April 15 - 17, 2011
Poof Dreams Into Profits
Daydreaming of Cuba for Dollars
By SAUL LANDAU and NELSON P. VALDES
Almost fifty years after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the university
professor tuned in to his i-Pod radio. A news bulletin interrupted "It's
Make Believe Ballroom Time" to announce an El Paso jury had acquitted
Luis Posada Carriles, well-known terrorist, on 9 counts of lying on his
immigration application.
The University of Miami scholar shrugged at the news. Although Posada in
some circles was known as the Hemisphere's Osama bin Laden, the
professor and colleagues focused on their research agenda. None even
asked if some of the Posada trial "observers" (who looked like extras on
the Sopranos) might have intimidated the Texas jury; or even wondered
why the government presented evidence that Posada bombed an airliner
with 73 people on board (all died) and then charged him only with lying.
The academics daunting challenge was figuring out new ways to get
taxpayers' money as Republicans slash precious services.
The professors understood that few academicians have received millions
in grants for their scholarly invention: the concept of "strengthening
the civil society in Cuba." Until now they had finessed the very meaning
of Cuban civil society by using that phrase as a euphemism for those who
took orders and money from US Interests Section officials in Havana.
That's the State Department's working definition of civil society. Who
in Washington cares Cuba's civil society has developed over centuries.
That's the past and not helpful for US policy.
Indeed, Washington would like to erase that past in which it
unsuccessfully (key word) tried everything short of a direct armed
invasion of the island to dislodge the disobedient Castro brothers:
after the Bay of Pigs, it tightened the ad hoc embargo and eventually
made into law. It waged psychological war, and backed wholesale
terrorist attacks and assassination attempts.
As scholars plotted to get government grants, in Little Havana, some
semi-retired assassins returned from their visits to proctologists to
hail the acquitted hero and also fabled FBI and CIA informer (on his
fellow plotters). None seemed to care about declassified CIA and FBI
cables showing Posada ratted out his fellow bombers. No one's perfect.
They also praised his lawyer who prolonged the trial into an 11-week
affair and thus earned his fee on which he can now retire.
In recent decades, however, State Department strategy has manufactured –
with the scholars' help – a civil society despite the fact that one
already existed, except in the minds of State Department bureaucrats.
Magical unrealism? The few academics who coined the notion have since
grown accustomed to better life styles coincident with receiving large
government grants and donations from a noted booze company.
The history and development of Cuban society certainly merits study, but
the scholars and their grant-givers have little or no interest in the
real Cuba. The money-making research agenda in the handful of
universities and research centers, gets determined by goals of US
policy, which have for fifty two years centered around the destruction
of the Cuban revolution.
The academics' objective -- note the word – was to tap into the
government's desires (and its Treasury) to have invented leaders for the
newly-invented "civil society." The US government never had an interest
in the real Cuba and since there's little grant money or donations from
rum producers available for studying the real Cuba, the finest (meaning
largest grant recipients) Cuba scholars produce the equivalent of sci fi
works and label them "scholarship."
The scholars' inventiveness doesn't preclude other areas of endeavor. In
decades past entrepreneurs have concocted independent associations for
doctors, libraries that depend on US money and supply and contain few
books and even free trade unions. AFL-CIO leaders fully supported them
even though they had no dues-paying members. A group of "independent
journalists" organized by US diplomats in Havana wrote stories the US
government helped them publish. Coincidentally, all their filings
contained negative judgments of Cuba's system and government. In 2003,
when some of these "journalists" got busted for receiving money, goods
and services from a foreign government (US), Nestor Baguer, one of the
more coherent writers in the group, revealed himself as a Cuban state
security agent. At the trial of some of his erstwhile colleagues, the
Cuban prosecutor used documents provided by Baguer and other moles to
prove the accused had received services from US diplomats in Havana.
These entrepreneurial members of the academic community devised their
version of what the US government would like Cuba to look like – now and
in the future. This Cuba bears no relation to reality, but it does
provide a way to spend taxpayers' money as miraculously, Congress enacts
legislation to authorize these expenditures while cutting teachers and
closing clinics. The scholars also attract anti-Castro companies to
donate money to these daydreaming projects.
One Cuban scholar produced the ultimate reverie: Fernando Henrique
Cardoso refers to that "poof moment - Jorge I. Dominguez' vivid phrase -
when the current regime will no longer exist." Several self-proclaimed
"leading" Cuba scholars in the US even contributed to a book that begins
with that premise. (http://marifeliperez-stable.com/books/) That
a-historical moment has no preconditions, institutions, history, context
or real live humans. As grade school kids say: "shit happens."
No scholar living in Cuba gets invited to these "forecasting" sessions.
These exclusive professors have converted poof dreams into profits;
moreover; they remain oblivious to the Miami mobs cheering the
triumphant return of Luis Posada Carriles -- whom FBI agents
affectionately call that "rat-fink, old fart, bomber."
Saul Landau's WILL THE REAL TERRORIST PLEASE STAND UP opens at San
Francisco's Brava Theater on April 16.
Nelson Valdes is Professor Emeritus, University of New Mexico
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