======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
On Feb 10, 2013, at 6:49 PM, Joaquín Bustelo wrote:
======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
On 2/9/2013 10:05 PM, John Wesley wrote:
Why do all these accounts overlook the fact that the Soviets, tired
of all the Guevarist revolutionary romanticism, by 1968 gave Fidel
the choice of either towing the Moscow line, or be left to the
mercies of the US ?
These accounts "overlook it" because it simply wasn't so. See, for
example what Fidel says about 40 seconds into this clip from episode
18 of the CNN documentary series "Cold War." It is about Cuba and
the Soviets in relation to Nicaragua and the civil wars in Central
America in the 1980s.
http://youtu.be/lct7SkpYfKA
Referring to U.S. accusations that the was a Cuban-Soviet plot to
take over all of Central; America, Fidel responded:
"Look, if a Soviet-Cuban master plan actually existed we would have
won the Cold War. (Laughs) If there had been a master plan. But
unfortunately there was no such plan, quite the opposite. Cuba's
actions conflicted with Soviet interests at that time."
Nor was that something new.
Five years ago on this list I documented another such divergence
between Cuba and the Soviets -- the decision to send troops to
Angola in 1975 to prevent a takeover of the country by CIA- and
South Africa-backed Angolan groups on the eve of the country's
formal independence.
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2008w08/msg00117.html
Here are a couple of excerpts.
Interview: Fidel Castro, president, Cuba:
"The Soviets knew absolutely nothing about it. We took the decision
because
of our long-standing relations over many years with Neto, and with the
independence movement in Angola."
"It was a question of globalizing our struggle, vis-à-vis the
globalized
pressures and harassment of the U.S. In this respect he did not
coincide
with the Soviet viewpoint. We acted ... but without their
cooperation. Quite
the opposite! There were criticisms. So?"
Interview: Karen Brutents, Communist Party Central Committee:
"In Moscow this was greeted without enthusiasm. It was only when the
Cubans
had landed that we got involved. Because the Cubans kept asking us
for help.
They wanted weapons; they wanted food supplies. Once we started
sending
things to Angola, we were soon in over our heads -- even though it
wasn't in
our plans to go there."...
Fidel is being a tad...disingenuous here. The Angolan intervention
(which, to the extent that it was intended to keep Angola out of the
hands of US imperialism, was not exactly a roaring success) was in
fact accompanied by intervention in then-USSR-sponsored Ethiopia to
suppress a Somali national movement in the Ogaden and free Ethiopian
troops to suppress a national movement in Ethiopia (again, not exactly
a revolutionary success, at least judging from the present state of
those three countries).
...Trying to help revolutionary movements in Latin America and the
Third World has been and remains, the North Star of Cuban foreign
policy since 1959.
The first test of that came soon after, When the Nigerian comprador
state, backed by the USSR and the AngloSaxons, used the genocidal
strategy of starvation to suppress the third-world revolutionary
movement of the Biafrans, I don't recall Cuban foreign policy doing
anything to help them, even in words. Did they?
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
