Two new posts came out today—what a Bastille Day this year!—and there’s a strange synchronicity about it all. You know, Bastille day, July, the month of Revolutions (US on July 4th, Venezuelan on July 5th, the Cuban on July 26th, the Nicaraguan on July 19th , and of course France in July 1789 and 1830), what a stroke of luck to publish two articles in one day, on this, of all days, and these two, of all articles.
In this piece posted at Caracas Chronicles I looked at the debate between the pro-chavista DSA socialists and the Venezuelan Workers Solidarity who called out the DSA International Committee for going to Venezuela on a pro-government tour where it expressed solidarity with the Maduro dictatorship. I end the piece criticizing the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist socialist left and point out that now, as a direct and exclusive result of the policies of Chávez/Maduro Venezuela is going to require large measures of both capital and imperialist intervention to recover from its economic (social, political, cultural, etc) collapse.
And that’s unprecedented. Since 1976 when Carlos Andres Pérez nationalized the oil industry (PDVSA), and I mean really nationalized, as opposed to what Chávez did, which was really a privatization in the sense that he took it over for his own use, not that of the nation (he used it to milk its resources to pay off the voters before his elections).
The second piece was published at Quillette and I want to thank Jamie Palmer for his great editing. I recognized the great job he did editing, but I’m reposting my original here since there are some points I made that I think he may have felt contradicted Quillette’s editorial and political line. The piece is a response to the situation in Cuba, where days of demonstrations rocked the country, and many activists were arrested, beaten and some were killed. Oh yes, including Marxists who have been jailed for mentioning that the protests were authentic and home-grown. As I point out in my article, nothing the US ever did to its own dissident communist left could compare to what the communists did to the communist left.
My original follows:
The Language of Totalitarian Dehumanization
One week before the massive protests in Cuba hit, I was at a friend’s house in Oakland, California celebrating 4th of July and listening to her tell about her adventures in Cuba. This friend is a Jewish red diaper baby, and that probably adds another layer to this story. She probably wouldn’t consider herself a “communist,” but some sort of “libertarian socialist.” I found myself squirming as she spoke highly of certain Left radicals she knew, and when she lamented the persecution of communists in the US, I wanted to interrupt and point out that it was nothing compared to the persecution of communists by the communists: In the US the persecution of communists ended with a number having to change careers, a few having to go to prison and a couple, the Rosenbergs, were executed. In the latter case, the notorious couple weren’t executed for being communists, but rather for spying for Stalin. Unlike all the millions Stalin had murdered, executed or worked to death in Gulags as Trotskyist agents or spies for the West, the Rosenbergs were guilty of their crime.
I managed to remind myself that I was a guest so I said nothing, but when my friend mentioned the “gusanos,” (Sp., “worms”) I broke my silence.
“I find that offensive,” I said.
My hostess looked at me, puzzled. What had she said that was offensive? I could tell she didn’t have a clue.
“Gusano. The word is offensive,” I explained.
She flashed her eyebrows and paused for a second, then went on with her story.
I left soon after, still upset. Why, I asked myself, do people on the left, especially those with a deep interest in Latin America and a strong affinity for the Cuban Revolution, feel it’s okay to describe those with whom they disagree as “worms”? No doubt my friend would feel offended, deeply offended, to hear either communism or Judaism described as “diseases” so why would it be perfectly acceptable to qualify those who oppose the Cuban Revolution as “worms”?
“Linguistic assaults,” Haig Bosmaijian reminds us in his book, The Language of Oppression, “often are used by persons who show no visible evil intent.” My friend clearly had no evil intent, nor had I, for years, when I used the same word as a pro-Cuban communist sympathizer, exactly as my friend had. I rarely thought about what I was saying, and when I did, I thought of those opposing Fidel and his project as diabolical, and considered the pejorative fitting.
Then I went to Cuba for my first visit, January 1, 1994. On that trip, a Mexican tour, where I was the single gringo, I had a meeting in an alcove of the hotel where we were staying that changed my life. It was the first day there when one of the maids furtively called me aside when only the two of us were in a hallway. Looking around to make sure there was no one listening, she whispered, “You’re from the USA, right?” I nodded. She smiled and handed me a napkin she’d written on. It was a name and a phone number. “Please call my sister when you return to the United States. Tell her I’m okay and that I’ll be coming as soon as I can.” I must have looked puzzled because she explained, “we have no way of getting in contact with family in the US.” She asked me to promise I’d contact her sister when I returned, and when I did she thanked me and walked quickly away.
I’d had my first encounter with a “gusano-to be” in Cuba, and she was warm, friendly and kind, taking a risk to share a secret wish, ask for a simple favor and nothing more. Yet it was a degree of intimacy to which I wasn’t accustomed. After all, First World tourists in the “Third World” rarely manage to break through to meet real people and understand their deepest concerns. Most of the people we meet are only worried about finding ways to get more money out of us: porters, waiters, salespersons, guides, street vendors, and the mass of people in the “informal economy.” Yet here was a stranger who had no ulterior motives and was just asking for a simple favor. She wasn’t trying a way to pry dollars out of my wallet with a sob story. Rather, she was risking everything to give me that rare thing: her trust.
How did she know she could trust me? I’ve come to see that Cubans have a sixth sense about tourists. First of all, they can spot them yards away and almost immediately, they manage to size them up and put them in the category of “with the Revolution” or “not with the Revolution.” It’s a skill they’ve had to hone well since their survival depends on it. They certainly can’t depend on their wages or ration cards. They’ve learned to read the tourist and know whether to approach them as a revolutionary or a dissident, and they’ll work the dollars out of them playing that role supremely. Cynical? Yes, worse than anything you’ll find in a third-world capitalist context. Communism, and the necessity and poverty it breeds, is the best teacher of free-market capitalism out there, the mother of all capitalist inventions.
Over the course of that week, the first week of 1994, I met many Cubans on the street with postcards or contraband they’d stolen from their workplaces trying to make a little money from the tourists. Or doctors whose monthly wages amounted to less than $50 driving taxis to make enough money to feed their families. And each time these people confided in me, at a corner, looking over their shoulder, or whispering in their own taxi with just themselves and me as their fare—even then whispering for fear of the all-seeing, all-hearing, vigilant eyes and ears of the dictatorship. I felt humbled. And ashamed. How could I have supported this dictatorship so long?
I wondered over the course of the week I spent in Cuba if I should take the napkin with the phone number and the message the woman had given me back home. I’m sure I thought of throwing it away. Wouldn’t carrying this message to the US be a betrayal of the Cuban Revolution? But wouldn’t a betrayal of that woman, though a complete stranger, be a betrayal far worse?
I brought the napkin home and eventually called the sister who lived in Miami. She was delighted to get my call and after I delivered the message we talked. She told me of her own anguish living under the Cuban dictatorship, and how she’d fled to Miami where she waited the arrival of more family members. I remember listening to that woman and saying very little, but when I hung up, I knew I’d done the right thing.
I’ve often wondered why I learned so little from those experiences, but they did prepare me, somewhat, for my experiences with Venezuela ten years later. By then I was no longer sympathetic to communism, but I neverthelessfell in with Chavistas right away. I began recording interviews with them in the Plaza Bolívar ten years to the day that I arrived in Cuba the first time. I went to Mérida and made friends with chavistas at the ULA (University of the Andes) and I often found myself listening to those friends refer to people in the opposition as “escualidos,” quislings, weaklings, “squalid ones.” I couldn’t bring myself to do the same, always referring to “los opositores” or “la oposición” instead.
During the year I lived in Mérida this linguistic violence never registered as anything worth mentioning or noticing. So for another number of years, nearly a decade, I tolerated, even if now I no longer engaged in, the verbal violence of authoritarianism. And when I met these opositores, people in the opposition, they were as kind and generous, and sometimes even more so, as my Chavista friends.
And then one day, I woke up and realized I’d been sleepwalking through a nightmare. I’ve told that story elsewhere about the culminating moment when I entered my entiodromia, my moment of metanoia, my conversion, my turning 180 degrees away from utopia, realizing all utopias inevitably become dystopic. Watching the post-election violence in April 2013 when the opposition came out massively for peaceful protests against the imposition of the new “President” Maduro and the linguistic violence of all those years of chavismo took physical—“kinetic”—form, I was forced to rethink everything. And that process continues.
What I didn’t understand completely on the 4th of July became clear to me on the 11th when thousands—perhaps tens of thousands, we’ll never know, since the Cuban dictatorship has such a powerful stranglehold on media—broke into the streets in a spontaneous rejection of the communist regime. President Miguel Díaz Canel called out the police and the paramilitaries (see photo) to beat the people back into their homes. The agents of the government had been well-prepared for this for years and evidently felt no compunction about attacking the “gusanos” who hours ago had simply been their neighbors. The language and ideas they’d imbibed from the regime had prepared them because in order to physically violate a person or persons, it’s often necessary to first violate them verbally. Again, Bosmajian: “The distance between the linguistic dehumanization of a people and their actual suppression and extermination is not great; it is but a small step.” Once the target is isolated in the linguistic, ideological category of the “other, it’s easy enough to dispense with them physically. They are, after all, now purged of their humanity and considered nothing more than “worms,” bacilli, a disease to be destroyed for the good of “humanity.” And “humanity”? That’s us.
Or what’s now left of us.