CASTRO'S CUBA: LOST ILLUSIONS
Rosner, David & Block, Fred & Garrow, David J. & Clark, Joseph
FIDEL: A CRITICAL PORTRAIT, by Tad Szulc. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1986. 653 pp. $19.95. AGAINST ALL HOPE: THE PRISON MEMOIRS OF ARMANDO VALLADARES. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,...
...For Noble, the twin pillars of liberal reform are the overwhelming reliance on the state to regulate private industry and the parallel avoidance of true worker control over the shop floor...
...Starting with the early years of the Revolution, AI describes summary procedures against political opponents...
...This dramatic reversal poses a significant intellectual puzzle, since one would imagine that the greater strength of the labor movement and leftist parties in Western Europe would militate against such high rates of unemployment...
...He had drafted (not actually mailed) several letters to Francois Mitterrand and Edward Kennedy asking their advice on how to form a new political party, one which he would call the Cuban Revolutionary Party...
...Because of the liberals' fear of true labor involvement, government reform found itself without an involved constituency willing to fight against the attacks of industry...
...First, there is an element of circularity in his discovery that the low-unemployment countries have an institutionalized commitment to full employment...
...In 1978-79, 4,000 political prisoners were released, but many who refused to renounce their views were kept in jail beyond their sentences...
...624 pp...
...Between 1936 and 1940 Roosevelt put Hoover and the FBI back into the ideologically based "domestic intelligence" work that had largely been forsaken in 1924, and on a scale that quickly exceeded that of the Palmer-Harding years...
...Whether the emphasis was on "moral" or material incentives in the years since the revolution, what characterizes the record from 1959 to the present is that Castro has guided Cuba through every phase and every experience of Soviet communism...
...Perhaps analysts hoped that picturing the FBI's political crusades and dirty tricks as the quasicovert actions of a small, semiconspiratorial band centered around the idiosyncratic Hoover would make that legacy far less troubling than if Hoover's close ties with his political superiors and great popularity with many Americans were fully remembered...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986...
...Philadelphia: Temple University Press...
...Therborn's argument is that the successes of the low-unemployment countries can be copied if a revitalized labor movement mobilizes for full employment...
...In New York, for example, it was estimated that one man lost his life for every floor built in the various skyscrapers put up between 1890 and 1920...
...Nevertheless, he blamed the shortages and troubled times on the tiny portion devoted to the free market...
...But then "more than 4,000 homes deteriorate each year," so there has been a net decline in the supply of homes for the workers of Havana...
...Hoover's vastly expanded intelligence portfolio covered the left as well as the right, and "was precisely what Roosevelt intended," Powers stresses...
...in 1984, the U.S...
...Prisoners report beatings and long confinements in punishment cells...
...it's just that right now the Revolution is not able to provide a counterpart to that effort in money because there is no counterpart in goods, and then we run into all these problems we've been talking about...
...THIS IS FOLLOWED by a fascinating and too brief chapter that traces out differences in the ways that countries distribute employment and unemployment...
...New York: The Free Press...
...Much of the historical and legal commentary on Hoover's FBI has sought to ignore those two facts...
...In this connection Amnesty International's report on "Political Imprisonment in Cuba" (November 1986) is a model of careful research...
...If we don't forget the role of the party, the role of awareness, of education and revolutionary ethics, some day we will have many more people working in a different frame of mind as our soldiers, doctors, and teachers are doing," Castro said...
...In China and Hungary there was marked improvement of food production and consumption when farmers were given back their land and permitted to sell to the populace...
...THROUGHOUT THE POST-1945 YEARS, and especially in the period after 1961, when William C. Sullivan became assistant director in charge of the Bureau's domestic intelligence division, internal security and "subversive control" dominated the FBI's work...
...Lest his listeners get the impression that any real progress is being made in housing, Castro goes on to explain that "a portion of these housing units had to be logically awarded to armed forces officers who are carrying out difficult missions abroad...
...What are the transgressions for which Cubans can be imprisoned...
...If nothing else, the Szulc and Valladares books show that Castro learned some perverse lessons from his own experience in Batista's jails...
...Once the excesses of many of Palmer's over-eager local or vigilante collaborators were revealed, enthusiasm for him and his raids quickly drained away...
...This puzzle is one of many that Goran Therborn addresses in a book that attempts to explain the dramatic differences in unemployment levels 393 among the developed capitalist countries...
...Powers concludes, with no little irony, that "the critical achievements of Hoover's career . . . were not secret at all...
...398...
...Although he is right in seeing the weaknesses in the Act, we must remember that the Act was radical even in the context of liberal reform...
...Perhaps our country's support of such dictators as Batista, Somoza, Pinochet, and many others, instead of encouraging the democratic alternative in Latin America, has helped many to keep their blinders about Castro's Cuba...
...The answer: We struggle against the deceit of living in the clouds, the deceit of thinking that we can swim in money without a material counterpart to all that money...
...Therborn begins by comparing the standardized unemployment data for fifteen developed capitalist countries, which he divides among high-, medium-, and low-unemployment countries...
...It was developed with the help of some of the more progressive people in the labor movement, including Tony Mazzochi of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers...
...He points out that "one of the more revealing explanations of the logic of deceit comes from the Communist party leader Blas Roca...
...When, in May 1924, newly installed Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone needed a trustworthy department veteran to take charge of the heavily troubled Bureau, Hoover again was there...
...President Mitterrand of France and socialists and leftists throughout the world brought pressure to release this poet...
...IN THAT SAME SPEECH Castro made it clear that the free-market portion of the farm economy produced "less than two percent of the supplies received by the population...
...The broader conclusion he draws is that one must look to national variations in politics to explain the differences in unemployment...
...The man who had used prison for organizing revolutionary cadres also learned that to be effective prisons must become places of horror...
...While Powers accurately portrays the cultural roots of Hoover's biases, he also points out how the Bureau's worst abuses of political freedoms, individual liberties, and even personal safety were targeted against those whom the wider society despised...
...The worker himself is the first one to be deceived since he is given money, he's virtually bought with money, with paper, and money is thus made into paper...
...Therborn seeks to explain this difference in terms of political variables, and his book can easily be read as a defense of Swedish social democratic reformism...
...These data allow him to debunk the standard conservative arguments that excessive social welfare spending leads to higher unemployment...
...As Noble tells the story, its failure was the product of this long and harrowing history of changing relationships between government, industry, labor, and reformers...
...This very interesting book by Charles Noble traces the rise and decline of the first of these agencies...
...The problems that prevent Cuban workers from getting a decent return for their labor are problems that derive from the economics that failed so drastically in every communist country...
...It is FDR . . . who has to bear the final responsibility for removing all effective restraints from Hoover's surveillance of the American political scene...
...Organized labor, especially in the cold war years, allowed its goals to become narrowly focused on bread-andbutter issues as accords were reached that conceded workplace control to management in return for higher wages and shorter hours...
...By tracing out the number of variables that intervene between economic dynamics and rates of unemployment, he shows that governments have a variety of different policy options available for influencing unemployment and that many of these can be used without dire economic consequences...
...But Therborn does not engage these arguments...
...In this respect a recent book by Armando Valladares, who was a Prisoner of Conscience in Castro's jails for twenty-two years, reveals the extent to which Cuba's maximum leader has been writing a shameful chapter of human rights abuse...
...Powers appreciates the mixture of lessons Hoover drew from his heady role...
...Therborn goes on to argue that the key explanation for the successes of the low-employment countries is that they have all had a strongly institutionalized political commitment to full employment...
...SECRECY AND POWER: THE LIFE OF J. EDGAR HOO VER, by Richard Gid Powers...
...Railroad, construction and steel workers, and miners were the most endangered, experiencing death rates often twice and three times those of their European counterparts...
...It is in this light that Hoover's lifelong obsession with communism, even after the political demise of the Communist party, needs to be understood...
...For the laborer, it guaranteed payment for injuries on the job without the danger of losing a jury trial and the legal costs associated with the liability system...
...Castro's sole explanation was that "The cooperative movement was being held back by all this shady market business...
...Government itself was relatively quiet during the 1920s...
...He finds that for the fifteen countries, the rate of growth of servicesector employment explains 28 percent of the variance in unemployment growth...
...Catch-22...
...At a time when even the Soviets are placing more reliance on material incentives and greater decentralization, Castro has returned to the ideology of his late comrade Che Guevara, who always condemned thoughts of higher wages and more consumer goods as a reward for harder work...
...So, there was loud applause when Castro said that 3,000 additional men have been added to the police force in Havana and the military forces have been expanded...
...The lesson Castro drew from that is that a dictator cannot deal so leniently with serious opponents...
...These notorious committees have been cited as examples of "grass roots democracy," but in their role as informers they are widely known and feared...
...Through such agencies as the National Safety Council, the radical elements in the earlier coalition were sidetracked as safety standards and control passed on to industry spokespeople and academics who did their bidding...
...Because it relied on professionals, voluntary efforts, and inspection to address the problem, the OSH Act was doomed to failure...
...Is taking twenty-one years to build a hydrotherapy room building socialism...
...Thus for Hoover, and for many of the men who worked for him, the FBI became not simply a law enforcement agency, but both a political and a moral guardian of society's "traditional" values...
...Richard Powers's valuable and well-balanced biography of Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover reminds us of the two foremost themes that any analysis of the FBI's role in twentieth-century American politics must confront: how the Bureau's biases generally reflected the opinions and preferences of many Americans, and how the Bureau regularly acted, even in its worst abuses of power, not as an independent "rogue elephant," but as a direct agent of various presidents...
...Certainly not the party, since its vanguard role must always be reasserted...
...Powers stresses a birth-to-death emphasis on Hoover's cultural roots as the major organizing theme of this book...
...Amid all the economic chaos Castro described there was one boast that surpassed all others: Perhaps, when the history of this period is written, the greatest merit of all, amidst all these dangers, will be that we didn't withdraw a single soldier from Angola, or anywhere else, to increase our defense capability...
...People on the dole will not bring about socialism...
...Old stuff, Black argues...
...18.95...
...the omelet, you know, can't be prepared without breaking eggs...
...Indeed, only a frank recounting of the extent to which American popular opinion 'hated Hoover's chosen enemies will allow for a history that explains Hoover's powerful forty-eight-year reign...
...It is striking, for example, that high-unemployment England experienced a 0.7 percent annual growth of service-sector employment from 1975 to 1982, while high-employment Norway experienced a 3.6 annual rate of service-sector growth...
...As Powers puts it, there were always two sides to "Hoover's public role: the domestic-security professional...
...for example, Switzerland has emphasized restricting access to the labor market by women and foreigners...
...When goods are in short supply and the regime is determined to keep civilian consumption low, it's a pretty good bet that the people will be inundated with appeals for harder work so that the future will be better served...
...Explaining the "secret government" Castro organized in 1959, when he was still officially "democratic," Black quotes Blas Roca approvingly: "Castro's Marxism was hidden (even from the rank and file of the Communist party) because of 'the need of preventing the Americans from having a banner for intervention.' " Whose fault, then, was the deceit...
...It was not until the late 1960s that the tentative accords reached between government, manage397 ment, and labor began to unravel in the face of social protest movements, a new environmental consciousness, and dramatically rising accident rates brought on by the speedups associated with Vietnam War production...
...and Sweden has relied on public works and vocational training...
...He didn't add that Cuba has become more vulnerable to fluctuations in sugar prices because it has become more subject to the monoculture of sugar...
...Another of Amnesty International's Prisoners of Conscience, Andres Jose Solares Teseiro, was charged with "enemy propaganda" and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment...
...Who goes to jail under that dragnet law...
...He molded the Bureau of Investigation into a firstrate, professional criminal-justice organization which largely eschewed the ideologically motivated investigations of the pre-1924 era...
...Most important of all was a lesson of caution: antiradical initiatives could 395 not successfully be expanded beyond whatever limits the popular consensus would support...
...During the waning years of the nineteenth century, American workers experienced changes in production methods that proved disastrous to their lives and health...
...He became the best-known of Amnesty International's (AI) Prisoners of Conscience...
...Although Hoover's role as a young Justice Department attorney assisting Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer with the 1919-1920 antiradical raids has been revealed previously, Powers does an excellent job describing how the twenty-five-year-old Hoover, given administrative charge of the anti-red drive almost by happenstance, became in a few months "one of the more powerful men in Washington," someone who with a stroke of the pen could determine which alien leftists would be deported and which would not...
...Reagan appointed Thorne Auchter, a political hatchet man, as OSHA head, and Auchter signaled private industry, state governments, and OSHA officials not to worry about factory inspections, fines, strict standards, or enforcement...
...Came the sharp fall of sugar production and the general crisis of Cuba's economy in 1986 and Castro thundered against "a peasant planting a little of anything and earning tens of thousands of pesos, peasants who don't sell anything to the state but instead sell all their produce in the free-market at exorbitant prices...
...Many of the long-term plantados, most of whom have spent at least fifteen or twenty years in prison, are reported to be suffering from serious illnesses," the report says...
...Well now, whom do you blame for the economic chaos after twenty-eight years of Communist rule...
...From a staff of 391 agents in 1933, Hoover's FBI grew to 898 in 1940 and 4,886 in 1944 as the Bureau turned its energies against suspected German sympathizers and potential Nazi saboteurs...
...This pattern has been reversed in the 1980s...
...it begins with the premise that the laws of motion of capitalism tell us nothing about why unemployment is 14 percent in the Netherlands and only 1 percent in Switzerland...
...Yet here we are, twenty-eight years after Castro came to power, and almost all his recent speeches deal with economic failures...
...First, if a worker was injured, the legal system limited his ability to gain compensation under the doctrines of fellow-servant, contributory negligence, and assumed risk...
...The second, organized through the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, was the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, which set standards of exposure to toxins in the workplace...
...Castro found as little cause for celebration in the state-owned industrial sector as in agriculture...
...Washington Post, June 5, 1980...
...Noble finds that it was the managers' resistance to government involvement in shop floor practices and their concerted attempt to undermine the ideological and social base of the OSH Act that ultimately spelled its doom...
...The FBI's most heinous crimes, he rightfully notes, "were merely part of very highly publicized campaigns in pursuit of goals supported by the overwhelming majority of the public, the legal establishment, and the governing elite...
...Its power was based on its ability to enter the workplace and enforce standards relating to chemical and dust exposure and other safety problems...
...They openly declare that their ends can be attained...
...Even though he recognizes that reforms that create an institutionalized commitment to full employment fall far short of socialism, he suggests that these reforms could bring socialism closer...
...Therborn's argument is valuable in challenging claims that high levels of unemployment are economically inevitable in this historical period...
...After all, the most productive agriculture in the Soviet Union was located on tiny private plots that collective peasants were permitted to cultivate...
...An amnesty campaign swept Cuba and he was released after serving less than two years...
...More important, Hoover grew personally and politically close to FDR, and transformed the FBI into an arm of the presidency in a way that had dramatic consequences for American politics and constitutional liberties...
...In his speech last September Castro asked: "Is it that the 390 Revolution doesn't want workers to have better and better living conditions and doesn't strive for this...
...The growth of the factory system and mass production, combined with a nearly total lack of regulation and control, created extremely unhealthy and dangerous work sites...
...Not only had the FBI become "a political police force operating at the beck and call of the president," but "the personal relationship between Hoover and Roosevelt erased any limit set by law or custom to the requests the president might make of the FBI director...
...Tad Szulc's recent book painstakingly traces the Communist ties assumed secretly by Fidel Castro when he came to power and the subsequent rationalizations for his deceptions...
...One result of that cult was a new popular-culture celebration of the Bureau's work...
...Valladares's original sentence of thirty years was reduced to twenty-two following a worldwide campaign that threw pitiless light on the hideous conditions in Castro's jails...
...Although the first sentence is a perfectly reasonable defense of reformism, the second is an attack on political currents in Holland, West Germany, and elsewhere in Europe that favor struggles for a citizen's wage as a response to the crisis of unemployment...
...160 pp...
...We who have copied things many times and who...
...Came Castro's communism and with it familiar apologetics...
...Castro answers, 4,000...
...Testimony was brought against him by the local Committee for Defense of the Revolution (CDR...
...In Belgium and the Netherlands unemployment was almost double the American rate at levels of 14 percent...
...The first two doctrines put the burden upon the worker to prove that the employer was at fault and that neither the worker himself nor another employee could be held culpable...
...WHY SOME PEOPLES ARE MORE UNEMPLOYED THAN OTHERS, by Goran Therbom...
...By the early 1980s the agency had ceased to be a serious threat to management hegemony over the workplace...
...However, all of the major countries of Western Europe—the United Kingdom, West Germany, France, and Italy—had even higher rates of unemployment...
...In the 1970s industry began joint efforts to reverse public views of the value of controlling workplace dangers...
...Hundreds were executed...
...Many years ago Marx and Engels concluded their Manifesto with the defiant affirmation: "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims...
...In a review of the book in the Nation (January 24, 1987), George Black belabors Szulc for presenting these disclosures as if they were new—especially the "secret government" set up by Castro after the revolution...
...In the 1970s penalties were modified to twenty- or thirtyyear sentences...
...By shifting public scrutiny away from mismanagement and toward regulation as the cause of the nation's economic woes, industry gutted the radical elements of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, leaving in place an agency open to ridicule and criticism from the public, management, and work force alike...
...The first and most important was America's newfound fascination with, on the one hand, criminals and crimefighting, the Dillingers and Al Capons, and, on the other hand, what Powers, in an excellent previous book (G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American Popular Culture), termed "the cult of the detective hero...
...This emphasis cuts against his advocacy of full employment as the one correct political strategy in all developed capitalist countries...
...The answer to the problem is "political and ideological work...
...Amnesty International reports that he is allowed one visit every six months from his wife and is not allowed to send or receive letters...
...Liberal dependence on government as the mediator between management and labor left OSHA subject to attack by corporate actors all-too-ready to point out its inherent weaknesses...
...Castro now warmed to the subject of the bureaucrat's responsibility: A bureaucrat with a good home may not care about the fact that hundreds of thousands of people are living in run-down housing and tens of thousands of people are living in inhospitable quarters, and he may care very little that 4,500 to 5,000 new homes were being built annually in Havana during the last few years...
...The specific "criminal act...
...Therborn also shows the contrast between countries like England where unemployment falls disproportionately on male workers and Italy where women and young people bear most of the unemployment burden...
...He always retained "a turn-ofthecentury vision of America as a small community of like-minded neighbors" and understood himself as "an aggressive defender of traditional 396 values and customs," someone who saw police officials as "guardians of civilization" and who increasingly viewed crime and political dissent as threats to the nation's moral order...
...He reveals that while independence fired the zeal of Cuban revolutionaries throughout history, Castro tied his police and secret services to the Soviet KGB...
...Castro promised still greater centralization of the economy...
...Current estimates of the number of political prisoners range from several hundred to several thousand, according to AI...
...Therborn examines such variables as the number of foreign workers, the number of hours in a full-time job, the amount of part-time work, and the extent of women's labor force participation...
...suffered with 7.4 percent unemployment—hardly an impressive figure for what was supposed to be a year of great economic expansion...
...27.95...
...However, a bureaucrat, once he has solved his own problems, doesn't care about anything else, whether or not a 391 day-care center is opened, and it may seem marvelous to him that with the need for day-care centers in the City of Havana, six or eight of them are built in five years...
...Press coverage made Hoover into "a major celebrity, a media star," and James Cagney's G-Men movie, Powers reports, "turned Hoover and his Bureau into American legends...
...He is utterly persuasive in showing that governments have more freedom of maneuver in employment policy than is generally acknowledged...
...London: Verso Books, 1986...
...A fortunate Hoover, saved from the political backlash by his relatively low-profile role, stayed on to become head of the Bureau of Investigation's General Intelligence Division as the Harding administration took office...
...How times have changed...
...For Hoover personally, the following years witnessed not only a continuing willingness to serve the president of the moment (interrupted only by a serious estrangement from Harry Truman and minor strains with John Kennedy), but also an increasingly explicit articulation of how the FBI's mission went beyond crime, politics, and ideology to "higher" considerations of morality...
...But to Alexander Cockburn in the Nation, Valladares had to be plotting a bomb campaign against the Castro revolution (September 20, 1986...
...So too, with the other and darker side of the communist experience—freedom suppressed, art and culture in a straitjacket...
...The United Mine Workers pressed for a mine safety act that was passed in 1969, and in 1970 organized labor won a major victory with the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act...
...and the moralist who was always prone to turn his operations into dramatizations of right and wrong...
...Hailed at the time as labor's first significant legislative victory since the New Deal, this act mandated that two government agencies be established: the first, located in the Department of Labor, was the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), responsible for the regulation and enforcement of safety and health standards at the work site...
...At the same time, the only method of protecting workers was a haphazard system of factory inspection carried on by state departments of labor...
...Since Therbom also shows that for all fifteen countries, the number of manufacturing employees had dropped an average of 12 percent from 1975 to 1983, there is good reason to understand the unemployment of the 1980s as connected to the transition from industrial to postindustrial society...
...For example, one dam construction project had been cited as allegedly making a 500,000-peso contribution to the economy...
...If Austria, for example, finds its unemployment rate rising above 5 percent as stateowned firms are forced to carry out large layoffs, will that be because Austria's institutionalized commitment evaporated...
...According to Article 108 of the Cuban Penal Code, anyone who "incites against 392 social order, international solidarity, or the Socialist State, by means of oral, written, or any other kind of propaganda" or "prepares, distributes, or possesses" such propaganda, faces imprisonment for between one and eight years...
...THE NEW POPULAR CELEBRATION of the FBI men as heroic defenders of American social virtue gave Hoover a public fame totally unlike that enjoyed by any other federal bureaucrat, then or since...
...The five lowunemployment countries are Austria, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland—all of which have been successful in keeping their unemployment levels below 5 percent...
...His hostility to the citizen's wage idea is inconsistent with his own data, which show that in developed capitalist societies a reasonable standard of living can be achieved for everyone even when a large percentage of adults are not engaged in wage labor...
...Historically, government reformers continually failed to build a strong labor constituency, often relying on the older patterns of factory inspection and the police power of the state to ensure workplace safety...
...The writer's local CDR said at his trial that "he talked too much...
...8.95 paper...
...Only later and briefly did it become more involved in protecting the work force through programs organized by Frances Perkins, secretary of labor during the New Deal...
...While Therborn dismisses this as a weak finding, it is actually quite 394 dramatic given the number of variables that influence unemployment rates...
...There is also a short but provocative discussion of how different countries rely to differing degrees on the public or private sector to produce servicesector employment...
...Of course when we must set things straight there are difficulties, because it's unfortunate if we're talking about a worker (and not some shady dealer) who works at his machine and makes an effort...
...But Amnesty International cites a more weighty example of criminality: "an unpublished manuscript entitled Cuba, the Marxist State and the New Class: a Dialectical Materialist Study, which the police reportedly found when they searched his home before the trial...
...But now, concealing your "views and aims" has been proclaimed as both virtue and necessity, if you happen to be serious about revolution as your profession...
...292 pp...
...Black hardly takes into account the recent widespread rejection of dictatorship and support for democracy in Latin America...
...Hoover's moralizing came out most visibly in the Bureau's ideological crusades and COINTELPRO dirty tricks of the 1956-1972 period...
...Prison sentences were "often as much as sixty or ninety years...
...Therborn is a Swedish sociologist now teaching in the Netherlands who established his reputation as a thinker strongly influenced by Althusserian Marxism...
...Although the motives differ, so too do the institutional mechanisms that have been used to maintain full employment in these five countries...
...Explicit in his analysis is a somewhat condescending tone that condemns the liberal originators of OSHA for not being able to get beyond their class bias and liberal agendas...
...To this day illusions about Castro's regime survive among certain "leftists" who long ago gave up on the European and Asian communist countries...
...Workmen's compensation allowed business to be freed from the unpredictability of the jury system as injured workers began to win large settlements...
...Without a true base of support in organized labor, it is difficult to see how any stronger action could have been developed, and in the context of Reagan's America, we might be grateful to those liberal reformers for even this temporarily decapitated agency...
...How many are left for workers...
...Since Therborn describes England as a country that abandoned an earlier institutional commitment to full employment, there is a certain vagueness as to what constitutes a commitment...
...The mistreatment and tortures suffered by Valladares and others when they refused to accept the political "conversion" Castro offered them, are the harsh lessons Castro learned from his gentler experience under Batista the butcher...
...Second, Therborn abandons his statistical analysis too quickly...
...Castro went on to say that almost all of the agricultural production in Cuba comes from collective and state farms...
...The doctrine of assumed risk posited that even if the employee could show that the employer had maintained a dangerous workplace, employees were not automatically entitled to compensation if they had knowingly and freely "assumed the risks" by taking the job in the first place...
...From it we can see what lay ahead for OSHA: My idea of an OSHA would be if government set up an agency that would do research and study how things could be improved, and industry could . . . say, we have a problem here and seem to lose more people by accidents in this particular function...
...TAD SZULC IS NOT AN AUTHOR TO DENY CASTRO the benefit of doubt...
...in full-employment Sweden, 76.6 percent of women were in the labor force in 1983, while in the Netherlands with high unemployment the comparable figure was 38.7 percent...
...Above all, Cockburn condemns the "propaganda campaign against Cuba" and especially "the commotion over Valladares" that brought him out of Castro's jail...
...Once that was attributed to imperialism...
...Millions of workers were injured, poisoned, killed on the job as new factories brought workers into contact with a host of dangerous processes...
...Is taking twenty years to build a dam building socialism...
...Anticommunism had a positive value as a defense of American values whether or not there still were any Communists...
...Addressing Cuban trade union functionaries on January 14 of this year, Castro said, after many years of reporting progress, that rather than being overcome, problems were "getting worse...
...This avoidance of the issue of postindustrialism is linked to a third problem—the tenuous connections between the empirical analysis and Therborn's political conclusions...
...After G-Men, the popular image of the FBI changed from a conventional government agency . . . to a direct expression of the public's wrath against its enemies...
...The existence of OSHA has brought the issue of workers' health to the attention of a wide variety of activists and professionals...
...Workers had little legal protection from the hazards of the workplace...
...But the dam wasn't built till twenty years later...
...In the early part of the twentieth century, the workmen's (now workers') compensation program, a state-organized system of insurance for injuries on the job, developed out of a growing alliance among progressive reformers, some business interests, and even the work force...
...Now that it is a result of what the Soviet fatherland calls the "worldwide socialist division of labor," Castro blames the hurricanes and drought for his difficulties, along with speculation, malingering, poor job performance, lumpen elements, dishonest accounting, misguided youngsters, petty traders, stealing of raw materials, crime, and delinquency...
...The revolution in 1959 was aimed against the brutalities of the Batista regime, but as Szulc demonstrates, torture was an institutionalized part of the Cuban penal system at least into the 1970s...
...Moreover, his own comparative research highlights the range of choices as to how work and leisure can be organized and distributed...
...After organizing the armed assault on the Moncada barracks in July 1953, in which nineteen soldiers and police were killed and twenty-seven wounded, Castro was captured, tried, and given a fifteen-year sentence...
...have copied bad things well and good things badly, could have at least copied that from the Bulgarians and never have introduced the free peasant market here...
...Although prison conditions are improved for those who accept Castro's "rehabilitation program," the plantados (those who stand firm) are often denied visits, correspondence, medical care, fresh air, etc...
...It would be tempting to read this as the illiterate ravings of a president who would eventually bring us Contragate...
...Furthermore, writes Szulc: "The traditional Western concept of cultural liberty was erased by the Castro revolution...
...In Norway and Sweden, this has been rooted in the strength of social democracy, while in Switzerland and Japan, it can be traced to a conservative paternalistic tradition...
...And since it's always useful to cite the experience of other communist societies, the Cuban leader found a shining example: There are countries like Bulgaria that do not have free peasant markets and never did...
...Powers's book is forthrightly explanatory rather than denunciatory, and does not shy from praising Hoover's organizational skills during his first two decades as director of the FBI...
...He then analyzes data to find whether a number of economic variables—the rate of economic growth, the growth of the labor force, the cost of labor, or the rates of taxation— explain the variations among the fifteen countries...
...He writes: "As long as a large part of the [potential] working class is unemployed and marginalized, no further advances are likely...
...And not only that: at times we even reinforced our troops abroad...
...Communist regimes usually oscillate between emphasis on material rewards for work and socalled moral incentives to spur workers to faster and better production...
...America's arrogance, Black argues, made Latin Americans "agree with Castro that deceit is the only logical way to deal with us...
...They emphasize, in particular, the potential that a citizen's wage has for subsidizing a dramatic expansion of voluntary, community-oriented activities...
...he relies instead on an unexamined piece of Marxist dogma—that only employed workers are capable of struggling for socialism...
...Castro gave all those horrendous examples and then said: "[N]ow we're really going to build socialism...
...Not the people, since "the masses always understand...
...One of AI's Prisoners of Conscience is forty-one-year-old Ariel Hidalgo Guillen, a writer and academic sentenced to eight years' imprisonment under Article 108.1...
...If such activities are carried out via the mass media the penalty is between seven and fifteen years' imprisonment...
...In a speech on September 28, 1986 Castro says: "There are difficulties, there are economic difficulties, and I think that revolutionaries must be prepared for the good times and for the bad...
...Castro asked: "Is taking sixty-five years to build a highway building socialism...
...Near the end of his book, Noble quotes a remark made by Reagan shortly before his election in 1980...
...This chapter is extremely effective in conveying the idea that there is no simple relationship between economic dynamics and unemployment rates...
...For a few years, following the example of other communist countries, Castro allowed some freemarket sale of agricultural products...
...The significant variations across countries on these variables sometimes connect to unemployment trends in surprising ways...
...his correlations suggest factors that are worth examining more closely...
...Norway has made substantial use of public subsidies to private employers...
...YET THE OVERALL ARGUMENT 1S gill not persuasive...
...The crux of Noble's argument rests on his examination of "liberal reform...
...Convinced that serious professionalism and scientific means of crime-solving could succeed where partisan amateurs had failed, Hoover set about a reconstruction of the Justice Department's investigatory arm...
...These are standardized data from Therborn...
...Castro asks the workers to learn from soldiers, doctors, and teachers, because they can't link their wages to the duties they perform...
...The regime dictates what can be written or painted, the rule being that it must be "within the revolution," and the regime decides what's in or out...
...But the central point is that the medium- and high-unemployment countries have either lacked or abandoned an institutionalized commitment to maintaining full employment...
...For much of the post-World War II period, the United States routinely had rates of unemployment higher than those in Western Europe...
...The other source of Hoover's greatly expanded mandate was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who convinced Hoover that the FBI not only should target American enemies, but could also provide more personal and political information to the president himself...
...Yet what emerges from his book is that Castro deliberately deceived the people as to his "views and aims" when he promised them free political parties, free speech, free elections, and land to the peasants...
...A really effective and meaningful reform would have vested power in the hands of the work force itself...
...Just as he learned from and survived the Palmer era, Hoover also benefited from the scandals that rocked Harding's Justice Department...
...Using the rhetoric of economic efficiency and free-market ideals, management spokespeople and their academic colleagues organized a campaign to link governmental regulation to America's economic crises of the 1970s...
...The report does not show the word "laughter" after that declaration...
...Then, in 1935-1936, there occurred the two most significant developments in FBI history...
...LIBERALISM AT WORK: THE RISE AND FALL OF OSHA, by Charles Noble...
...Yet, as this book illustrates, the president's message reflected a long history that has been slowly killing American workers...
...But the present book represents a break with that tradition...
...Castro concluded, "We should never have started that strange experiment [the free market] here...
...And it was precisely the predilection of the Cuban people for democracy that led Castro to become an adherent of the Partido Ortodoxo of Eddy Chibas as he was rallying the Cubans to overthrow the Batista dictatorship...
...When hope receded even among the naive about the promised free elections after a year, five years, fifteen years, twenty years of Castro's rule, we began to hear other rationalizations: Although democracy has been forgone, observe the economic advances and well-being of the people...
...These Greenish currents have developed sophisticated arguments as to why a system of guaranteed income is a strategy preferable to the left's traditional emphasis on full employment...
...Castro attributed some of his economic setbacks to the fall in the price of sugar and a drop of oneanda-quarter million tons in sugar production last year...
...In the years after the Progressive era, management began the first of a number of attempts to regain control over the reform effort...
...So, while most of Latin America yearns for and moves toward democracy against terrible odds, the prospect is bleak for the Cuban people...
...As Powers puts it, "For Hoover, the specter of communism was more than the shadow of the real-life Communist...
...Hoover, Powers concludes, was "Roosevelt's effective, loyal, and indispensable agent...
...Until the age of 43, in 1938, when his mother died, Hoover lived in the house in which he was born...
...He reminds us constantly of Castro's brilliance and his ability to dazzle those who listen to him...
...Austria represents a peculiar combination of the two...
...capitalist societies have an extraordinary range of choices in distributing work...
...How did that minuscule tail of a free market wag that huge state and collective farm economy...
...Would you come look at our plant, and then come back and give us a survey...
Vol. 34 • July 1987 • No. 3
