From: orwell@reg.triumf.ca (BALDEN, RON)
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Re: Cuba interferes in internal Cuban affairs
Date: 12 Nov 1992 20:13 PST
Organization: TRIUMF: Tri-University Meson Facility
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: reg.triumf.ca
Keywords: propaganda
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    


From: drm@esl.com (Don McGregor)
>... What can I say.  The United States Government arrests people for planning  
>to attack Cuba, while the Cuban government is PAYING FOR AND ORGANIZING  
>attacks on Cuba!?  

>I'm resisting mightily the temptation to cross-post this to talk.bizarre.

The bizarre feature here is that Don McGregor should believe this 
surreal lie.  Perhaps he gets his background information about
Cuba from the recent novel by Marilyn Quayle and her sister.
Those who like to be more strongly coupled to reality might care to read: 

"The Fish is Red: the story of the secret war against Castro"
by Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, Harper and Row, 1981
(Library of Congress catalogue number: E 183.8 C9 H56).

also "The *Real* Terror Network" by Edward S. Herman
(South End Press, 1982; reprinted by Black Rose Books, 1985).

Along these lines, it is noteworthy that when Fidel Castro -- some eight
months before the Bay of Pigs invasion, in a televised speech at the
United Nations -- made the perfectly accurate charge that the C.I.A.
was training a group of Cuban expatriates in Guatemala for a planned
counterrevolutionary invasion of Cuba, his charge was treated by the
U.S. press as the ravings of a madman.  (This story is told in Erik
Barnouw's history of television, "Tube of Plenty"; I have the second
edition, circa 1980; there is now a third edition circa 1990.) 

It must always be kept in mind that Castro's revolution benefited perhaps
95 percent of the Cuban people; the 5 percent who it didn't benefit --
i.e. the oligarchy who ran Cuba as a de facto American economic colony --
came to the United States and formed a community with natural
right-wing alliances with the American establishment, mounting
an unceasing propaganda campaign for 30 years against the real
achievements of the Cuban revolution. 

From Gabriel Kolko, "Confronting the Third World: U.S. Foreign Policy
1945-1980" (Pantheon, 1988), Chapter 13, "The Challenge of Latin
America" (this is an essential book for those who want to
understand U.S. foreign policy, along with Michael Parenti's
1989 book, "The Sword and the Dollar"):

""Cuba, more than any place in Latin America, had [prior to Castro's
revolution] been virtually a de facto U.S. colony.  Economically, 
preferential tariff arrangements since 1901 transformed it into a vast 
dependent sugar plantation tied wholly to the U.S. market while 
importing three-quarters of its needs from the north.  During the 
1950s the stagnant sugar industry still accounted for 80 percent of
Cuba's export earnings and a quarter of its national income, requiring 
a country with vast uncultivated estates reserved for sugar to import 
a quarter of its food needs.  Cuba's trade deficit with the United 
States in the decade up to 1959 amounted to one billion dollars.  U.S. 
investors owned fully 40 percent of Cuba's sugar production, 90 
percent of its utilities, half of its railroads, and much else --- 
while naturalized citizens controlled a significant part of the 
remainder.  The main economic function of the highly Americanized 
Cuban middle and upper classes was to service this United States-owned 
system as well as the immensely profitable industry that catered to 
Yankee tourism with hotels, prostitution, and gambling.  Marginalized 
and with precious little national identity, this comprador bourgeoise 
preferred to make and spend money and left politics, and the army that 
controlled it under Fulgencio Batista for most of the time since 1933, 
to declasse, highly corrupt soldiers with few ties to the established 
local economic elites.  Perhaps more than any other nation in the 
hemisphere, the United States' domination had created in Cuba a 
centrifugal, highly unstable society.

It was the very nature of this ruling class, combined with the 
economic and social consequences of a dependent export economy with 
large unemployment and growing land tenure problems, that made the 
July 26 Movement under Fidel Castro capable of winning power so 
quickly and with relatively few forces, for the Cuban status quo
had few defenders ready to stand and fight for it. ""
[Gabriel Kolko, "Confronting the Third World"]

Thomas P. McCann, in his "An American Company: the tragedy of United 
Fruit" (Crown, 1976) admits that United Fruit took far more
out of Cuba than it ever put into it, although it disguised 
this fact by various accounting schemes to make it look like they
were just breaking even.  McCann worked for United Fruit for more
than twenty years (roughly, 1953 - 1973), joining the company just out 
of college and rising to V.P. in charge of public relations.
His book makes very interesting reading.  Fidel Castro's father
worked for United Fruit (at some low-level -- maybe just a laborer)
and McCann speculates that Castro's intimate familiarity from
childhood of the injustice of being a serf to foreigners in your own 
country was a powerful spur to his revolutionary ideas.

Ron Balden
Xref: sparky alt.activism:18749 alt.feminism:4368