From Cuba and the United States, tyrannies and dictatorships | Opinion

In 1997, a Cuban friend told me “Fidel is a dictator, but not a tyrant”. We were in a province of Mozambique where he worked as a doctor and I as an architect. That afternoon, in a courtyard of red African earth, I did not understand his idea. It seemed contradictory. For some reason, I never forgot it until, a few years later, reviewing declassified documents, I thought Washington was not a dictatorship, but a tyranny.

The word trap was not in the apparent contradiction of Javier’s sentence but in the usual deception that ideolexics carry, for example, when words like “democracy” or “dictatorship” are used as if they were was the Moon and the Sun: two differentiated bodies, but not the only moon or the only sun in the Universe. In this way, a hegemonic power which dictates its will across borders and lacks equal representation for all its citizens (especially for those who are not millionaires) like the United States, a paramilitary regime like Colombia, a neoliberalism imposed in the blood like Chilean, or a system like Norwegian or Icelandic are called “democracies”. For strategic reasons, Haiti or Honduras are not called “capitalism”, even though they are more capitalist than the United States. I wouldn’t want to insist once again that it is not capitalism, but hegemony that defines the power and (material) wealth of a country.

Theodore Roosevelt, among many others, made it clear: “The democracy of this century needs no more justification than the mere fact that it has been organized in such a way that the white race gets the best lands in the New World. This democracy has been adapted a thousand times to serve a minority, no longer so white but dominant economically and financially. In formal democracies, the ruling classes do not censor as in a traditional dictatorship; Critics are silenced from the mainstream media or, when these transcend in one way or another, they are demonized as in the days of the Inquisition.

In formal democracies, one percent only needs to convince half plus one of the voters to remain in political power. Not a difficult task when, for example, God is included in the bundle of his “values ​​and principles”. But the micro-elite above do not depend on the lower half to maintain their economic power. It is only when this power is challenged that formal democracy is replaced by fascist dictatorships, such as those supported by Washington and transnational corporations throughout a long history. Until the mid-19th century, slavers had succeeded in convincing a majority (including slaves) that slavery was the best regime for extending freedom and civilization. When democracy became inevitable, they hijacked it with similar ideas: the wealth of the rich is the best way to increase the welfare and freedom of workers.

Even so, this vague and contradictory idea that we call “democracy” remains the best utopia and the best resource for those below. But let’s be clear: none, no matter how crooked, exists thanks to the powerful in service, but in spite of them. The same are individual and collective rights and freedoms; all are the product of endless (and demonized) struggles from below.

In the United States, racist and classist principles, flags of the defeated Confederation, consolidated internal borders and spread to Latin America, where they imposed dozens of dictatorships, always in complicity with the eternal Creole oligarchy, generations before the marvelous pretext of communism appeared.

Since then, Washington and the mega-corporations have been the main promoters of communism and other left-wing alternatives on the continent. One of the earliest cases dates back to the 1930s with the massacres of Indians and peasants in El Salvador, but the foot on the gas came after World War II, when the United States’ most important ally, the The Soviet Union, became the only adversary with power and inspiration possible for the Third World against the old Anglo-Saxon tyranny. It was at this time that the CIA was born (1947) and, shortly after, they created, among many others and without warning, Che Guevara.

When the CIA and UFCo succeed in destroying “the communist regime of Jacobo Árbenz” in 1954, one of the only signs of democracy in the region, the young doctor Ernesto Guevara has to flee to Mexico, where he meets other exiles. , the brothers Raúl and Fidel Castro. When the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, Guevara warned: “Cuba will not be another Guatemala. In other words, its independence from the American Empire would not be boycotted with first media bombardments, induced mobilizations and later military attacks, as in Iran, as in Guatemala. When, four months later, Fidel Castro visited the White House to confirm trade and diplomatic relations with Washington, Nixon, Eisenhower, and the CIA already had another invasion in mind. The custom of overthrowing the independence alternatives was so long and the arrogance of an overwhelming military and media force so blind, that they could foresee neither a shameful defeat nor an insurmountable trauma in the Bay of Pigs. CIA agent in charge of operations in Guatemala and Cuba, David Atlee Phillips, wrote that the problem with the failure was that Che and Castro had learned from history and not Washington.

But Che Guevara is described as a murderer for ordering the summary execution of 200 criminals of the Batista regime (the CIA reported that this was far from the number executed by the previous regime) while Cuban terrorists such as Posada Carriles, Orlando Bosch and many others who have dedicated themselves to planting bombs in planes, boats, hotels, diplomatic cars, like Orlando Letelier’s, and collaborated with genocidal mafias like Operation Condor, were protected by Washington. The massacres of hundreds of thousands of victims in a few decades in Central America alone by the grace of Washington and the CIA were to bring peace, democracy and freedom to these lands. (After Stalin, those killed for political reasons in Latin America far outnumbered those in communist countries under the influence of the Soviet Union.)

The same practice, the same interests, the same discourse of the slavers of the previous century with new ideoléxicos. By the logic of the story, Fidel Castro and the dozens of Augusto Pinochet are not the same thing, although in simplified language the two could be called dictators. Cuba and Che are also a direct consequence of Washington’s imperialism, but for opposite reasons.

For this reason, although by all Western standards it could be said that Cuba is a dictatorship, it must be remembered that the United States is the tyranny that created it, a brutal tyranny that has lasted for at least two hundred years. . Cuba was the first major defeat of this arrogance, and for some reason it managed to resist for 60 years.

Is a reverse dictatorship necessary to overcome the tyranny of two centuries? We don’t like the answer of the story. But it is clear. Although (or because) we are radical Democrats, we are not going to throw stones at the Strangled Island in the name of freedom. We could never side with the mercenaries.

For more details, see Jorge Majfud’s latest book, “The Wild Frontier. 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Fanaticism in Latin America”.