify the issues at stake, it's useful to respond to arguments raised in a letter in sharp disagreement with the Militant. In a letter e-mailed around the world, and printed here in the letters column, Karen Wald writes that the SWAT-style assault by special forces of la migra's Border Patrol "was simply the only way to rescue a small child being illegally held."
From the standpoint of the exploited and oppressed, however, a question posed this way can never produce an answer in the interests of the working class. Because it proposes that those of us in the workers movement share responsibility with the capitalist rulers and imperialist state — whose interests are irreconcilable with ours —in solving their problems and resolving their dilemmas.
Malcolm X used to say that in the days before the U.S. Civil War, when the slavemaster got sick, the house slave would say, "'What's the matter boss, we sick?' When the master's house caught afire, he'd try and put the fire out." But the field slave would "pray that the master died. If the master's house caught afire, they'd pray for a strong wind."
The latter is what marks the course of class-conscious workers today toward "our own" bourgeoisie, the masters of modern finance capital. Our starting point is not winning concessions from the exploiters, but how to educate and mobilize working people along a line of march that can culminate in getting rid of the exploiters. Along that road, the toilers will win the maximum concessions. But above all, through revolutionary class independence we will prepare the ground to overthrow the imperialist rulers whose march toward fascism and war poses historic dangers to working people, the Cuban revolution, and all humanity.
It's only among those who share this class objective and standpoint, of course, that there is common ground for discussion.
In an earlier e-mail, Wald wrote that she thought "sending roses to Janet Reno was going overboard in one direction," but that "the Militant's editorial position is going overboard in the other." Wald's reference was to an exchange in last week's Militant letters column headlined "Flowers for Reno?"
But Wald's own April 22 letter reprinted in last week's letters column issued a call to write individual letters of "congratulations" to Reno, Clinton, Gore, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner, Hillary Clinton, and Tipper Gore.
Crowd control advice
Wald may not have sent flowers to Janet Reno. But in an April 13 letter also printed in the letters column, Wald did send the attorney general something else that had a different fragrance: advice on police crowd control methods.
"The solution is really simple," Wald wrote to Reno. "As a journalist I've seen it done on dozens of occasions in various cities and states around the country: Send in officers to clear away the crowd, declaring it an illegal gathering and giving them five minutes to disperse; arresting those who fail to obey the law. Including all the reporters and cameras. [The INS SWAT squad did deck an NBC camera crew and smash their equipment, but not even Clinton, Reno, and Meissner thought they could jail the entire press corps and blindfold the entire world! — SC] Remove everyone from a five block radius."
We don't know for sure the various places in the United States Wald has been favorably impressed as she has "seen it done on dozens of occasions." But cop action of the kind she urges on Janet Reno has been carried out on thousands of occasions against striking workers, civil rights demonstrators, anti-Vietnam War activists, and many others in the United States and throughout the capitalist world. And the further away the cops or paramilitary commanders can keep the press or photographers, the better they like it — for reasons those of us who have been on the receiving end know all too well.
Of course, neither Janet Reno's "Justice Department" nor any other section of the U.S. government police apparatus needs "advice" on repression. But Wald's casualness, even pride, in proffering such advice to U.S. imperialism's top police official sheds additional light on another aspect of her other letter run in this week's issue.
"Just as you would not condemn the police force in a capitalist city for any number of proper actions they take on behalf of the citizenry — against murders and rapists, for instance — simply on the basis that at other times the police force acts in unacceptable ways. Criticize what they do wrong, and commend what they do right."
But from the standpoint of any class-conscious working person — let alone communists — the "police force in a capitalist city" never acts on behalf of the so-called citizenry. The police always act to defend the class interests of the exploiting class whose interests it is their job, their only job, to serve and protect. The "citizenry," stripped of all class distinctions, is — and can only be — the exploiters' obfuscatory fiction and self-serving justification, not ours.
In the centers of imperialism in particular, Lenin taught us more than 80 years ago in his as-necessary-as-ever booklet State and Revolution, there is "an unprecedented strengthening of the 'state machinery' and an unprecedented growth of its bureaucratic and military apparatus, side by side with the increase of repressive measures against the proletariat," including in "the freest republican countries."
Can anyone imagine combing all 45 volumes of Lenin's Collected Works and finding even one word of advice to the police of tsarist Russia or anywhere else in the capitalist world?
Capitalist 'justice'
Does this mean communists never call on the capitalist state to enforce democratic rights and protections won by working people through bloody struggle? Of course not.
An aspect of the Militant's long record on this question was reviewed in last week's issue, in an article on the powerful proletarian social movement responsible for the destruction of Jim Crow segregation across the U.S. South.
But class-conscious fighters for Black rights knew that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were not "acting on behalf of the citizenry" when they were forced to federalize the National Guard or send in U.S. troops in response to demands from a growing mass movement. The vanguard of Black rights fighters, many of whom were organizing armed self-defense against racist terror, raised further demands as opposed to "commending" the White House. They took advantage of the political space they had won and used it to advance as far as they were strong enough to press.
Nor, as last week's article explained, did the use of federal troops strengthen — politically, morally, or otherwise — the position of the capitalist state to use arbitrary force and abridge the hard-won democratic rights of the toilers. To the contrary, the rights conquered by working people and the labor movement were expanded in ways the U.S. rulers — despite their current assaults on many fronts, with the Clinton administration in the vanguard — have been able to erode but cannot reverse short of bloody defeats for the toilers in major class battles still to come.
What about the "proper actions" of the police "against murderers and rapists"?
The capitalist police don't take action against murderers and rapists. They take action against those they accuse — and then most of the time convict and sentence — as "murderers," "rapists," "burglars," "armed robbers" (who are usually found to have "resisted arrest," to boot, and treated accordingly). The real "growth industry" among the U.S. cops, courts, and "Justice Department" over the past decade — largely responsible for the unprecedented explosion of the U.S. prison population, especially among Black youth — has been those accused of drug-dealing.
This is how capitalist police forces operate all the time, not "at other times." This is not what they "do wrong," it is what they do.
In Illinois this simple fact of capitalist society began taking on such a stench among broad layers of working people over the past few years that even the conservative, pro-death penalty Governor George Ryan was compelled to issue a moratorium on executions, acknowledging there is no justice in the courts. His action was neither "commendable," nor taken "on behalf of the citizenry." Ryan simply made a cold-blooded political decision in face of well-publicized evidence that in Illinois alone, 12 human beings had been executed since 1973 while 13 others on death row — more than half — had been exonerated and released. Nationally over that same period, 85 death-row prisoners had been released — 1 for every 7 executed.
'Humanitarian intervention'
Nor are the implications of the question "What else could they have done?" limited to support for the rulers' exercise of police power domestically in the United States and other imperialist countries. To the contrary. Among growing layers of bourgeois liberals, middle-class radicals, and centrists in the workers movement, there are mounting calls for imperialist-organized troops, flying the United Nations banner, to conduct "humanitarian intervention" around the world — to echo the headline of a recent feature section of the liberal, popular-frontist Nation magazine.
Proponents of this course point to "terrible dilemmas."
"How else are 'we' to stop the horrible tribal genocide in 'failed states' such as Rwanda?" they ask.
"If NATO had not sent tens of thousands of troops into Bosnia and Kosova — whatever the righteous criticism of their excesses — how else were 'we' to stop the ethnic cleansing?"
"Without the 'peacekeeping' force led by Australian imperialism last year, how else could 'we' have rescued the innocent people of East Timor, terrorized by the rightist militias sponsored by the Indonesian regime?"
And we can expand the list. (Reaching back in history 35 years, for example, it could be asked: "How else could 'we' turn back the Belgian- and U.S.-organized mercenaries in the Congo without the UN intervention force? — the UN forces that at best stood by and did nothing while Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba was seized by rightist forces and later murdered. Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution gave a different answer.)
As the Militant editorial pointed out last week, the imperialist rulers "do at home what they do abroad. Foreign policy is always ultimately an expression of the real trajectory of domestic policy." In an interview in another prominent liberal magazine, The Progressive, David McReynolds — the Socialist Party-USA's 2000 presidential candidate and retired leader of the War Resisters League — drew the parallel quite succinctly: "What we are lacking [once again, who is "we"? — SC] is some kind of international United Nations police force.... It needs to be a police force that is not carrying AK-47s as much [as much!!] as it is carrying nonlethal means of crowd control and is trained in medical care.... There are lots of tricks for keeping crowds under moderate control and we haven't succeeded." [Another advisor! And this time not just for Janet Reno, but for the NATO Command and Joint Chiefs of Staff!]
Such rationalizations for imperialist war and carnage are not new, either in the workers movement or among bourgeois and middle-class radicals and pacifists. As the workers and peasants of Russia were led into the slaughter of World War I, their class-collaborationist misleaders asked: "How else are 'we' to stop the depredations of the German Kaiser?" The workers and farmers of Germany were told by their misleaders: "How else are 'we' to resist the backwardness and expansionism of the Russian tsar?" And the betrayers of the working-class movement in the United States helped the rulers mobilize workers as cannon fodder in support of president Woodrow Wilson's promise of "a war to end all wars" and to rescue oppressed peoples across Europe and ensure them "national self-determination." The Bolsheviks under the leadership of Lenin provided an example in practice of the effective — and definitive — reply.
During the Second World War, once again, misleaders of labor and the oppressed told working people: "How else will 'we' defeat Hitler, and help the Soviet Union defend itself, if the working class does not support the imperialist government of Franklin Roosevelt and its war policies?" Using that rationalization, workers were told they were "undermining the war effort" if they didn't support the federal wage freeze and no-strike pledge. Blacks were told they were "objectively" aiding the Nazis if they demonstrated to demand equal rights in wartime industries and in the U.S. armed forces itself. Puerto Ricans were denounced as reactionary nationalists for resisting the draft. Japanese-Americans were told to go peacefully into Roosevelt's Nisei concentration camps if they wanted to prove their patriotism and truly help the Soviet workers and peasants turn back Hitler's invasion force.
And the Militant stood alone in the workers movement in August 1945 in condemning the barbaric U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How else, after all, could the peoples of Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere throughout Asia be freed from Emperor Hirohito's boot?
The August 7 issue of the Daily Worker — the newspaper of the Communist Party USA, which supported the imperialist war — ran in full U.S. president Harry Truman's justification of the annihilation of the people of Hiroshima, and the next day proclaimed in a headline: "American labor contributed its share in creating Atombomb." After the assault on Nagasaki a few days later, the Worker featured a racist caricature of a Japanese soldier with two explosions blowing his brains out — one labeled "atomic bomb," the other "Soviet declaration of war," with the overall caption: "The old one-two."
That very same week, the Militant was emblazoned with the headline that told the truth about the course of U.S. imperialism over the next 55 years and counting: "There is no peace!"
Unbending determination
Referring to the U.S. rulers' contemptible use of the Cuban child they hold hostage, Fidel Castro told the hundreds of thousands who turned out for May Day in Havana: "It is obvious that they underestimated our people, who have not rested a single day for something absolutely just."
Revolutionary-minded workers and farmers in the United States and the world over continue to salute the unbending determination of the Cuban people to resist U.S. imperialism's latest, five-month-long assault on their national sovereignty. In doing so, they have made it impossible for the U.S. government not to return Elián González to his homeland, sooner rather than later.
We continue to salute the dignity and firmness with which Cuba's communist leadership has conducted its dealings with the Clinton administration, making the concessions they deemed necessary to try to resolve the crisis while standing their ground on defense of Cuba's national rights. In doing so, they are acting in the traditions of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who faced imperialist aggression from all sides against the young Soviet workers and peasants republic some 80 years ago.
In supporting unconditionally the right of the Cuban government to pursue its course in the difficult and unfinished negotiations with Washington over the return of Elián González, working people in the United States at the same time denounce every single demand the imperialist rulers of this country have placed on revolutionary Cuba and its citizens: the insolent INS trip to Cárdenas to determine Juan Miguel González's "fitness" as a father; the pressure on him to come to the United States, as he did in early April; and now the conditions under which the six-year-old and his family are still kept from returning to Cuba.
For the very same reasons, communists and other class-conscious working people in the United States are obligated to condemn in the most uncompromising terms the April 22 commando-style raid in Miami. Millions in the United States saw images of that operation on TV and in the newspapers and sensed — correctlyùthat comparable police assaults can, will, and do happen to many of them too, all the more so as the capitalist crisis and political polarization deepen worldwide. (As this issue goes to press, one such assault is under way right now on a small Puerto Rican island, as federal marshals, FBI agents, and U.S. marines remove protesters who have camped there for more than a year demanding a halt to use of Vieques as a practice area for U.S. military bombing and shelling.)
As last week's Militant editorial underlined, "if the only voice working people and worse-off layers of the middle classes hear speaking out against such indignities are those of reaction; if no angry and determined working-class voice is heard pointing a class-struggle way forward, then the radical siren song of fascist demagogues will gain an ever more receptive ear."
The rise in resistance by workers and farmers across the United States over the past few years, however, is creating new openings for the revolutionary workers movement to gain a hearing today. Together with the reverberations of the Cuban people's intransigence, this shift in U.S. politics is transforming politics in South Florida, pushing back rightist forces there, and sharpening divisions within the U.S. ruling class over Washington's unsuccessful four-decade-long effort to bring Cuba to its knees.
Normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba!
End the reactionary ban on trade and economic relations!
Send Elián González, with his family and friends, back home today!
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