Comment
Readers are invited to address letters to: Comment, NACLA, 151 W. 19th Street, 9th floor, New York, NY 10011. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. In Romero's Name Deborah Huntington...
...government, it seems to me that statements of this sort in a publication such as yours are particularly unfortunate...
...Perhaps Doggett simply intended to report Alan Garcia's statements on the matter, but it reads as though it is her own statement...
...James R.Brockman, S.J...
...Given the importance of both men, a more balanced picture is needed...
...In the context of the general attacks on Cuba, Nicaragua and the Latin American Left by both the press and the U.S...
...Perhaps more than anyone, the Cubans understand the constraints of geopolitics in the real world...
...I would think it might be argued that even under those circumstances Cuba should not join the cessation of payments...
...We might speculate further on what the appropriate action for the Cuban government would be if a Latin American debtors' cartel were to be formed and organized cessation of payments-in whole or in part-were initiated...
...We also have some debts with a group of Western banks who lent to us challenging the pressures of the U.S...
...Medellin had added: "whether the tyranny proceeds from one person or from evidently unjust structures...
...While I agree that Castro has been "rather vague on exactly what should be done," he has repeatedly stressed the theme of safety and strength in numbers...
...And when asked by Business Week what he thought of Castro's debt intiatives, Garcia replied: "Cuba is the country that most promptly pays its debt to Western countries and probably promptly pays its debt with the Soviet Union, although we don't know how...
...Cuba's debt, like Cuba's economy, is a very special case-as MacEwan points out well-and warrants further study...
...The statement that Romero said mass in some of the occupied churches needs clarification...
...We have enough anti-communism being thrown at us without contributing inadvertently or otherwise to the process...
...For the record I would like to point out a few mistakes...
...The pope's addresses in Mexico strongly urging social justice also had considerable effect in the assembly hall at Puebla...
...I thought she did a good job of explaining the current evolution of the debt crisis...
...In his third and fourth pastoral letters, he repeated the traditional moral theology on violence, which details the conditions under which force may be used in legitimate defense: force must be the only means possible that remains, and it must be proportionate to the violence being resisted and the rights being defended...
...Then, when the debtors got themselves organized in the manner that their creditors have long been organized, meaningful action could begin...
...In Romero's Name Deborah Huntington and NACLA have produced an impressive description of the recent history of the Catholic Church in Latin America in the September/October issue...
...Romero was careful to respect the right of the people, including politically committed Christians, to decide for themselves what actions they should take in the political realm...
...I especially learned a lot from "Visions of the Kingdom-The Latin American Church in Conflict...
...Addressing the UN General Assembly in September, Peru's new president said, "We do not adopt spectacular positions, counselling nonpayment while punctually repaying one part of the world and repaying with strategic sovereignty a substantial debt [to the other part of the world...
...He followed very closely a statement of Pope Paul VI's encyclical Populorum Progressio (The Development of Peoples) that the Medellin bishops' conference had repeated: an insurrection could be justified "in the very exceptional case of evident and longstanding tyranny that seriously violates personal rights and dangerously harms the common good of the country...
...The article states that Castro is talking of "an entire bloc of nations acting in concert...
...Paul's 1975 apostolic exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi (Proclaiming the Gospel) was a green light to liberationist pastoral activity and a vademecum for Oscar Romero, who quoted it frequently in his sermons and writings...
...In the case of Cuba, not one cent was lost [to capital flight], not one cent robbed...
...Arthur MacEwan Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Boston Martha Doggett responds: A careful reading of the sentence on Castro's alleged hypocrisy shows that the accusation is indeed Alan Garcia's...
...One could not argue that this process was the same in Cuba...
...So far, at least, the Cubans have handled their debt problems (I am referring only to the debt in hard currency...
...While I agree that Cuba has not paid its debt with hunger, some economists do link the hikes in consumer prices in the early 1980s to the country's effort to "build-down" the debt...
...With Cuba, the case is different...
...And it was John Paul II who told the bishops at Puebla to take Evangelii Nuntiandi and Medellin as their guides...
...Rather, he was careful not to do so...
...To my knowledge, he has never suggested that any single Latin American government, acting alone, should refuse to pay its debts...
...In particular, I wish to correct errors about Archbishop Oscar Romero, since my biography of him is cited...
...In any case, all this is speculation...
...Second, the argument against paying the debt would seem to me to be based on the fact that the debt was pushed on Latin America, both in the long run by its dependence in the international system and in the short run by the banks and international agencies...
...otherwise, Puebla might have been very different...
...It is not correct that Archbishop Romero affirmed in his homilies "that the conditions existed for legitimate insurrection...
...Since] part of our debt is also with Third World countries, with Argentina and Mexico, we feel we have a moral responsibility to pay...
...I am aware that he once said a funeral mass for victims of repression in the cathedral while it was occupied in protest, but he also frequently protested to the popular organizations at their seizures of churches and condemned the occupations in his public sermons...
...The sort of gratuitous and baseless statement in Doggett's otherwise good article, however, seems to me a form of low journalism...
...While I know of no occasion when Castro has directly addressed the issue of Cuba's role in a possible cartel, he did tell Fortune in September that "Ours is one of the few countries that can and must repay its hard-currency debts...
...the debt to the Soviets is another matter) without any severe hardships...
...So in a way they helped us break the blockade...
...First, Castro has argued that the debt cannot be paid, or at least that it cannot be paid without extreme and unacceptable hardship...
...She only sets out the theological principle...
...He added: "The Church is not the one to say when is the moment for insurrection...
...Paul's 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio was an important step from Vatican Council II to the Medellin conference...
...I think that this has happened with the portraits of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II...
...Insofar as sacrifices have been made, they have not been thrust upon the poorest segments of the population, and, in fact, the Cuban economy has continued to expand throughout the 1980s...
...I also liked Martha Doggett's November/December piece, "Too Little, Too Late-A Debt Balance Sheet...
...When asked specifically by Business Week about this "contradiction," Castro replied: "There is no contradiction in this...
...In numerous talks and interviews he has said that if any one or a couple of nations were to repudiate, other debtors would surely follow their example...
...This charge of hypocrisy against Castro seems to me to be totally without foundation...
...In his first homily after the October 15, 1979 military coup Romero did give his opinion-after the fact-that the coup had fulfilled the conditions for a legitimate insurrection...
...While Castro is usually rather vague on exactly what should be done and exactly how it should be done, I think it is relatively clear that his position would support a "debtors' cartel" of some sort...
...I was bothered, however, by [. .. ] the statement that Fidel Castro is acting in a hypocritical manner because he is saying that Latin American governments should not/cannot pay their debts while at the same time Cuba is paying its own debts...
...My time was well spent...
...I find no reference to any of this in the article, and the omission produces a one-sided portrait of both men...
...MacEwan's criticism does not refute the fact that Cuba does meet its Western obligations while encouraging a region-wide repudiation...
...While it may be true that the Vatican and L'Osservatore Romano did not note the first anniversary of Romero's death, it is only fair to mention that John Paul II did note the second anniversary, saying in his weekly Angelus message on March 21, 1982, that Romero "gave his life for the Church and for the people of his beloved country...
...In an article that covers so much ground, it is inevitable, no doubt, that a complex reality should come out more simple than it is...
...Until then it is hardly hypocritical for Castro, or any other national leader, to decline to have his government go it alone...
...Several of your recent articles have been informative, interesting and useful...
...I know of nowhere that Castro has indicated what Cuba would do under these hypothetical circumstances...
...Obviously there is nothing wrong with criticizing Castro or the Cuban government...
...During the break between semesters I had some time to catch up on reading, and I devoted a good part of this time to the issues of Report on the Americas that had been accumulating...
...While not totally insulated from international capitalism, Cuba is surely not hooked in to the same degree as most of Latin America...
...It was the Church's task to help them form their consciences in light of the gospel, not to decide for them...
...Cincinnati, OH Dogged Anti-Communism...
...The argument for stopping payments is based on premises that do not apply in the case of Cuba...
...But in that same October 21 homily he rejected a call that some of the popular organizations were making for an insurrection against the new government, because, he said, "insurrection is licit only when reasonable means have been exhausted...
...That seems to me to recognize him as a Christian martyr...
Vol. 20 • January 1986 • No. 1
