Castro: Savior or Sadist?

Fidel Castro died on November 25 at the age of 90, or, as our President-elect Donald J. Trump ignominiously put it, "Fidel Castro is dead!" Predictably, we have been treated to the unproductive debate that usually happens when a controversial figure dies, with both defenders and attackers rushing to put out their thoughts, many of which, from one side or another, will inevitably be oversimplified and of little use. So here I am, to take a strong stance on Fidel Castro and his legacy, and that stance is: ...eh. I can't say I'm really on either bandwagon in this case. The good and the bad that Castro did both seem obvious, and abundant--and, for me, Che Guevara is easily the more sympathetic and interesting of the figures in the Cuban Revolution. I have seen Castro praised as a hero, a champion of the oppressed, and a devoted friend of the poor on the one hand, and attacked as a cruel despot and heartless murderer on the other hand. And I guess this is one case where I kind of feel like both have fair points.

Castro in 1974 (Image from Politico)

As Pat Buchanan once said in a very different context, "Great men are rarely good men." The general principle is an important one: for instance, Napoleon may have been a war-hungry dictator, but you can thank him for many important advances in human history, such as his eponymous legal code, which offered codified law (then a fairly new idea), the end of hereditary nobility, legal equality, and separation of church and state, and influenced civil codes around the world in the 19th century. Similarly, Castro played a major role in reshaping Cuba in many positive ways, while still being, on the other hand, an authoritarian ruler who routinely violated human rights.

Castro's revolution overthrew Fulgencio Batista, a brutal (US-backed) dictator who, according to then-senator John F. Kennedy, "murdered 20,000 Cubans in 7 years - a greater proportion of the Cuban population than the proportion of Americans who died in both World Wars, and...turned democratic Cuba into a complete police state - destroying every individual liberty." Arthur Schlesinger wrote that "the corruption of the government, the brutality of the police, the regime's indifference to the needs of the people for education, medical care, housing, for social justice and economic opportunity-all these, in Cuba as elsewhere, constituted an open invitation to revolution." Batista had aligned himself with the wealthy elite in Cuba, as well as the American mafia, while economic inequality exploded. So no one can say that Castro et al. weren't justified in throwing out the old regime and wanting something new.

Nor can we say that Castro wasn't any better than Batista; Cuba can now boast of a lower infant mortality rate than the much-richer United States. Today, 99.8% of Cubans aged fifteen or older can read and write; the literacy rate was 76% under Batista, before being increased to approximately 96% by a highly successful literacy campaign under Castro in 1961. Then-Secretary-General of the UN Kofi Annan stated in 2000 that "Cuba should be the envy of many other nations, ostensibly far richer. [Cuba] demonstrates how much nations can do with the resources they have if they focus on the right priorities - health, education, and literacy." That's a far cry from Batista's style of governing.

And, given his role in opposing Apartheid, Castro earned the respect of Nelson Mandela, who we were all gushing over when he died a few years ago. And, of course, Malcolm X also met with him, as Colin Kaepernick recently reminded us. So it's not exactly like Castro's admirers are limited to leftist college students looking for some way to piss off conservatives. Those screaming at anyone who's said a word of praise about Castro should stop and think for a second about that.

Of course, we know why Castro got on the US establishment's bad side: he nationalized the property of American companies, seizing banks and oil refineries that were owned by big names like Shell and Chase Manhattan. And he became pals with our number one enemy at the time, the Soviet Union. Those, of course, are the real reasons that we've heard so much criticism of Castro from the intelligentsia, as opposed to the "reformer" King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who was at the head of one of the most repressive regimes on Earth--one which happens to be our ally (for petroleum-related reasons).

Many of Castro's critics like to minimize the legitimate good he did, while exaggerating the bad with casual Hitler comparisons, often dousing the whole deal with an unhealthy dose of hypocrisy. Take the insufferable Ted Cruz, who has attacked Castro as a "totalitarian tyrant," while just last year he praised Egypt's Sisi, who overthrew a democratically elected president and presided over a Tiananmen Square-style massacre of protestors. Significant historical events, shocking as they rightfully are, are deprived of useful context. For example, there's Khrushchev's account (disputed by Castro, who released a letter from the time that backs up his version of events) of how Castro asked him to launch a preemptive strike on the US during the Cuban missile crisis. Often left out, of course, is how we had tried to invade Cuba only a few years before, and for the years after that had engaged in a vicious terrorist war against it. If we had suffered the same things we had inflicted on Cuba, a "preemptive" strike against our aggressors would be a given—and to say that the US would destroy any country that invaded it, likely using nuclear weapons (as Castro proposes in his letter) seems to almost go without saying.

But the fact that many critics of Castro exaggerate or decontextualize his misdeeds certainly doesn't mean he wasn't guilty of any. For instance, while not as extreme as some rightists have painted it (in an attempt to exploit leftists' sympathy for LGBT+ rights), there was grave mistreatment of gays under Castro's regime. After a military draft was instituted, forced-labor camps were set up where those "unfit" for service were sent, forced to work long days and subjected to cruel mistreatment. Gays were one of the groups sent to these camps, along with many others, including Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholics, and other "delinquents" suspected of being insufficiently loyal to the cause of the Revolution. The thoroughly leftist Jean-Paul Sartre said that in Cuba, there were "no Jews, but there are homosexuals"--a harsh critique from an intellectual sympathetic to the cause of the Cuban Revolution. To his credit, Castro would later call this treatment of gays "a great injustice," but that acknowledgement certainly doesn't erase what happened.

And there should be no question that Castro was dictator, who engaged in the typical behaviors one can expect from that unfortunate type. Amnesty International reports that "[o]ver more than five decades documenting the state of human rights in Cuba, [we have] recorded a relentless campaign against those who dare to speak out against the Cuban government’s policies and practices." Castro promised free elections in 1959, and, of course, inexcusably reneged on that promise. Leftists and socialists who want to view Castro as a saint are far more marginal than the legions of intellectuals and commentators who want to demonize him, but as someone who is pretty well immersed in Left Twitter, I can say I have seen plenty of them there. At best, one has to think they are badly misguided; at worst, they are unconcerned with, or even hostile to, the rights and liberties that are crucial for a truly free society.

Castro continued the Leninist/Stalinist bastardization of Marxism that disregarded Marx's support for a truly democratic society and instead concentrated power in the hands of a party elite who claim to represent the will of the people. Marxists like Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, and Karl Kautsky had all criticized this deviation from early on, when it got its start in Lenin's Soviet Union, but unfortunately, it was that strain of Marxism that took hold in numerous countries around the world. Castro did little, if anything, to correct its authoritarianism and fundamentally undemocratic nature, and his regime in Cuba is certainly not what Karl Marx had hoped for.

So I view Castro's death only with a sort of ambivalence, content to leave the celebrating to those he unfairly victimized and the mourning to his family and the people whose lives he improved. Like many others, he leaves behind a complex legacy, badly oversimplified by both his defenders and detractors. As with most things, Castro's life, and his time in power, was not black or white, but some shade of gray. Just how dark or light that shade of gray is up for interpretation.

Update: I have updated this post to include to acknowledge Khrushchev's account of Castro's position on a preemptive strike against the US is disputed and seems to be challenged by a letter Castro later released.

Trump's Victory: Looking on the Bright Side

On Tuesday of last week, an absolute disaster happened. Donald Trump, the worst presidential candidate either major party has coughed up in many years, managed to win the presidency. It was an unwelcome surprise to many, including myself. At this point, it is clear Trump has secured more than enough electoral votes to secure the presidency, winning Wisconsin, which no one expected, and Michigan, which was also thought to be a state that was leaning Democratic. Hillary Clinton, though, is the winner of the popular vote--the second time in sixteen years the archaic, Byzantine piece of shit that is the Electoral College denied the popular vote winner the presidency and handed it to someone that failed to win even a plurality of the people's votes. An institution designed by racist, rich white men who were afraid of the commoners has ensured the election of another racist rich white man. Ho, ho. The continuity that exists in American politics is striking sometimes.

Trump at his victory speech (image from CNN).

There are some immediate takeaways from this election. First, the Electoral College needs to be abolished--or it needs to be ensured that it awards the presidency to the popular vote winner--ASAP. Secondly, the DNC fucked it up majorly when they pulled out all the stops to ensure Clinton got the nomination. Her supporters always tried to scare away support from Sanders by saying that she was more electable. Look how that worked out. Ho, ho. Obviously we can also talk about major failures on the part of the polling industry, the media, and any other number of institutions. Unexpectedly, we have to perform an autopsy instead of holding an inauguration.

Election day and the day thereafter, when Trump was declared victor, mark dark days for America, particularly for those of us who are Muslim, LGBT+, Latinx, black, or just concerned with having a country that isn't run by a bloviating narcissist billionaire whose ego trip went further than even he could have probably ever expected. There's no getting around that. Donald Trump's election is a tragedy, and the people too blind to see it now might have to learn it the hard way by seeing how truly awful his presidency can be.

But that doesn't mean this result, as horrifying as it is, doesn't carry with it certain upsides. I'm not trying to paint it as a blessing in disguise; that it isn't. But few things are entirely good, or entirely bad. And elections are rarely, if ever, among them.

One of the major good things likely to come out of this election is the defeat of the Democratic Party establishment. Their candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost, which is bad news for many people, but very bad news for them. They'd bet everything on her, and she lost to a gag candidate. It's going to be awfully hard for them to come back from that. That means that in four years, we could be looking at a genuine anti-establishment progressive as Donald Trump's major opponent--the nominee of the Democratic Party, if the party still exists. It might seem petty to focus on this, as a Sanders supporter, but I maintain that Clinton was unlikely to bring the changes we need. If she was pushed hard, there was a chance she would take some steps in the right direction, but that's as much as I can say. On the other hand, we could very realistically have a genuine progressive in 2016, the same way George McGovern gained the Democratic Party nomination in 1972 after Hubert Humphrey, the establishment pick, lost the 1968 race. But unlike poor McGovern, who stumbled against a popular president and got crushed, our progressive would face a con man who, on the day of his election, had a favorability rating in the thirties. And imagine where it will be when the people who fell for his con realize they've been played for fools.

Another good thing: liberals hate Trump. As in hate. They rightly see him as a monster, not just an opponent. This is the sort of thing that radicalizes people--that pushes milquetoast liberals to more sweeping critiques of the status quo. If I hadn't despised the Republican Party under Obama so much, I might never have actually shifted to the left, reexamining sacred cows like capitalism and the state. Even if we don't see liberals all becoming radical socialists, the amount of hatred they have for Trump is enough to get them mobilized like they haven't been before. We saw a massive mobilization of support behind Bernie Sanders earlier this year. It might well take the sheer ugliness of a Trump presidency to provoke the reaction necessary to keep important segments of society--young people, ethnic minorities, LGBT+ people--truly, militantly organized, aggressively challenging the status quo in ways they weren't before.

What about the people who supported Trump? For me, there are two major groups there, and the correct attitude toward each is shown with unusual wisdom by a cartoon I stumbled upon on Twitter:

Indeed, the genuinely bigoted of Trump's supporters will not be of much use, until they abandon their bigotries, but those who voted for him because they are disenchanted with the political and economic status quo are people that should absolutely be reached out to. The good news about Trump's victory, with respect to them, is that they can now see for themselves what a con job the right-wing populism Trump ran on really is, and therefore be all the more skeptical of right-wing populists in the future, realizing that it is the left that offers the best prospects for replacing the status quo with something better and fairer.

While a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been far preferable on the whole to a Trump regime, it would have made it easy for liberal and left-leaning segments of the population to be too complacent, as they have been under Obama. But a Trump presidency might be enough to provoke a serious reaction against the unpopular, undemocratically elected maniac. This could be the day that a sleeping giant was awoken--one that wouldn't stop until it crushed Donald Trump and his Republicans, crushed the corporate centrists within the Democratic Party, and finally took hold of power in ways we haven't seen for a long time, if ever at all. Vive la Résistance.

A Leftist Case for Voting Clinton

Let me first note that this post is directed at people who fundamentally agree with my politics to begin with, so if you overwhelmingly disagree with the views I've put forward on this blog, it might not be of much interest to you--but if you're curious, feel free to read on of course. The target audience here, though, is people who generally fall on the left side of the political spectrum, like myself, because the issue here is one that divides us leftists every time there's a presidential election: whether or not we should vote for the Democrat.

Photo Credit: AP; found at Business Insider

I have made my issues with Hillary Clinton abundantly clear, and I will briefly state again: I do not like Hillary Clinton, and I think she represents everything wrong with the Democratic Party. In fact, I think she's probably their worst presidential nominee in decades, and even in a campaign where her opponent, Donald Trump, is an absolutely vile being, she has still managed to alienate and disgust me over and over again. The arguments I'm about to make have nothing to do with any failure on my part to appreciate the grave misdeeds of Clinton's past (spearheading our disastrous and illegal intervention in Libya, voting for the even more disastrous and illegal Iraq War, the Constitution-shredding USA PATRIOT, and on, and on, and on). I am completely unenthusiastic about the prospects for what a Clinton presidency will look like, and quite concerned on some fronts, like the issue of Syria.

But, in spite of all of that, I have already cast my vote for Clinton (via absentee ballot). And, while I've been consistently opposed to attempts to shame leftists into voting for Clinton, I do have to say that I think it's the right choice, at least for those of us living in swing states (like myself) in an election as close as this one. I want to list here the most common arguments I hear from leftists against voting for Clinton, and lay out my response.

The argument: "She's no better than Trump."

My response: Yes, she is. I despise Hillary Clinton and everything she stands for, but she hasn't proposed banning Muslims from entering the country, deliberately killing terrorists' whole families, deporting every undocumented immigrant, undoing the small amount of progress we've made toward universal healthcare by repealing "Obamacare," cutting taxes on the richest Americans, and many, many of the other policies Trump has proposed. Yes, there are some similarities between these hideous ideas and some of her own policies--she's a big supporter of drone strikes, which have killed many innocents, she's been heartless at times in talking about immigrants, she's said single payer will never happen--but she is clearly not as toxic as Donald Trump is on these issues. She is also not affiliated with an ultrareactionary right-wing party that makes no effort to even pretend to care about the poor or working class, unlike Trump. Her candidacy has not invigorated white supremacists. The only issue where leftists often try to say that she might be worse than Trump is foreign policy, but the case for that is weak. Trump supported the Iraq War, and he supported intervening in Libya. He's argued for sending 20-30,000 troops to fight ISIS. And while he has, at times, sounded more reasonable than Clinton when it comes to Syria and Russia, his running mate is Mike Pence, who sounds even worse than Clinton, and Trump has shown a desire to let his vice president make all the decisions in that department. Trump would simply be a vastly more disastrous president than Hillary Clinton.

The argument: "Voting supports the system that currently exists."

My response: Abstaining is not a more effective way to change the system than voting. A very large portion of the electorate abstains in every presidential election, and the system is still pretty intact. Voting is the one very limited way in which the system is designed to be influenced by regular people; while this shows the need to push for changes in the system from outside of it, throwing out that one way to make your opinion matter while working within the system makes no strategic sense. The argument that by participating in the system you are somehow upholding it is simply not based in any empirical reality. Further, while I firmly believe that we need to have a system where the population does more than just vote, voting has absolutely played a major role in achieving positive changes throughout American history; it elected Abraham Lincoln, who played a decisive role in the abolition of slavery. It elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, who did a great deal to regulate business and help the poor and the elderly. It elected Lyndon B. Johnson, who pushed through the Civil Rights Act, as well as Medicare and Medicaid. I'm certainly not denying that you can find major flaws and misdeeds with these presidents, but the fact that they were elected was an important part of achieving enormously significant changes.

The argument: "Voting for the lesser of two evils just lets the Democrats keep moving rightward."

My response: We had an election in which a significant number of leftists abandoned the Democrats: the 2000 election. While there were a number of factors leading to Gore's "defeat," and yes, I think he was probably the rightful winner, it is simply true that, had a small percentage of Nader voters in Florida voted for Gore instead (or had a number of Nader voters in New Hampshire done the same), Gore would have won the presidency. The fact that Gore lost and a factor in his loss was clear disenchantment on the left did nothing to move the Democrats leftward. In fact, it just gave mainstream liberals ammunition to use against leftists and, particularly, Ralph Nader. Because of what happened in 2000, liberals have mercilessly painted leftists as impractical dipshits who represent a political dead-end, because they're too dumb to ever achieve the goals they have. The same will happen if this mistake is repeated.

The argument: "The lesser of two evils is still evil."

My response: Yes, but that doesn't change the value of the fact that they are a lesser evil. Opting for the less bad of your two options doesn't mean you've given it your personal seal of approval; if someone holds you up at gunpoint and offers you the choice to either hand over your money or get shot, the fact that you hand your money over to avoid getting shot doesn't mean you've somehow lent your approval to the robber's actions.

The argument: "We need to build a third party that's focused on serving the people, not the corporations."

While I agree that this is probably the best way to go about changing the system given how profoundly corrupt both major parties are, voting for an existing third party is obviously no guarantee that it will become a major player in future presidential or congressional elections, and it's possible to create a new party that will be a major player in the next presidential election, skipping the "spoiler" phase altogether. This has happened before: the Republican Party managed to come in second place in the first presidential election they participated in; so did Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party, in their first (and only) presidential election. The two biggest third parties in this election--the Green Party and the Libertarian Party--have both been around for decades, and never gotten more than a few percent of the vote in any presidential election. Either these parties do not represent the views of many Americans, or they are too poorly organized to get their message out effectively. We can't simply blame the two-party mentality for their failures, since Ross Perot managed to get almost twenty percent of the vote in 1992. Neither of these parties is going to fill the void that exists in our political system unless they change dramatically, and voting for either Jill Stein or Gary Johnson does nothing to even begin this process of necessary change.

Realistically, our best shot at a new viable political party would be either a collapse of one or both of the existing ones--like how the Republican Party rose after the collapse of the Whigs--or a split within one or both of the major parties, like the one that happened within the Democratic-Republican Party to give birth to the Democrats and the National Republican Party (the latter of which obviously didn't last). So far, neither of these things has happened, though it certainly looks possible that either or both could. But voting for a third-party candidate in this election does nothing to get us closer to either. While it would help either minor party to get five percent of the vote in this election and thus get access to public funding, there's no guarantee that would give them any real shot at winning the next election, and only the Libertarians look like they have a shot at meeting that threshold (based on the polls), and the Libertarian Party is not the left-wing party of the people you're looking for.

I've previously enunciated my disagreement with a lot of the standard arguments about why you have to vote, and I'm very much sympathetic with many the ideas behind not voting, but I don't think the arguments hold up. This election offers a real choice. The choice is not between good and bad, true--it's between bad and worse--but when you have two bad options, the normal and rational thing to do is pick the less bad option, which is Hillary Clinton in this case. Whatever positive consequences there are for sitting out the election or voting third party, if you're a voter in a swing state like myself, the potential negative consequence--Donald Trump getting elected--outweighs them. So, utterly cheerlessly, I urge those of you who live in swing states to vote for Hillary Clinton if you haven't already. The consequences of failing to do so could be awful.

UPDATE: I realize it sounds pretty short-sighted to blame the Green and Libertarian Parties' failures simply on poor organization or an unpopular message given their exclusion from the presidential debates and general marginalization in the media, which are undeniably factors in their lack of electoral success. However, I do think these parties are partly to blame for their own status, given that they have focused too much of their resources on promoting presidential candidates who have no chance of winning and not enough on trying to first win local offices in order to boost their credibility and effect changes on a municipal level.