LEITERS
Editors: Stephen Newman's piece on libertarianism ["The Chimeras of Libertarianism," Dissent, Summer 1987] prompts me to make the following points. The central point to be made in favor of a...
...ROBERT ROMAN Chicago, Ill...
...It is not an ideal arrangement, but ideal renditions—e.g., Plato's Republic —distort human life...
...If it's narcissism, it reminds me of a person I once met who could only speak about herself...
...Should we not leave some crucial decisions—apart from keeping the peace—as to what we ought to do to the state, whether democratic or elitist...
...MAX GORDON Boca Raton, Fla...
...Szulc lays to rest the myths about Castro and Communism, noting that he deliberately lied to the Cuban people and lied to the members of his own movement and of the Communist party, when he set up a Communist dictatorship...
...I told Mr...
...Tuttleton that, in my opinion, the Dissent editors had been negligent in not checking charges of such a nature with their author before sending the article to the printer...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...Though his personal popularity "remains high," a segment of Cubans views Castro "as a ruthless and cunning dictator, a cynical betrayer of liberal democracy in whose name he first rallied millions of Cubans . . . a servile satellite of the Soviet Union, the idolized object of a personality cult . . . and a cavalier creator and perpetrator of fundamental economic policy errors at home...
...And how reconcile this fact, often noted by visiting journalists, with the bleak picture of Cuban life drawn by Clark...
...Horses can be trained, dogs regimented up to a point, but persons—who are distinctive by virtue of their capacity for self-motivation—are going to be largely subject to the multifariousness embodied in human existence...
...No Third World country approaches Cuban standards in the area of a decent life...
...Perhaps the main example of this ambivalence (not balance...
...Szulc writes that his book is intended as a portrait of Castro and not as a revolutionary history, hence avoids in-depth discussion of the revolution's achievements and problems...
...And dissenters are recipients of jail terms where torture is the preferred treatment of those who refuse to accept Castro's view of the world...
...q JOSEPH CLARK Replies: Max Gordon is right about one thing, I did not write a book review of the Szulc and Valladares books...
...It has been difficult ever since to think about Communist kindergartens without the image of the young girl intruding...
...Szulc tells us, for instance, that Cuba has a highly trained reserve of more than a million armed personnel...
...Kazin seems also to have misunderstood three books of mine (on Jesus, Paul, and Trotsky) that he does me the honor of referring to, again, however, with the false charge that they display my penchant for "conspiracy theories...
...By his second trip, however, he had adopted the entire vocabulary of Liberation Theology...
...Max Gordon mentions the Valladares book...
...Cockburn is a "Jew-hater," and disgraceful of you to print it...
...Some years ago I was at a health resort in the Soviet Union, some eighty miles from Moscow...
...Kazin's charge...
...When poor Leon Klinghoffer was murdered in his wheelchair and thrown into the ocean by Arab terrorists, Cockburn palliated this too (Nation, November 2, 1985...
...she had indeed benefited from Soviet child care, but the price was losing her father...
...I do not here challenge Clark, an old friend and former colleague, in his critique of Castro's repressive practices and economic failings...
...But the entire book is devoted to refuting that assertion...
...Kazin's assumption that the "abysmal misery" in Latin America calls for cooperation not with the productive potential of Western industrial democracy but with the regimentation of Soviet totalitarianism, restores the nostalgia of the grand old days of the 1930s, when the historically matchless slaughters of the Bolshevik regime were defended by dupes, fools, knaves, and opportunists Kazin felt at home amongst...
...Thus "His conservative profile as a Catholic theologian requires the elimination of any suspicion of complicity with the Soviet executive...
...No, Alexander Cockburn is not a "Jew-hater," but I am certainly a Cockburn-hater...
...For a decade [sic] the Catholic Church has been on record as opposing it...
...I.H...
...If conditions are as Clark describes them, how explain that no popular uprisings ever take place, that no one hears of significant defections among the tens of thousands of troops who go abroad annually and the many thousands of volunteer doctors, teachers, and technicians working as civilians in some twenty-five Third-World countries...
...His daughter was an alumna of the Soviet child-care system...
...But word had just come of a political purge and her father had been executed for his political deviations...
...Carmichael states that "the Pope's disclaimers of solidarity with the Liberation Theologians are questions of tact rather than of substance...
...Close confirmation of these claims comes from a startling source—a U.S...
...and that torture and deprivation of human rights are the earmarks of the Cuban penal system and its Soviet-controlled secret police...
...I wrote an article on Cuba, drawing mainly on Castro's speeches for source material...
...He is a snotty upper-class British leftist (to put it politely) whose condescension to democracy and approval of Kremlin despots of course calls for habitual jabs at Jewish critics and victims of Soviet tyranny...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...Castro's "desire for absolute authority has withheld decision-making powers from his subordinates, and careful responsible management of the country and its economy remains Cuba's desperate need—to the point where the long-term success of the revolution is at issue...
...The Fall 1987 issue is easily the most graphically exciting issue in the past dozen years...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...And how did Cockburn put it (Village Voice, July 24, 1978...
...It lists a "highly equitable" income distribution, "virtually wiping out malnutrition...
...Had I written a review of the Szulc book I would have noted the extraordinary contradictions between his "positive" assertions about Castro and Cuba and the devastating rebuttal he himself offers...
...His miscomprehension of my article on the Pope (Midstream, May 1985) seems well-nigh total, culminating in an actually libelous charge that I called the Pope a Communist...
...The two books were cited mainly as witness to the deplorable decline of the Cuban economy and the continued barbaric suppression of human rights...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...A particularly mad, bad example of such extremism appeared in Midstream (May 1985) by its editor, Joel Carmichael: "The Kingdom of God And The K.G.B...
...professionally arranged an unprofessional-looking assassination, designed to establish in the minds of multitudes a primordial, would-be fact—the 'natural' hostility between the Kremlin and the Vatican...
...It is a great accomplishment in any society, underdeveloped and industrial...
...Well, I'm still working my way through it...
...Perhaps that's why he doesn't quote from Valladares...
...q Untruthful Remarks Editors: I deplore Alfred Kazin's untruthful remarks about my friend Alexander Cockburn ["They Made It...
...And after all, Cockburn soothed his readers, "In Western Europe anti-Semitism is not the socially sanctioned form of bigotry it once was...
...Professor Tuttleton strongly denied Mr...
...The free market reflects what one would expect of the make-up of free men and women...
...The central point to be made in favor of a system with a free market is that it is the best reflection in institutional arrangements of the human condition...
...What my article on the Pope showed was nor that he was, personally, a Communist or Marxist—who can know what he, personally, thinks?—but that he was obliged to waver between contending forces in the Church...
...Pride, jealousy, envy, intemperance, imprudence, lust for power, and the rest of the vices that we can succumb to are no less capable of intruding upon our lives with extremely damaging consequences...
...Libertarians disagree and are therefore dismissed as utopians...
...Does this apply to every area of life...
...Both the positive and the negative of Cuban society present enough that is unique to merit study by American socialists...
...a health care system rivaling "numerous developed counWINTER • 1988 • 119 tries...
...The repression merits condemnation where it stretches beyond the requirements of protection from the relentless CIA efforts to cripple and destroy...
...They had all been beneficiaries of a Soviet child-care institute—a "Childrens Home...
...When he finally left the Voice to go to the Nation after he was exposed by the Boston Phoenix as having accepted a $10,000 grant from an Arab group (paid by Iraq) to write a book about Israel in Lebanon, he seemed astonished at the uproar...
...To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...TIBOR R. MACHAN Professor of Philosophy Auburn University, Ala...
...It IS beautiful...
...There are still enigmas in the trial...
...Editorial Note: In addition to the above letters, answered by Mr...
...Kazin would have had an opportunity to reply...
...For two decades the major force upsetting the traditional Roman Church has been Marxism in one form or another: great orders in the Church—the Jesuits, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and, of course, the Liberation Theologians, have mounted a stupendous movement for social change along avowedly "Marxist" lines...
...STEPHEN NEWMAN Replies: Professor Machan's letter serves to illustrate the ideological blinders typically worn by dedicated libertarians...
...The market, instead, is more akin to actual people than to mannequins, or to actual marriages rather than to the stuff of Harlequin romances...
...Libertarianism argues that limiting the scope of authority of as powerful and well armed an institution as government is the most prudent way to ensure the greatest degree of justice in human societies...
...For some reason Cockburn's Jewish editors and colleagues on the Village Voice were always taking offense...
...My article consisted entirely of quotations: I now know that it was, if anything, embarrassingly skimpy: things are far more advanced...
...How can he read this book without concluding that any system, any regime, any man who sponsors that kind of barbarism in the twentieth century has earned a place in the Valhalla where Stalin now abides...
...It's true that the Pope criticized, mildly, some aspects of Liberation Theology on his first trip to Latin America four years ago...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...Generalizations need to be tested...
...What emerges from Clark's review is a devastating picture of economic failure and decay, and of brutal political repression—a society confronting disaster with no redeeming feature...
...I never agreed with Sidney Hook's characterization of Kazin as a "crafty opportunist": nor is any craftiness shown in Kazin's piece, merely a deep ignorance heavily coated with venom...
...Carmichael's article "horrified" Dr...
...While the repression Clark describes follows Valladares's book, the generally dismal picture he draws of Cuban society is strangely at odds with various claims advanced by Szulc, a respected veteran journalist who spent many months in Havana interviewing Castro in depth, as well as scores of his long-time associates and friends in Cuba, and specialists on Cuba in the U.S...
...Clark's piece seems less concerned with these books than with discussing recent speeches in which Castro levels mordant self-criticism at the economic failures of Cuban society and lashes his compatriots for not responding more productively to moral incentives...
...Arthur Hertzberg, who as a member of the editorial board of Midstream protested that "Anyone who writes this is the Jewish equivalent of the kind of Gentile who can believe in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion...
...On April 2 of this year, millions of people, including myself, heard him, in Chile, saying to a woman who had been scarred that she "must go on fighting for her people's freedom...
...To believe that, somehow, if the market produces certain failures the politicians can remedy them is to believe that political life hasn't its own pitfalls, that the dynamics of politics or bureaucracy are less susceptible to corruption than are the dynamics of commerce...
...He credits the revolution further with "immeasurably improving the human condition of millions of Cubans...
...But greed is not the only vice that can upset our ideals...
...is his statement early in the book that "Fidel represents the values of honesty, political legality, and social justice...
...Both those on the left and those on the right think that some regimentation of people is needed—the left wants government to make sure no one lives too ambitiously, greedily, the right wants it to ensure no one lives too naughtily, irreverently...
...Greed may not be their undoing...
...Kazin's personal charm has always consisted of the explosive expression of a genuine emotion: in this article of his, the emotion, whatever it was, has been channeled into mindless malice, perhaps vis-à-vis the "right," as though old-line Stalinists could make their own position some sort of center enabling them to call anyone who believes in democratic freedoms and is against totalitarian ferocity and stupidity an "extreme rightist...
...An introduction states that "the Cuban revolution has managed social achievements, especially in education and health, that are highly respected in the Third World...
...Since Carmichael cannot deny that I quoted him literally and correctly, he offers personal insults and of course suggests that my social views must be Stalinist...
...What were the secret negotiations carried forward between Washington and the Kremlin, apropos Shcharansky...
...To say I believe in conspiracy theories may be too silly for further comment: but I must insist on his retracting the statement that I called the Pope a Communist, especially since the only remark I made about the Pope as a person was that he could not be a Marxist...
...When Paul Berman in a notable Voice article exposed Noam Chomsky's virtual defense of the leading French "revisionist" of the Holocaust—the issue was just the murder of six million Jews—Cockburn accused him of "pandering to certain groups...
...How could Clark have disregarded Szulc's testimony that Castro is "still the enormously popular (and even loved) leader of an extremely volatile nation...
...Dissent, Fall 1987...
...But surely corporate bureaucracies impose their own institutional regime on formally "free" men and women, and the abuse of private power is every bit as terrible as the misuse of public office...
...near-total elimination of illiteracy and a "highly developed multilateral education system...
...What ruler who has reason to fear his people would arm them...
...Kazin's remark that Professor Tuttleton (not named but clearly identifiable) has "private reasons for snapping at Jews...
...None have a higher doctor-population ratio than Cuba or a greater longevity expectation at birth...
...Keep up the good work...
...But she did it so artfully that I didn't mind...
...120 • DISSENT...
...In Praise of New York Editors: When I saw the advertisements for the special "In Search of New York" issue of Dissent, I thought: "Oh boy...
...When Anatoly Shcharansky was on trial in Russia for "espionage," Cockburn managed, virtually alone in the United States, to suggest that the Jewish defendant was guilty and that President Carter was lying when he denied that Shcharansky had been employed by the U.S...
...When my copy finally arrived in the mail, I beheld it and said: "Oh Boy...
...For many years now I have been unable to read him, first in the Village Voice and then in the Nation, without muttering to myself "PhilbyMcLeanBurgess...
...Admittedly, the free-market economists overstate the case when they claim that bureaucrats are as much motivated by greed as are people who are professionally committed to that pursuit, merchants, executives, advertisers, and the lot...
...Congrats to Jim Sleeper for an impressive effort...
...and that we apologized for this negligence...
...Politicians, bureaucrats, the police, etc., are no less subject to vices (or virtues) than the rest of us involved in commerce, education, and other areas those on the political right or the left wish to subject to more extensive government regimentation...
...He assumes that only the state is a serious threat to freedom, and that power is magically banished from the marketplace once government bureaucrats are made to withdraw...
...Is a deal still to unfold...
...Perhaps a personal anecdote will make it clear why I am reluctant to cite Communist kindergartens and child care in order to present a "balanced picture" of what the Communists have wrought...
...For a Pope, in a civil war situation to which he had been invited by the Pinochet regime, and in which his presence formed a shield for the vast demonstrations stage-managed by the Communist underground, to express himself with the formula of the "people's freedom" is alone enough to make mincemeat of Kazin's arrogant know-nothingism...
...and "a wellmotivated population...
...And the contents...
...Commerce Department agency report in 1982 (the age of Reagan) prepared for the Joint Economic Committee of Congress...
...I also told Professor Tuttleton that if he sent a letter to Dissent voicing his complaint we would of course print it— in which case Mr...
...It also renders Cuban society inexplicable...
...Instead, he told me, he would comment in an issue of the neoconservative journal the New Criterion which has, however, not appeared as this issue of Dissent is being completed...
...JOEL CARMICHAEL Editor, Midstream ALFRED KAZIN Replies: "They Made It!," the pages from my private notebooks on life in this fair city, were directed essentially at the Jewish (and mostly ex-left) right-wing extremists who have made so much noise in the Reagan era...
...And Castro's arbitrary methods of rule, which he himself condemned in the past, are no contribution to revolutionary success...
...The choice is not between an unregulated market and the political road to serfdom, as Machan would have us believe...
...Yet he does tell us that the "revolution bestowed on Cuba extraordinary gifts of social justice and equality, advances in public health and education and an equitable distribution of the national wealth...
...The Pope's incursion into political agitation" leads Carmichael to say that the Pope "had accepted, despite verbal disclaimers, the primary contention of the primitive Marxists and of Third World spokesmen...
...Professor Tuttleton has chosen not to send a letter...
...How many hands had a part in the script...
...After an animated discussion a hush fell on the group as one of the young people asked, "Have you heard what happened to Comrade X?" The comrade in question was a leader of the Vietnamese Communist party...
...Szulc also has much to say that is negative about Castro's rule...
...Certainly New York has lessons for other cities, but we should be cautious about assuming just what those lessons are...
...Castro "sees to it that in Cuba all children are healthy and clean and well-educated...
...But to deal only with these and to suppress the historic positive side of the Cuban revolution, that which makes it outstanding, is unconscionable distortion...
...Leon Klinghoffer, "awful though his end may have been, was the only known victim of terrorism in the fall of 1985...
...In expressing the "special solidarity" felt by the Church for all those who "suffer persecution for the cause of justice" the Pope's "formulation" is that of "activists linked to revolutionary upheavals...
...There I met a group of young people from all over the world, mainly children of Communist leaders...
...Any effort to coerce us to be perfect is most likely going to land us in some worse trouble than what we face naturally, based on our assets and liabilities...
...The prosecutors do 118 • DISSENT not seem to have made much, publicly, of the fact that someone recruited by the C.I.A., though in fact working for the K.G.B., had been in contact with Shcharansky, and thus Carter's denials were disingenuous...
...It was despicable of him to write that Mr...
...That the editors converted my article into a book review is of small moment and hardly affects the two matters at hand: that Soviet-style economics (now deplored even by the Soviet leadership) has wreaked havoc in Cuba...
...Kazin, we have received an oral complaint from Professor James Tuttleton regarding Mr...
...Therefore "From that point of view, the K.G.B...
...The report also confirms much of Clark's criticism, lambasting Castro for burdening Cuba with a "highly inefficient political and economic management system" modeled after the Soviet...
...q On Castro's Cuba Editors: In your Summer 1987 issue Joe Clark purportedly reviews two books on Cuba, Tad Szulc's Fidel and Armando Valladares's prison memoirs ("Castro's Cuba: Lost Illusions...
...Machan seems not to understand either very well...
...As to legality, Szulc shows that Castro is an absolute dictator in all matters and that even his succession has been decided—with his brother taking over when he dies...
...BEN SONNENBERG Editor, Grand Street Venomous Ignorance Editors: It is seldom agreeable to be likened to the John Birchers, but when the accusation comes from Alfred Kazin, in your WINTER • 1988 • 117 Fall 1987 issue, it fills one with a warm glow of achievement: Kazin has smoked himself out again...
...But actually the utopians are those who rely on such regimentation for purposes of reaching their impossible goals—on the left full economic equality, and on the right total spiritual fulfillment...
...rather, our choice is between an inegalitarian politics of the market and the egalitarian politics of democracy...
...More New York narcissism...
Vol. 35 • January 1988 • No. 1
