REVIEWS
Coser, Rose Laub & Radosh, Ronald & Alba, Richard D.
REVOLUTION IN CUBA: AN ESSAY IN UNDERSTANDING, by Herbert L. Matthews. New York: Scribner's. 468 pp. $15.00. CUBA IN THE 1970s: PRAGMATISM AND INSTITUTIONALIZATION, by Carmelo...
...In the first period—roughly from 1890 to World War I—the image occurs as part of the xenophobic response to the arrival of the large number of socalled new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe...
...7 Were these elections for municipal, regional, and 14 Revolution in Cuba, p. 327...
...Not the least prevalent has been the policy to restrict the number of Jews, blacks, women, in fields that wished not to lose prestige through the addition of people thought of as having low status...
...Nonetheless, this period is of great importance because it gave birth to other images that easily attached to the Mafia label...
...In fact, ethnicity is crucial for the Mafia belief...
...It was clear that this plant manager felt the only subject the workers were permitted to discuss was how the norms were to be implemented...
...If we oppose such restrictions— I guess this is what the quota scare is all about—it is time that the trend be reversed and that precisely people of low prestige, such as minorities and women, be not only accepted but actively recruited...
...21 Robert Scheer, "Why Kill Castro ?" New Times, October 31, 1975, pp...
...WITH FIDEL: A PORTRAIT OF CASTRO, by Frank Mankiewicz and Kirby Jones...
...If a surgeon is convicted for malpractice because he has an unusual amount of deaths on his record, does this mean that quotas are being introduced to measure the success or failure in the practice of medicine...
...A few years ago Retamar had led the opposition to what he then called the "mechanical" attempt to impose the style of Soviet "socialist realism" on Cuban artists...
...The new Soviet aid was offered on condition that Castro stop experimenting with the Sino-Guevarist economic program, which had been based on "growth through consciousness": labor mobilization, egalitarianism, use of moral incentives, and the attempt to achieve a gigantic sugar harvest...
...In exchange for renewed Soviet aid, the Castro leadership agreed to transform Cuba into a society based on the Soviet model...
...But he persists in asking whether peasants "really administer their own co-operatives, or the workers their own factories...
...The Mafia theory assumes an absolute moral distinction between criminal and noncriminal and views crime as an alien intrusion...
...The most important of the recent books is the study by Carmelo Mesa-Lago, director of the Center for Latin-American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh...
...An issue might contain a resolution of the Chinese Communist party's Central Committee, a statement by Yugoslav Marxists, excerpts from the works of Georg Lukacs or Karl Korsch, contemporary writings by Regis Debray, as well as pieces by a "plain" Marxist such as Paul M. Sweezy, or even an article by Eldridge Cleaver, who by then had long been disillusioned with Castro's Cuba...
...applies equally to Fidel Castro and the explanations he offers...
...but Glazer, alas, forces one to recall ancient verities...
...Just when this happy moment has arrived it turns out, in Glazer's account, subordinate groups threaten, in their willful obtuseness, to demolish its foundation...
...We do not know what happened at Apalachin, since the participants of that meeting refused to testify...
...The popular emphasis on the Mafia obscures the actual nature of 316 BOOKS organized crime...
...It is not surprising to find that the plant manager calls the tour to a halt, after Caute boldly proclaims: The only point I want to make is this: a nationalized economy, like Cuba's, is not a worker's economy...
...But the overlap among all these categories is substantial...
...Either we hire new workers if they are available...
...I realize that Glazer objects to evaluating results, yet I cannot but help noting that between 1972 and 1974, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education for February 10, 1975, the proportion of women in faculty jobs throughout the country has increased from 22.3 to 24.1 percent, and that of full professors has increased from 9.8 to 10.3 percent...
...The Rise and Decline of Fidel Castro, pp...
...Matthews would do well to reread what he calls the "emotionally hostile" article by Jose Ygle'sias, who pointed out that recalcitrant artists and the people are not really separate, that to silence one group indicates the Cuban leadership was not listening to the other...
...Despite the apparent detail and confidence of this assertion, the evidence for it is slim...
...Nowhere in the book do we find some hard data about the results of affirmative action, so far...
...Payment of Cuba's debt to Russia, which accrued between 1960 and 1972, was deferred until 1986...
...I really did not think that I would ever have to repeat Anatole France's old quip that the majesty of the law allows rich and poor alike the freedom to sleep under bridges...
...the maintenance of blacks in a subordinated and degraded position for a hundred years after the Civil War...
...Instead, Matthews comes to the rescue of Cuba's neo-Stalinists...
...309 terated enthusiasm for Fidel Castro's charisma, as well as some naive and at times ignorant statements about the politics of the Cuban Revolution...
...The Mafia theory, like nativist ideologies, is used to preserve the social honor of some and to destroy that of others...
...Yet, it is not impossible that Cuba might move toward autonomy and independence within a socialist framework...
...In the case of Valachi, much of what he reported was gangland rumor and hearsay...
...But within that reality, there is room for Cuba to show more flexibility...
...It helps resolve the question: to what extent does the mere fact of wealth entitle an outsider to general respect and access to power and privilege...
...But they reject the notion that is at the heart of Mafia theories: that there is a secret, nationwide organization of Italian-American criminals distinguished by a strict and uniform code of behavior, a clear hierarchy of command with positions designated by titles, and centralized control invested in some person or set of people...
...His Cuban host is dismayed by such questions...
...3 Roberto Fernandez Retamar, "Caliban: Notes Towards a Discussion of Culture in our America," The Massachusetts Review, Winter-Spring 1974, pp...
...Another source of support for the Mafia theory stems indirectly from the use of ethnicity to define social honor...
...the restriction of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, the relocation of the Japanese and the near confiscation of their property, the resistance to school desegregation, etc...
...Having endured years of distorted and inaccurate antiCuban polemics, it serves neither the interest of the Cuban Revolution nor that of rapprochement to replace an earlier hostility with an equally myopic view of the present...
...This mass organization of 4 million members, with offices on every block, functions, as Matthews puts it, by getting every able bodied Cuban actively involved in "watching, helping, praising, or admonishing everybody else...
...With Fidel, pp...
...129-57...
...The Third Interim Report of the Kefauver Committee announced the existence of a "sinister criminal organization known as the Mafia operating throughout the country with ties in other nations...
...The CDRs soon were transformed into a mass institution that implements the government's policies on a blockbyblock basis...
...248 pp...
...almost disappeared during the period of "voluntary" labor mobilizations, when "vanguard workers" determined labor policy...
...The publication of these books indeed coincides with the efforts by some State Department realists, liberal senators, and congresspeople to change United States policy toward Cuba...
...one editor was summarily dismissed from his post, another transferred to Cuba's cinematography unit, and even Minister of Education and Culture Jose Llanusa was dismissed and put in charge of a pig farm in Camaguey...
...Other recent books, which have received less attention, allow North Americans to take a less apologetic look at Cuba...
...312 BOOKS Fidel Castro does not acknowledge such tendencies...
...Last, but hardly least, The Godfather provided finishing touches of verisimilitude by its sympathetic portrait of Mafiosi and their social milieu...
...This task does not require us to weigh the BOOKS 317 claims of the Melting Pot against those of cultural pluralism or once again to identify ourselves as members of disparate and contending ethnic groups...
...8 6 K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power (New York: Hill and Wang...
...I did not detect any sense of joy or dedication but, rather, saw hundreds of people sitting around idly with bored expressions, perhaps annoyed that they had to endure this event after a full day's work...
...With Fidel, p. 222...
...W hen I told a friend that my Sicilian grandfather had died in jail, he asked without hesitation whether he had been killed by the Mafia because he "messed up...
...Of course, in so doing, he cannot avoid comparing the image to the men and events it is intended to represent, but, mostly, his book is a history of the image...
...In an essay he wrote elaborating on these themes, Retamar argued that Cuba had become part of a community of socialist nations and had inherited a tradition full of achievements as well as of errors...
...Glazer's main thesis is that affirmative action— which requires a good-faith effort on the part of employers to increase the proportion of minorities and women among their employees and aims at integrating blacks in schools and in housing— threatens the American ideals of individualism and free choice and violates the principles of the American tradition...
...As a criminologist, Smith's analysis of the advocates of the Mafia theory is, not surprisingly, largely confined to the roles played by law-enforcement officials...
...Matthews dubs the new Organs of People's Power "an experiment in genuine democracy," while Mankiewicz and Jones refer to the Matanzas election as the "first, unrigged, unbought election ever, whether before or after the Revolution...
...This is indeed how affirmative action hiring is often circumvented: memoranda are sent out, interviews conducted, advertisements placed—and all this provides accumulated proof of "good faith" (which is all the government requires...
...Nathan Glazer is troubled by what he thinks is affirmative action, even though he concedes that "eve have not quite reached the degraded condition of the Nuremberg laws...
...What got them there was the presence of their cousins, nephews, uncles, landsmen and brothers-in-law who engaged in their own affirmative action...
...What if the workers feel the plan is not realistic, I ask, and the new goals are too high...
...q 20 Cuba in the 1970s, p. 137...
...10, 1973 (New York: Institute of Current World Affairs...
...What social needs does it satisfy...
...But today still Cuba is a country where all political power is held by the leadership of the Communist party...
...One sees" nothing of the kind...
...Chicago: Playboy Press...
...The image of the Mafia forms part of a vulgar explanation of social inequality that absolves the powerful of responsibility...
...The only possible method [for Cuba] was a form of authoritarianism," which developed into MarxismLeninism...
...New life has been pumped into the Cuban Federation of Labor (CTC), which had 3Cuba in the 1970s, p.x...
...Like the East European bureaucrats whose personal style Castro eschews, the Cuban leader equates opposition with counterrevolution...
...BOOKS 3 1 1 economic debates had "come to grips with the problem of political power in, and the political organization of, all those societies where centralizeu reformist experiments in planning and economic management were taking place...
...Revolution in Cuba, p. 448...
...Similarly, I argue that if some sections of the population need more effort on the part of the community for their rehabilitation, they are entitled to it...
...Now, only Granma remains, voicing the government position on all matters...
...He does not acknowledge that opposition can exist within the framework of a socialist ideology that is acceptable to both the majority and the minority...
...Middle-class blacks are fine, but what about lower-class black female heads of family who do not share the Protestant Ethic...
...His examples could be used equally well as evidence of resistance to affirmative action by faculty and administrators...
...The trade agreement of 1973 provided Soviet help in solving Cuba's balance-ofpayments dilemma...
...They could be equally interpreted as willful or unwitting misperceptions...
...Why permit counterrevolutionary groups to publish articles aimed at the destruction of the Revolution...
...My friend's question and the view of reality underlying it testify to the deep impression the Mafia has made on the American consciousness, and a most casual glance at the American media indeed will provide similar testimony...
...He is indignant about the ruling of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which states that "It is arbitrary and therefore unnecessary to treat all `serious' convictions as being equally predictive of future employment...," which to anyone concerned with civil liberties sounds timid indeed...
...Except among Jews, the ethnic past is placed in a psychological limbo and denied any meaningful connection to the occupational present...
...Socialism in the twentieth century," he writes, "has to be imposed from above, as it was in Cuba...
...Under socialism, the artist's sole responsibility is to aid the Revolution...
...22 Dumont, Is Cuba Socialist?, p. 154...
...41, Aug...
...His testimony is also suspect because it was given after he killed a man in prison and thus may have been motivated by a desire to please lawenforcement officials in order to avoid prosecution...
...His arguments against affirmative action procedures are weak...
...In fact, there are numerical considerations in almost any policy, whether it is the ratio of tenured to nontenured faculty, or the ratio of different disciplines or fields...
...A Cuban refugee who hopes that the paths of the new Cuban generations inside and outside Cuba "will converge in the future," Mesa-Lago provides his work with the balance that is lacking in Matthews' book...
...TODAY'S CUBA is a country of paradoxes...
...He tells us that, according to one Cuban leader, Padilla "was not arrested because he was a writer, but because of his activities against the Revolution...
...9 How one wishes that instead of presenting a Polaroid SX-70 to Fidel Castro, Mankiewicz and Jones had brought him a copy of Roy A. Medvedev's On Socialist Democracy...
...179 pp...
...The article appeared originally in Casa de las Americas, Sept.-Oct...
...Smith divides its development into three distinct periods...
...329-30, 459...
...94, 236-37...
...In brief, they reject the belief in a bureaucracy of crime known as "the Mafia...
...Smith satisfactorily explains the forces that shaped the theory and its attractions for law-enforcement bureaucracies, but he does not explain why the theory took such deep root in the American consciousness...
...or we work all day Saturday instead of half a day...
...Herein lies the importance of The Mafia Mystique...
...The new institutionalization means greater central coordination in government, the revitalization of the Communist party, and the introduction of rank and hierarchy into a new, professional 310 BOOKS army...
...Herbert Matthews, who knows a great deal more about Cuba's political ups and downs, offers a complete history of the Cuban Revolution—one he hopes, he tells us, does not seem to be written from the outside...
...José Yglesias, "A Cuban Poet in Trouble: The Case of Heberto Padilla," New York Review of Books, June 3, 1971...
...During this period the "gangster" and "racketeer" came into public view, confounded out of the reality of Prohibition bootleggers and their movie counterparts as portrayed by Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney...
...But if a modus vivendi with Cuba is to be accepted by the American public, which has been inundated for years with distorted coverage of the Revolution's achievements, a new image will have to be provided...
...it is quite another to be asked to fight discrimination against the less competent or incompetent and criminally inclined...
...The appealing, quixotic attempt to skip the transitional phase of socialism and rapidly create a "New Man" in an egalitarian communistic society through the development of consciousness, the use of moral incentives, and labor mobilization has been quietly halted...
...Nonetheless, despite a paucity of supporting evidence and a chorus of skeptical voices, that belief flourishes, suggesting that the phenomenon deserving study is not merely the structure of a criminal organization but the pervasiveness of belief in it...
...The residents of each building were grouped in their own circle, and they sat for hours listening to lectures on topics ranging from firefighting instructions to the need for increased "Cuba in the 1970s, p. 86...
...The limit of what he considers to be "within the Revolution" has now substantially diminished...
...ETHNIC INTENSITY AND PUBLIC POLICY, by Nathan Glazer...
...In the period of 1973-75 alone, Cuba received 300 million rubles worth of technical aid, and, in this same twoyear period, the Soviet Union agreed to pay higher prices for Cuba's two major export items—sugar and nickel...
...This image was fed by a general perception of widespread crime among Italian immigrants and by two widely publicized incidents: the murders of the New Orleans superintendent of police David Hennessey, and of the New York City detective Joseph Petrosino...
...instead, it had produced low-labor productivity, gross mismanagement, and indeed the dislocation of the entire economy...
...As Ronald Dworkin has argued recently (New York Review of Books, Feb...
...The role of the unions was explained to me in Havana's old Partagas cigar factory, which still occupies the same building where past generations rolled cigars in 1845...
...Che failed to discuss the issue of "direct participation of all the workers...
...But this ignores that, whatever else it may be, ours is a class society...
...5, 1976), equity does not mean that people who have unequal needs be given the same thing: if, of two patients, one needs a larger dose of medicine than the other, this is what the sicker patient should get...
...More delegation of power to Moscow-oriented old Communists now is clearly under way and evident after the convening of the long-delayed first congress of Cuba's Communist party...
...How, Caute asks, can the Cubans "talk of socialism when there is no collective decision-making...
...This is also how I interpret the statement by a department chairperson that "at present we are authorized . . . to interview [emphasis added] only candidates from ethnic minorities...
...Cuban cultural policy, Halperin accurately writes, is now "fundamentally indistinguishable from the neoStalinist obscurantism that still guided official cultural policy in Moscow or the cruder version that prevailed in Peking...
...Here was another example of how the Revolution demands mass participation—but it could hardly be called an example of socialist democracy...
...The same depth of belief is shown by the 1967 Task Force Report of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, which asserts that: today the core of organized crime in the United States consists of 24 groups operating as criminal cartels across the nation...
...13-14...
...2 Since Matthews proceeds to argue that this authoritarianism is to be credited for massive benefits in the social sphere, he feels he does not have to venture a candid assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Cuba's political structure...
...9 This writer had the opportunity to witness what might have been a typical CDR event...
...I believe that an understanding of the Mafia phenomenon requires that we reclaim the ethnic past...
...380 pp...
...At about the same time, Thomas E. Dewey's investigations of New York rackets and the prosecution of Murder, Inc., popularized the notion of "organized crime...
...It is impossible to understand anything about ethnic relations in the United States without acknowledging that what happens inside our borders is based on quotas of admission, and very small quotas at that...
...11 Matthews even resorts to the fallacious argument that cultural freedom is of concern only to intellectuals, since wages, working conditions, and social services are not touched by their work, but are provided by the revolutionary government...
...250-51...
...20 There was a time when many foreign observers hoped that Cuba would become the model for a socialist society that could free its people from the old dependence on American corporations, and also remain free of Soviet domination, with a government that would be popular with all citizens...
...There is no such thing as a spontaneous, grassroots Marxist socialism suddenly infusing a complete society...
...You make absolutely sure that the trade unions can never challenge your power, your authority, but on the contrary, act as transmission belts for your directives.s The Revolution's economic policy has changed...
...Berkeley: University of California Press...
...The integration of the poor is quite another matter...
...Perhaps it satisfies strong social needs despite the lack of supporting evidence...
...There has been a respectable opposition to the popular and official theories of the Mafia ever since Daniel Bell published his answer to the Kefauver hearings, "Crime as an American Way of Life...
...Dumont, Is Cuba Socialist?, p. 119...
...In Cuba, as in other socialist societies, Karol noted, "socialist democracy is not the kind of luxury people can only afford when everything else has been settled...
...Were it not for U.S...
...Glazer does not seem to have read Daniel Bell's famous paper showing that crime was always strong among new immigrants, whether they be Irish, Italian, or Jews...
...399 pp...
...He argues that some lawenforcement agencies seized upon the Mafia theory because it coincided with their interests...
...But, on many levels, the Revolution's institutionalization is producing a type of society that is far less appealing than that of the early years...
...Women "choose" sex-typed lower occupations because they are denied entry into the higher reaches of the occupational hierarchy, and a split labor market makes disproportionately high percentages of blacks and other minorities "choose" low-paid and menial occupations...
...in the running of communal affairs...
...In the early years of the Revolution, readers had a wider choice of printed opinion...
...Mankiewicz and Jones, who state categorically that "there has been no consistent Communist line, no ideological `turns' to fit sudden and unexpected developments in the Soviet Union," would be surprised to learn that the demise of Revolucidn, and the very creation of Granma, had to do with Soviet dissatisfaction with Juan Arcocha's critical reportage on Soviet society in Revolucidn during Castro's trip to the U.S.S.R...
...q AFFIRMATIVE ACTION...
...The Fidelistas printed Revoluci6n, the Communists published Hoy, cultural affairs were freely debated in Lunes de Revolucion and theoretical issues in Cuba Socialista...
...Today Cuba is busily working out trade, diplomatic, and anti-hijacking agreements with as many Latin-American countries as possible...
...Managers and administrators, like yourself, make all the crucial decisions...
...4 Rene Dumont, Is Cuba Socialist...
...In our cities there is another problem, and that is the large, depressed section of the black population...
...Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press...
...He goes so far as to deny criminals their civil liberties, to deny jobs to those who were convicted in the past...
...For an example of early romantic reports on Cuba, see Sandra Levinson and Carol Brightman, eds., Venceremos Brigade: Young Americans Sharing the Life and Work of Revolutionary Cuba (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971...
...The era when all the top positions in the Administration, the Communist party, and the Army are held by Fidel Castro and his original guerrilla band may now be coming to an end...
...Why is the Mafia theory so universally attractive...
...faculty members reflected on the Revolution itself...
...Yet even Che preferred "to take shelter behind two myths, both of them imported from the USSR": that workers had no other interest "than the acceleration of production in accordance with the overall economic plan," and that the revolutionary leaders "know best how to interpret the thoughts and needs of the working class...
...Glazer insists that among the three key characteristics of the distinctive American orientation to ethnic differences has been `first [that] the entire world would be allowed to enter the United States...
...He was released for "lack of evidence," and sent directly to the airport to board a plane bound for the United States...
...3 IN THE ECONOMIC SPHERE, Cuba has introduced the once abandoned and discredited use of material incentives, including production bonuses, pay for overtime, and wage differentials— all meant to create a sustained balance between labor expended and productivity...
...Glazer consistently ignores these and other constraints on free choice and gets nervous when, so he alleges, affirmative action legislation restricts the freedom of choice of employers and administrators to hire and place people according to their "individual merit...
...The journal printed material unavailable elsewhere on the island...
...13 But the intellectuals who criticized the arrest and 12Frank McDonald, "Report from a Cuban Prison," Report no...
...12 A rationale for Cuba's cultural policy was given to this writer during the summer of 1973 by Roberto Fernandez Retamar, editor of Cuba's literary journal, Casa de las Americas...
...102, 68...
...The new economic course, in fact, is related to a return to what Mesa-Lago terms the postreform Soviet system...
...We have three choices," he answers...
...While anti-Castro liberals used to depict Cuba as a dangerous Soviet beachhead, some writers now describe the country in terms similar to the rather uncritical reports that came from the Revolution's most faithful supporters during the 1960s...
...You have a machinery for the ventilation of certain minor grievances, but that is all...
...Just as Tito was able to maneuver and create an independent path for Yugoslavia, Cuba's developing economic growth, combined with detente, could give Castro the chance to shed some of the dogmatism that seems to have been dictated by the necessities of the Cuban-Soviet alliance...
...My point merely is that the statements Glazer quotes do not add up to any (let alone "overwhelming") evidence of "government insistence on quotas," whether "illicit" or not...
...This explanation receives no firm retort from Mankiewicz and Jones, who even add the rationale that "if one compares Cuba's lack of political freedom and social mobility to any other Latin-American country, then to all but a handful of landed aristocrats it must seem a very desirable place indeed...
...I am surprised that Nathan Glazer, a professor at Harvard University—an institution that hires people, I am sure, for their professional qualifications—should have so little respect for or knowledge about standards of evidence...
...The problem, he said, was that Cuba's friends were calling attention only to its errors...
...but the new institutionalization has not led the Cubans to face the problem pointed out earlier by K.S...
...The integration of blacks proceeds, and at a pace related to their rise in income and occupation level...
...He does admit to what he calls a "clumsy handling" of Padilla, but he concludes that the Western intellectuals "struck out blindly, in haste...
...What he is really concerned with is to uphold the present class and sex structure of the society...
...The Revolution's friends have always stressed Cuba's achievements in education, literacy, health care, and housing—achievements denied or ignored by the pundits of official liberalism...
...Castro relinquished some power to the old-line, trusted Communist Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, a man who had always advocated a more conventional Soviet course of economic development...
...Cuba might yet, as Mesa-Lago suggests, be transformed from a "centralist-dogmatic and Soviet-dependent" system into a "more democratic and independent socialist system...
...One recent report noted that militants check each Havana apartment at night, to see that tenants are not wasting electricity...
...Like the legend of the Elders of Zion, the Mafia deflects blame onto a sinister alien conspiracy, thus legitimating the "native" social order...
...Task Force Report on Organized Crime, issued in 1967, stamped the image with the imprimatur of serious academic and intellectual analysis...
...he presents some pieces of hearsay that lowering of standard's is being advocated, but these are usually personal interpretations...
...6 THERE MAY NO LONGER be the brand of authoritarianism in Cuba that emanates from the militarization of labor, with bureaucrats exerting themselves to gain compliance through "voluntary" labor mobilization that is organized along military lines...
...It is reasonable to expect that an organization would leave greater traces of its existence, especially in a quarter-century of' close scrutiny, than we have here...
...The importance of ethnicity for the Mafia phenomenon is often obscured by the defensive pas de deux between Italian-American groups and law-enforcement officials in which each seeks to deny the meaningfulness of its ethnic character...
...Their "dishonorable" descent encourages a view of themselves as interlopers and intruders...
...That program had failed to reach its high economic targets...
...Matthews constantly seeks to provide rationales for Cuba's chosen course...
...A strange sort of coercion that boasts of so little effectiveness...
...Matthews, Revolution in Cuba, p. 15...
...Footnotes, the bulletin of the American Sociological Association, reports in its February 1976 issue that the Executive Office has received hundreds of requests for the names of minority members and women eligible for recruitment and hiring, and adds that "some people are beginning to question the effectiveness and sincerity of such search efforts...
...One would hope that a journalist such as Herbert Matthews would provide a critical account of Cuban cultural policy and the Padilla episode...
...BOOKS 313 "confession" of Heberto Padilla in fact were identified with and supporters of the Revolution— though fearful it might slip into the Soviet path...
...New York: McGraw Hill...
...they traveled of course subject to an itinerary that served to feed the illusions of the radical tourist...
...or we increase the daily work hours...
...It is not a question of rights for the former exploiting classes (which is how Castro states the case) but of rights for "differing tendencies and attitudes within the working classes itself, among the masses...
...10.95...
...If organizations were prevented from evaluating the results of their operations, they would come to a standstill...
...Once it was the "microfaction" of Anibal Escalante and his followers who were condemned...
...He even tells us that he agrees with a statement in the poet's confession, in which Padilla says that his blows against the Revolution would increase his popularity with so-called liberals in the United States...
...British historian David Caute provides a humorous but tough-minded account of his 1972 tour with a group of Europeans...
...CUBA IN THE 1970s: PRAGMATISM AND INSTITUTIONALIZATION, by Carmelo Mesa-Lago...
...In the second period—running roughly from World War I to 1950—the Mafia image seemed dormant...
...The affluent have the freedom to send their children to private schools, but the great majority must "choose" class-typed neighborhood schools...
...The talk of the day in Cuba is economic incentives, wage differentials, and building the material base through the use of cost-benefit analysis and raising capital efficiency and labor productivity...
...On a hot August evening in 1973, the streets of the Vedado district in downtown Havana were packed to capacity, as the local CDRs brought out the inhabitants of every apartment within a certain radius...
...4 Matthews' defense of the Cuban policy is at best sophomoric...
...Perhaps the CDRs are not quite the institutions of "police inquisition" denying the poorest worker his dignity, as Rene Dumont suggests but they certainly are not, as Matthews argues, organs of a "grassroots concensus" that represent "surely some kind of democracy...
...12.95...
...New and rigorous forms of ideological control have been introduced...
...Now the CTC functions much like its Soviet counterpart— enforcing work discipline, helping to increase productivity, and arranging vacations and social events...
...Thus a statement of the Civil Rights Commission that if "racial and ethnic minorities are not purchasing homes . . . the marketing and sales techniques being used will warrant careful scrutiny," leads Glazer to the non sequitur that "one sees the process whereby affirmative action became goals and targets, and goals and targets became quotas...
...Intellectuals, he argued, can no longer be considered a group that has the right to stand apart from the people and to separate themselves from the task of building the Revolution...
...Housing "choices" are determined by income, land value, rental value, and, in the case of public housing, by political decisions...
...Yet, on a deeper level, he fears what affirmative action could be, namely a spur to a change in the class structure...
...WHAT GLAZER OPPOSES with strong feelings is a figment of his imagination: the belief that evaluation of results of hiring practices, or school placements, or housing policy is synonymous with setting quotas...
...his stronger fears of potential long-range consequences emerge upon a careful reading...
...The modern era began with the Kefauver hearings of the early 1950s...
...One must be naive indeed to believe that in the past it was just individual merit that landed huge numbers of Jews in the garment industry, and large numbers of Irish in the police force...
...The uniqueness of the Cuban Revolution, so much praised in the past by Sartre, has gradually dulled and the more conventional features of socialism "a la Eastern Europe" appear increasingly stronger on the island...
...10.95...
...He defines himself as a liberal journalist, an American who never saw a need to concern himself with socialism...
...207 pp...
...Glazer claims that "evidence from the universities of illicit government insistence that quotas be set is overwhelming...
...16 THESE SUPPORTERS of the Cuban Revolution seem to feel that they must conclude with an optimistic prognosis, and so they all point to the experimental elections held in Matanzas province in 1974 as proof that institutionalization is leading to new forms of mass democracy...
...66-67...
...Cuba's ideological rigidity and lack of open political discussion is most evident to foreign visitors when they open their morning edition of Granma, the paper Caute accurately calls "one long government press conference," a "casserole of slogans and exhortations," which prints the news in a propaganda framework that of course presents only one side of any argument...
...you mobilize labor, direct labor, discipline labor, and all the time you tell the workers that this silo belongs to them...
...7.95...
...Almost the entire world has been prevented from entering the U.S., because ever since the 1920s we have enacted immigration quotas that keep out all but infinitesimal numbers of people from other nations...
...In the center of each group sat a family wearing placards identifying them as the most revolutionary militants in their building...
...He also notes that the Organs of People's Power are to be guided by a Commission that is to regulate and conduct the elections...
...If the Mafia image should serve as a device to start the process of reclamation, it will finally have served us well...
...that no one is now excluded from the broadest access to what the society makes possible...
...To him, employment, schooling, housing, all have depended on individual choices until very recently, when—alas, says Glazer—the government introduced group criteria of access to these facilities...
...21 It is probably too late for Cuba to remove itself completely from its close economic and political ties to the Soviet bloc...
...other factors than mere technical qualifications" should be considered...
...Writers have to prove their militancy by producing overtly political works...
...THE CUBAN REVOLUTION abides no longer by Fidel Castro's 1961 pronouncement, guaranteeing a place for nonrevolutionary writers and artists...
...The threat of the last ten years to this distinctive American pattern" is that "the nation would, under pressure of those recently subordinated to inferior status [how recent?] be permanently sectioned on the basis of group membership and identification...
...I One indication of that policy is the Cuban government's decision to suspend publication of Pensamiento Critico, a journal published by the Philosophy Department at the University of Havana and run by a group of scholars sympathetic to Guevara's critique of Soviet economic policy...
...he could not defend himself in court because he spoke no English and died in jail of pneumonia...
...New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 130...
...All this, McDonald concludes, "was only part of a larger crackdown on intellectuals throughout various departments of the University as well as numerous cultural organizations...
...Smith argues, however, that the Mafia theory has ultimately worked against the interests of these very law-enforcement agencies...
...Really, isn't this nonsense...
...It is hardly accidental that many heroes of so-called black exploitation films war against the Mob, the Syndicate, and the Mafia...
...Suddenly, on Christmas Eve 1971, he was arrested as a spy, held incommunicado for three months, and interrogated by state security officials...
...And it is for these reasons, I submit, that affirmative action is being resisted in some sectors of the population, and that its specter haunts the author of this book...
...While touring a sugar exporting plant in Cienfuegos, Caute receives the usual answer that emphasizes the extent of worker participation...
...That failure, however, made Cuba even more dependent upon Soviet goodwill...
...Only Mesa-Lago suggests that one should wait and see...
...The established social order is not threatened, but strengthened, when the Mafia becomes the target of morally justified rage...
...Since "petty-bourgeois" writers like Heberto Padilla had been deprived of any economic path to advancement, Retamar claimed, he and his type tried to express their sentiments through literature...
...He could have argued that unions had to function as autonomous institutions expressing and defending the interests of the working class...
...moreover, the meeting and their silence can be understood without postulating a BOOKS 315 "gangland convention...
...Their close partisan identification with the Revolution and their position as honored invitados invariably led to a defusion of all criticism...
...Obviously, those questions cannot be fully answered here, but I can point to the foremost element in any answer: namely, ethnicity...
...When socially mobile persons feel that their origins are not worthy of respect, there is a strong tendency for them to play down the significance of those origins or even to change their names...
...Earlier critics of Cuba's economic policy during the Sino-Guevarist period, such as French agronomist Rend Dumont, had assumed that the political corollary of material incentives would be a "certain amount of liberalization," combined with the formation of small work collectives to be run by the workers themselves—thereby creating a decentralized socialist apparatus that would allow for the accommodation of public criticism...
...Glazer admits that one could read American history as characterized by the enslavement of the Negro, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic movements...
...The plant's manager says that new norms for increased production have been introduced in order to fill the great foreign demand for Cuban cigars...
...q 3 20 BOOKS...
...Are there not other factors, some legitimate and some not, that have always been considered essential for the welfare of a department or a school, one of which is its composition, variously defined...
...Glazer knows that "voluntary action," which he advocates in housing and busing, works only "for relatively stable families," but that seems fine with him...
...3.95 (paper...
...I must hasten to add that of course not all administrators and faculty are devious...
...And for those who wish the best for the Cuban Revolution, it becomes indispensable, as Rene Dumont so aptly writes, to present "a more complete and different view from that of its officials and propagandists...
...The director was assigned to a non-functioning university television station...
...Aside from the hearsay and conjecture reported as fact by local and national law-enforcement officials, the major evidence for the existence of a nationwide organization of Italian-American criminals remain the Apalachin meeting of 1957 and the Valachi testimony of 1963-64...
...219-20...
...Valachi's testimony added a vivid portrait of a secret society, replete with organization charts, titles, and rites of initiation...
...In short, ethnicity becomes a conservative principle in the most fundamental sense, used to maintain domination and control of positions of privilege, to close the doors of the club to the newcomers because they are not honorable enough...
...Their membership is exclusively men of Italian descent, they are in frequent contact with each other, and their smooth functioning is insured by a national body of overseers...
...Yet Medvedev's argument against those he terms "conservatives" in the U.S.S.R...
...Medvedev argues that the sum total of bourgeois democracy is not something to be discarded after social revolution, but a process to be extended and given new and richer content...
...New York: Basic Books...
...Smith is at his best in tracing the development of the image in this last era, especially in showing its often spontaneous and fortuitous evolution and the continual refashioning of evidence...
...Arcocha's reports, Maurice Halperin writes, "exposed some of the bleak reality of political life in the Soviet Union...
...Yet power remains centered in a small group—at first, the original band of guerrillas who fought with Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra, and more recently the leadership of Cuba's Communist party...
...The problem with the Matthews volume is precisely that it is not written from the outside...
...In the last few years, such writers as Gordon Hawkins, Francis Ianni, and Murray Kempton have raised damaging questions about the Mafia concept...
...Closely allied to this use of ethnicity is the creation of myths that serve to legitimate the social order...
...Could Glazer (or Sidney Hook) provide examples of employment for "technical" qualifications only...
...This does not mean, as Glazer asserts, that requirements for qualifications are to be relaxed, and nowhere in the government guidelines is such a statement to be found...
...now it is the remnant of the followers of Che Guevara...
...Still, the Mafia image did not take root until the Apalachin convention of 1957 gave a semblance of reality to an otherwise abstract notion...
...In each case, Fidel acts as the noble jefe maximo, who goes about the island exhorting his children on the need to understand the wisdom of the new Cuban policy...
...Ignoring the genesis of organized crime in the structure of American society, the Mafia theory spawns the illusion that it can be eliminated by the destruction of a small band...
...Events had forced him, he told us, to reconsider his earlier position...
...He fears the great unwashed and the monstrous regiment of women who threaten the established structure of society...
...against the Revolution, nothing...
...Mesa-Lago has produced a careful, sober, and scholarly picture of the Revolution's institutionalization...
...but it is only half the story...
...Is this such a novel practice in academia (or elsewhere...
...This trend was complemented by a spate of new books about the Cuban Revolution, books whose authors seek to make that Revolution acceptable to North Americans in terms Fidel Castro surely would approve of...
...The concept of affirmative action has awakened public consciousness to the social reality that inequality is rooted in social institutions to protect the privileged, rather than merely in the hearts and heads of men and women...
...The average Cuban sees Fidel Castro as his compahero, and this citizen is embued with a spirit of solidarity for the Revolution and with pride in how much has been accomplished after years of effort...
...the actions of the men to whom the image is imputed...
...They, we hear, have been enabled to compete with earlier settlers on an equal footing, especially since various antidiscrimination measures of the early '60s have removed the stigma suffered earlier...
...Maurice Halperin, an American political scientist who taught for five years at the University of Havana, offers both a first-hand account and an analysis of Cuban-Soviet relations...
...What these Western and colonized Latin-American intellectuals actually objected to, he claimed, was the very existence of socialism...
...In the 1950s, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics became the chief advocate of the theory because it needed a strong and conspiratorial opponent to explain its failure of making progress in the struggle against narcotics...
...are to be awarded to workers who have successfully increased their productivity...
...the faculty of the Philosophy Department was broken up...
...CUBA YES?, by David Caute...
...One of the things I find remarkable about affirmative action is not just that it is supposed to provide individuals with opportunities that have been denied in the past, but that it could potentially (if effective, that is) bring about some structural changes in the society...
...provincial assemblies proof that Cuba had finally created democratic institutions...
...It is painful to have to recall the elementary fact that freedom of choice is an unequally distributed 318 resource, based on the class, ethnic, and sex structures of society...
...Carmelo Mesa-Lago succinctly describes these changes: The romanticism of the 1960s has apparently come to an end...
...Glazer assumes it to be obvious that once a criminal always a criminal, whether or not he has purged himself of the crime after being convicted...
...It is no accident that Glazer does not quote his "evidence" from these guidelines...
...that the American polity has instead been defined by a steady expansion of the definition of those who may be included in it to the point where it now us all humanity...
...Into this group fall Herbert L. Matthews' recent study and the text of a lengthy interview with el jefe himself by Frank Mankiewicz and Kirby Jones...
...1 ° 91bid., P. 224...
...But just as the repressed impulse is merely deflected and seeks satisfaction in an object that suitably disguises the original source, so the ethnic impulse seeks outlet in relishing the ethnicity of others: The ethnic joke is a functional parallel to humor in Freudian theory...
...While many recent admirers of Castro see his movement throughout Cuba as an example of truly direct and democratic leadership, what David Caute states is more likely the truth: that Castro stands in the way of creating truly representative institutions...
...1971...
...New York: Basic Books...
...Of course, Fidel and his leadership believe that they alone see the correct path and actions to be taken...
...with insufficient knowledge of the case and of Fidel Castro and his revolution...
...73 -74...
...Frank Mankiewicz, former Peace Corps director for Latin-American projects, and his associate Kirby Jones provide numerous examples of unadul'For an elaboration of this argument, see Hans Magnus Enzensberger's important essay, "Tourists of the Revolution," in The Consciousness Industry (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), pp...
...Now not merely veterans of the Old and the New Left come forth with such reports...
...This could happen through a change in residential (and therefore educational) class stratification and through a decrease in the power of `old-boy" networks in employment...
...7 Cuba Yes?, pp...
...There was the failure of the plan to harvest 10 million tons of sugar—which, had it succeeded, would have given Cuba a surplus that would have reduced its debt to Russia...
...Any suggestion that Medvedev's critique of Soviet society could be applicable to Cuba, I am sure, would receive only scorn from these new friends of the Cuban Revolution...
...22 This means the propagandists on both sides of the abyss...
...And further:] It is one thing to fight discrimination against the competent, the hard-working, and lawabiding...
...Look only at the ease with which the accusation of Mafioso is made against prominent Italian-Americans such as Joseph Alioto and Frank Sinatra, the public readiness to believe it, and the difficulty these men experience in shedding the label once it is applied...
...Although Karol was sympathetic to the position of Che Guevara, he argued that neither Che nor his opponents during the 1963-65 'Cuba Yes?, pp...
...369 pp...
...Basing his commentary on Cuban sources, MesaLago writes that the Communist party is given the responsibility of guiding the OPPs, which the Cuban government has fashioned in the image of the Soviet Union's local soviets.'" The other institutions said to signify proof of mass democracy are the Committees for Defense of the Revolution, or CDRs, formed in 1960 to combat counterrevolutionary activities...
...IN AND OF ITSELF, Smith's book is excellent, carried out with thoroughness, intelligence, and a sense of humor...
...1°Roy A. Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 44...
...7 Fidel Castro tries to explain that there is no need for a "press that is against the revolutionary class...
...Normalization of relations with the United States might in the long run give Fidel Castro the option to slowly develop a more independent position, and perhaps even retreat from the present close association with Soviet policy...
...It is not identical with the huge female-headed sector, or the welfare population, or the population out of which comes a disproportionate number of juvenile delinquents, the violent, and the disturbed...
...Matthews does not inform his readers of the nature of Padilla's offenses...
...The first Commission established to guide the Matanzas operation was chaired by the veteran Cuban Communist leader Blas Roca...
...2 Revolution in Cuba, pp...
...15 1bid, p. 332...
...We know that for blacks there has been less progress...
...Anyone familiar with the claims made by the Cubans should know that it is wise to reserve judgment lest the latest heralded mechanism of mass democracy goes the way of previously praised but soon abandoned projects (i.e., the Communist youth encampment on the Isle of Pines...
...Ethnicity is used as a way of imputing degrees of social respect, a way of marking the boundaries of a "status group," in a society in which positions of power and privilege have been assaulted by successive waves of immigrants and their descendants...
...A policy that does not evaluate results is a policy of irresponsibility...
...This may result in increased productivity and greater economic stability...
...His first piece of evidence comes from Sidney Hook who reported that a university president was told by a HEW official that "Department Heads should be advised that...
...In the 1960s, the other law-enforcement agencies, such as Robert Kennedy's Justice Department, used the theory to arouse fears of a supercriminal organization as a way of justifying the use of wiretapping and other invasions of privacy...
...McDonald had been teaching in Cuba for one year...
...314 BOOKS vigilance against counterrevolutionaries...
...Glazer reminds me of the contempt that New York City's established German Jews used to harbor against East European Jews who "chose" to live on the lower East Side...
...The real issue, Medvedev contends, is not that of freedom for counterrevolutionaries but the right of a minority within a socialist society to argue for its viewpoint...
...in 1963...
...I had great difficulty in persuading him of a far less vivid reality: my grandfather was a poor immigrant storekeeper accused of buying goods stolen by other poor immigrants...
...THE RISE AND DECLINE OF FIDEL CASTRO: AN ESSAY IN CONTEMPORARY HISTORY, by Maurice Halperin...
...But he thinks that] this is a selective misreading of American history...
...Such attitudes lead David Caute to ask whether Cuba has in fact introduced socialism at all...
...It is, indeed...
...There is no talk about quota whatsoever in the statement...
...I think it correct to see the Mafia phenomenon as akin to 19th-century nativism and KnowNothingism...
...Within the Revolution, everything," Castro then said...
...He calls "ominous" (a term he uses repeatedly) the government guideline that "an affirmative action program is a set of specific and result-oriented procedures . . . ' because he arbitrarily equates results and goals with quotas...
...Why were the other papers phased out...
...Karol...
...It requires only that we understand our relationship to our own ethnic experience and that we place it in a position of normative equality to all other kinds of experience...
...For much of the past year—before Cuba's recent African involvement—it seemed that relations between the United States and Cuba were proceeding toward normalization...
...But what about those who have managed to get in...
...Since 1970, Cuba has gone deeply into debt to the Soviet Union...
...These friends and supporters often traveled to Cuba as guests of the Cuban government...
...To be sure, these authors accept the reality of ItalianAmerican criminals and criminal gangs, with ties cemented by kinship and common origins...
...the payments were to be made over a 25-year period beginning in 1986...
...Yet Matthews not only finds the "Marxist-Leninist Cuban Revolution" entirely beneficial, he also does not shy away from a universal generalization about socialist development...
...This is how I interpret the statements of some chairpersons of sociology departments that they BOOKS 319 "felt coerced to hire a woman or a minority member regardless of whether or not he or she was the best candidate for the job...
...THE MAFIA MYSTIQUE, by Dwight C. Smith, Jr...
...But even these few purported traces, as Dwight Smith points out, are highly suspect...
...Many of the white male denizens of the faculty clubs got there in just about the same way...
...This use leads to archetypal images of social origins, normative biographies that deprive many descendants of 19th- and 20th-century immigrants of any feeling that their origins are legitimate by the society's standards...
...If the personnel policy of a university insists on a minimum of scholarly writing for faculty promotion, does this mean that a "quota" has been set for publication...
...Smith turns his focus from arguments over the evidence for the existence of the Mafia to a concern with "the development of the image from outside the behavior pattern, not...
...restrictive immigration policies, some of the millions who perished in the Holocaust could have been saved...
...Not only was the journal closed down...
...Frank McDonald, a North American who was teaching Caribbean Studies at the University of Havana, reports that the rector of the University told the staff that Pensamiento "was attracting too much attention and the positions taken by the The Rise and Decline of Fidel Castro, p. 360...
...Wages are determined according to the fulfillment of quotas set by the planning board, and scarce and desired consumer goods (TV sets, washing machines, pressure cookers, watches, etc...
Vol. 23 • July 1976 • No. 3
