Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

CHOMSKY ON ANARCHISM
Cubans have long been berated for the same kinds of backwardness.
Outrage peaked during the Pan-American games held in the United States,
when Cuban athletes failed to succumb to a huge propaganda campaign to
induce them to defect, including lavish financial offers to become professionals;
they felt a commitment to their COUntry and its people, they told reponers.
Fury knew few bounds over the devastating impact of Communist brainwashing
and Marxist doctrine.
Fonunately, Americans are protected from the fact that even under the conditions
of poverty imposed by US economic warfare, Cubans still refuse to
accept dollars for domestic service, so visitors repon, not wanting to be "your
slave." Nor are they likely to be subjected to the results of a 1994 Gallup poll,
considered to be [he first independent and scientific survey, published in [he
Miami Spanish-language press but apparently not elsewhere: that 88 percent
said they were "proud of being Cuban" and 58 percent that "the revolution's
successes outstrip its failures," 69 percent identified themselves as "revolutionaries"
(but only 21 percent as "Communist" or "socialist"), 76 percent said
they were "satisfied with their personal life," and 3 percem said that "political
problems" were the key problems facing the country.
If such Communist atrocities were to be known, it might be necessary to
nuke Havana instead of simply trying to kill as many people as possible from
starvation and disease to bring "democracy." That became the new pretext for
strangling Cuba after the fall of the Berlin wall, the ideological institutions not
missing a beat as they shifted gears. No longer was Cuba an agent of the
Kremlin, bent on taking over Latin America and conquering the United States,
trembling in terror. The lies of30 years can be quietly shelved: terror and economic
warfare have always been an attempt to bring democracy, in the revised
standard version. Therefore we must tighten the embargo that "has contributed
to an increase in hunger, illness, death and to one of the world's largest
neurological epidemics in the past century," according to health expens writing
in US medical journals in October 1994. The author of one says, "Well,
the fact is that we are killing people," by denying them food and medicines,
and equipment for manufacturing their own medical products.
Clinton's "Cuban Democracy Act"-which President Bush at first vetoed
because it was so transparently in violation of international law, and then
signed when he was outflanked from the right by Clinton during the election
campaign-cut off trade by US subsidiaries abroad, 90 percent of it food,
medicine and medical equipment. That contribution to democracy helped to
bring about a considerable decline in Cuban health standards, an increase in
mortality rates, and "the most alarming public health crisis in Cuba in recent
memory," a neurological disease that had last been observed in tropical prison
camps in Southeast Asia in World War II, according to the former chief of
neuro-epidemiology at the National Institute of Health, the author of one of
the anicles. To illustrate the effects, a Columbia University Professor of
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