Cuba as a Testing Ground

by Servando González

The following paper is part of a larger study in a collection of articles and academic papers to be published early next year under the title The New World dis-Order.I suggest that before reading this article the reader take a look at these pages: AUTHOR

Pro-Castroists who visit Cuba refuse to see the unavoidable reality of Castroism. Hundreds of American gays were visiting Cuba at the very same time Castro was imprisoning effeminate homosexuals and sending them to the infamous UMAPs, but they saw nothing, heard nothing, and ignored what they could not avoid knowing. Many American intellectuals have been visiting Cuba while Castro is sending Cuban writers, artists and poets to prison, but they prefer to believe the stories concocted by the jailers and torturers. Many politically correct tenured radicals have been visiting the Island under the tenuous cover of academic research, refusing to see that Castro, an old, white rich male, has created in Cuba the most racist, sexist, homophobic, phallocentric and logocentric society in the Western hemisphere,1 but they keep hiding the fact from their students while proceeding with the deconstruction of Western thought. Many leftist American Jews know that Castro harasses the Cuban Jews and that the incidents which occurred in Cuba during the Mariel exodus were reminiscent of the early persecutions of the Jews in Nazi Germany, but they prefer to change the subject. Most American feminists love Castro, but they prefer to ignore Castro's discrimination and crimes against women. Many black Americans were visiting Cuba to enjoy the marvels of a discrimination-free society, but, after they discovered that the facts were quite different from the myth, they managed to keep the secret to themselves. Today, the new American Uncle Toms keep traveling to Cuba to pay their respects to their beloved white slavemaster. Many religious organizations claim that they are helping the Cuban people to overcome the American embargo, but the result is that they actually have joined Castro in his efforts to destroy religious freedom in Cuba.

Over the years these people have shown a high capacity for deception and especially for self-deception. As the Spanish saying goes, there are none so blind as those who will not see.2 But there is the possibility that the real explanation for these people's behavior would be even more worrisome: they see exactly what is happening to Cuba and the Cuban people, and they are delighted,3 because to them Castro's Cuba is a sign of things to come; a successful example of the New World Order.4

Castro has killed a large part of the Cuban people, destroyed morally5 and materially the ones who have managed to survive his wrath, and has devastated the country.6 On the other hand, perhaps Castro's ultimate goal has always been the destruction of Cuba and its people.7

As we saw above, Cuban society was so close to the American one that, since the early fifties, many American marketing companies were using the Island as a probing ground to test their products before launching them in the U.S. Seemingly, the use of Cuba as a testing ground for American products, services and ideas, did not end when Castro took power in 1959. There is the possibility that Castro's Cuba is a large scale experiment in social engineering, a test run of the New World Order8 before its worldwide implementation.9 This perhaps explains why some people at the State Department, the CIA, and at the highest levels of the American society, helped Castro to come to power in Cuba. It may also explain why President Kennedy changed the original invasion plans and sent the Cuban patriots to die at the Bay of Pigs and why Castro, unchallenged by the U. S., has been in power in Cuba for more than forty years creating havoc all around the world.

Though the phrase New World Order became popular in the U.S. after President Bush mentioned it twice in his State of the Union Address on January 29, 1991,10 the idea is not new. In its twelfth thesis, the Humanist Manifesto II, published in 1973, states,

We deplore the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds. We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move toward the building of a world community in which all sectors of the human family can participate. Thus we look to the development of a system of world law and a world order based upon transnational federal government. This would appreciate cultural pluralism and diversity. It would not exclude pride in national origins and accomplishments nor the handling of regional problems on a regional basis. Human progress, however, can no longer be achieved by focusing on one section of the world, Western or Eastern, developed or underdeveloped. For the first time in human history, no part of humankind can be isolated from any other. Each person's future is in some way linked to all. We thus reaffirm a commitment to the building of world community, at the same time recognizing that this commits us to some hard choices.11

In 1995 Castro visited the U.S. to address the U.N General Assembly during its 50th anniversary celebration. He was the guest of honor at the Rockefeller family mansion in New York. To avoid confrontation with protesters, the invitation was moved to the Pratt House, headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations, on East 68th Street in Manhattan. There Castro was met by retired Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller and the best and the brightest of the internationalist crowd.12

The Council on Foreign Relations, the brainchild of the Rockefellers, is probably the major force behind the creation and implementation of the New World Order.13 The C F R is currently working frantically to help prepare for a "peaceful, democratic transition after Castro"CFR lingo for "Castroism after Castro."14

There are several tell-tale signs characterizing the New Age/New World Order. An important economic feature of the New World Order is sustainable development, a nebulous term used by the New World Order internationalists. Though it is almost impossible to find a definition of sustainable development, at least we have one of what is not sustainable. In a UN Conference on Environment and Development report of August, 1991, Maurice Strong15 wrote,

It is clear that current life styles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil foods, appliances, home and work place air conditioning,16 suburban housing are not sustainable. . . . A shift is necessary toward life-styles less geared to environmental damaging consumption patterns

Strong's idea of sustainable development closely depicts Cuba after 44 years of Castroism. But Maurice Strong is not an isolated case.

Recently, World Bank President James Wolfensohn, a New Ager who has "greened" the Bank, praised Castro for doing "a great job" in providing for the social welfare of the Cuban people. The Bank's 2001 edition of World Development Indicators shows Cuba topping virtually all other poor countries in health and education statistics.17 Wolfensohm pointed to Cuba as a model to follow. The World Bank was created in 1944, but in 1968 Robert McNamara became its president and he turned it into a New Age/New World Order tool. Wolfensohn is a former board member of the Rockefeller Foundation and a close friend of Maurice Strong.

Another internationalist who believes that Castro's Cuba is the model to follow is United Nations Secretary general Kofi Annan. During an April 2000 summit in Havana, Mr. Annan insisted that Castro's regime has "set an example we can all learn from."

In 1980 the World Health Organization's (WHO) representative in Cuba stated that "there is no question that Cuba has the best health statistics in Latin America." In 1988 WHO presented Fidel Castro with its "Health for All" award in recognition of Cuba reaching all the WHO health goals set for developing countries to achieve by 2000. In 1990 UNICEF published a report on the "State of the World's Children," which concluded that "Cuba is the only [Latin American] country on a par with developed nations" with regard to infant mortality rates.

More redcently, the UN Human Development Report 2003which ranks countries according to life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real incomeplaces Cuba in the 52nd position out of 175 countries, in the group ot countries with hight human development. Of its closest neighbors, Haiti ranks 150th, the Dominican Republic 94th, Grenada 93rd and Jamaica 78th

That the UN idea of development is a peculiar one, to say the lesast, was made clear some time ago by Juan Valdés,18 head of the Latin American Department of the Cuban Center of American Studies, most likely acting as a mouthpiece for Castro, explained in some detail the philosophy of the Cuban misery specialist.19 According to him, the goal of the Cuban system is not to give the same things capitalism gives; more houses, more cars, more suits, more videocassettes, but to place the people on the same egalitarian level. In that sense, Valdés added, the rationing card [in force since 1962] should not be seen as a fault of Cuba's economic system, but as a political and economic success. The reason for this is that rationing "places the population at the same subsistence level, unifying them in that egalitarian base."20

In another publication, Valdés explains in detail Cuba's goal, "we are never going to have a consumer society." Then, after making clear that this is "a Cuban position that has found opposition inside the socialist camp," Valdés added, "We believe that socialism should not be oriented toward giving [the people] the same things capitalism gives; more houses, more cars, more clothes, more video recorders."21

Valdés' statement, made before he was purged from the CAS, is further proof that Castroism has nothing to do with Marxism or communism. Due to its intrinsic faults, communism was a social and economic failure. Nevertheless, the communists' goal was never the destruction of their countries. Soviet leaders, particularly Nikita Khrushchev, always tried to make the Soviet Union an economically advanced country. Not even Stalin would have uttered such statement as Valdés'. But what we are witnessing in Cuba today is not a failure product of unsound policies, but the success of the deliberately planned destruction of a country and its people.

According to Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian ex-Catholic priest who created a sort of New Age Liberation Theology, the true goal is not a socialism of abundance, but a socialism of poverty. Castro's Cuba is the materialization of Boff's dream. No wonder he and his buddy Frei Betto see in Cuba the signs of the kingdom of God.22 Looking ahead to Elian's life in Castro's Cuba, CBS correspondent Randall Pinkston affirmed that, though Cubans are not free to speak, they appear untroubled by the lack of modern conveniences. In small cities like the once prosperous Cárdenas, Elián's home town, thanks to 40 years of Castroism there is no running water indoors, there are open drainages, and taxis have metamorphosed into horse drawn carts.


Conclusion

If people as powerful and influential as Maurice Strong, James Wolfensohn, Kofi Annan, Federico Mayor, and the Rockefellers --just to mention a few of the "Cuba-as-a-model-to-follow" crowd--, the real force behind what they call the New World Order, see Castro's Cuba as a model society which everybody must copy, this should be a motive of concern for the whole world.

NOTES:

1 . That is, if one is to follow their own politically correct definition of a racist, sexist, homophobic, phallocentric and logocentric society, terms that ultimately are but covert expressions of American cultural imperialism of the Left. It seems, however, that the politically correct tenured radicals apply these hate terms only to the bad guys, and they are convinced that Castro is one of the good guys.

2 . The unifying thread linking together all these Castro-lovers is that they are actually America-haters. Their hatred for the United States of America, which they see as an oppressive, racist, homophobic, sexist, imperialist society, is evidenced in their words and actions. This profound hatred, which peaked in the 1960s, has become an important part of the American leftist and liberal ideology. Their support for Castro is not based on anything that he has achieved in Cuba, which is not much, but only in the apparent fact that he has successfully defied the United States. However, if growing suspicions among some intelligence analysts and ex-Castro associates concerning the Maximum Leader's true allegiances some day happen to be true, it may be that these America-haters/Castro-lovers have been victims of a false flag recruiting (a technique by which an informant, defector in place or agent is recruited through the disguise of telling him he will be working for the "good guys"another country or service different from the one who is actually making the recruitment), unwittingly working for what they hate most. In the field of intelligence and espionage things are seldom as they seem. At any rate, Fidel Castro has a long record of deceiving everybody, including (or perhaps particularly) his friends. There is another link, though. Most of the America-haters I have mentioned above loosely belong to what Peter Metzger calls "the coercive utopians," whose ultimate goal is to lower the American standard of living, destroy our democratic institutions, and demolish U.S. national independence. See, "The Coercive Utopians," paper presented at the National Meeting of the American College of Nuclear Medicine, April 28, 1978 (updated June 1979). Public Service Co. of Colorado, Denver, Colorado, p. 14. Most of the coercive utopians, and Castro is obviously one of them, believe that modern capitalist society is deeply flawed and intrinsically evil. Therefore, the U.S., probably the best example of a developed capitalist society in the world, is seen by them as the main enemy. At the same time they see Cuba as a model of the society they have in mind for America. To the coercive utopians Cuba is the symbol of everything they wanted but they never could have. Cuba is the last holdout, the last hope, the last opportunity. But the Cuba they see is only a figment of their imagination; it has nothing to do with the real Cuba under the Castroist rule. As authors Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac put it:

The glorification of socialized Third World poverty reflects the romanticism of the utopians. Rural communal life, the outward show of worker participation in workplace assemblies, the rhetoric of egalitarianism, the block level of civic control which is seen as an expression of neighborhood solidarity and self-governance, the very absence of consumer goods, make these societies immensely appealing. That their chief distinguishing characteristic is the desire of vast numbers of their citizens to leave at almost any price does not daunt the utopians. The Coercive Utopians (Chicago: Regnery, 1983), p. 3.

3 . See, i.e., Ramón Ferreira, "La miseria cubana está de moda," El Nuevo Herald, March 8, 2001. According to Ferreira, to these people Cuba's misery "is cool."

4 . For example,California New Agers are exhilarated about the possibility of continuous power black-outs all over the state. No wonder they are so happy when they travel to Cuba: during the last 30 years black-outs have been a common occurrence in Castro's Cuba.

5 . Christopher Hunt, an American writer who visited Cuba in 1996, wrote that, during his grass-roots journey from Havana to Santiago to Bayamo to Holguín to Camagüey to Sancti Spíritus to Santa Clara to Varadero, what he left behind was a trail of bribe-takers, prostitutes, would-be pimps, black marketeers, bootleggers, bolita gamblers, money-changers, sex tourists, snitches and men who asked him for his socks. See Orlando Alomá, "In Fidel's Footsteps: A Tourist Views Cuba," The Miami Herald, January 11, 1998.

6 . Some novels and short stories written by Cuban authors describe the destruction of Cuba and its people much better than any scholarly work. See, among others, José Antonio Ponte, In the Cold of the Malecón (San Francisco: City Lights, 2000); Daína Chaviano, El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (Barcelona: Planeta, 1998); Mirta Valdés, ed., Cubana: Contemporary Fiction by Cuban Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); and Zoe Valdés, La nada cotidiana (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1997). For a perceptive description of the day-to-day misery of the average Cuban, see Corinne Cumerlato and Denis Rousseau, L'Ille du docteur Castro (Paris: Editions Stock, 2000); also Catherine Moses, Real Life in Castro's Cuba (Wilmington, Delaware: SR Books, 2000)

A recent visitor to Cuba wrote his impressions, "I was appalled by what I saw in Cuba. When you walk the streets you see faces that are as devastated as the buildings. People look depressed, beaten down. They stare into the distance, as if in trance, as they wait for buses or in endless food lines, or when they sit on the sea wall, staring intently toward the horizon, toward Miami." Tony Mendoza, "Cuba Today: Instant Antiquity," The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 24, 1997, pp. B8-B9. The initial sequences of Win Wender's documentary film Buenavista Social Club shows images closely similar to the ones described by Mendoza.

7 . A Cuban woman said with tears in her eyes, "I don't know why Fidel hates us so much. Why does he just keep trying to crush us?," Catherine Moses, op. cit., p. 84.

8 . The evidence indicates that the New World Order is but a refurbished version of Nazism. The strong ideological similarity between the Nazi and the New Age movements is because Nazism was an early version of the New Age movement. Hitler himself was a believer in occultism and oriental religions, he was a "vegie," and the Nazis believed that mother earth was a living organism and pioneered the ecological movement. See, i.e., Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons From the German Experience (San Francisco: AK Press, 1995); also Luc Perry, The New Ecological Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Though fascism is always associated with nationalism, it seems that a new variety of fascism is emerging: international socialism, that is, fascism on a global scale controlled by transnational corporations with the United Nations as its law enforcer. International socialists, however, are not using the traditional coup d'état tactics traditional fascists have customarily used to grab power, but the more subtle strategy developed by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.

9 . For example, political correctness, and important component of the New World Order, was field-tested in Castro's Cuba many years before its implementation in American colleges and universities. Like their American counterparts, the politically correct Cubans pioneered the total lack of a sense of humor that characterizes political correctness.

10 . "What is at stake is more than one small country; it is a big idea: a New World Order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankindpeace and security, freedom, and the rule of law." . . . "The world can, therefore, seize this opportunity to fulfill the long-held promise of a New World Order, where brutality will go unrewarded and aggression will meet collective resistance." [emphasis added]

11 . American Humanist Association, Humanist Manifesto II, 1973 (HMII).

12 . Miguel A. Faría, Jr., "In Bed With Castro," NewsMax.com, June 6, 2000.

13 . The Rockefellers had a key role not only in the creation of the CFR, but also in the creation of the United Nations, the Bilderbergers, and the Trilateral Commission, all strong advocates of the New World Order. For an eye-opening analysis of the CFR see, William Blase, "The Council on Foreign Relations and the New World Order," www,newnetizen.com/globalelite/cfrandnwo.htm. The web is a major source of information on this subject. Of course, if you mention this in "serious circles" you will immediately be labelled as a "conspiracy nut." As an interesting detail I would add that William Wieland, who played an important role in bringing Castro to power, was a protegé of Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles, an important member of the CFR. Herbert Matthews, the New York Times journalist who catapulted Castro to the world, was a CFR member. Important media members of the CFR are Dan rather, Barbara Walters, Tom Brockaw and Mort Zuckerman.

14 . See, i.e., Irving Louis Horowitz, "An Appeasement Policy for Castro's Cuba?," The Miami Herald, December 6, 2000. In another article, professor Horowitz states that the CFR has become "the fulcrum and spearhead of the Cuba Lobbythose seeking the establishment of normal diplomatic and social relations with Communist Cuba" "Humanitarian Capitulation: U.S.-Cuba Relations According to the Council on Foreign Relations," Center for a Free Cuba, www.cubacenter.org/media/archives/2000/fall/humanitarian.html.

15 . Rockefeller wrote the foreword and Strong wrote the introduction for the Trilateral Commission recently published book Beyond Interdependence: The Meshing of the World's Economy and the Earth's Ecology.

16 . Of course, this does not apply to them. A journalist who attended the Earth Summit chaired by Strong, noticed that the whole conference site had air conditioning blasting while all the doors were open. See "U.N to Rule Over America?: Geoff Metcalf Interviews Journalist, Author William Jasper on World Tyranny," WorldNetDaily, July 15, 2001.

17 . Jim Lobe, "Learn From Cuba: World Bank Says," Inter Press Service Finance, April 30, 2001.

18 . Not related to the Colombian coffee guy :-)

19 . The philosophy of the Cuban misery specialist is very close to the philosophy of his American New Age counterparts. For example, the true purpose of the creation of commuter lanes in California's highways was not to optimize traffic, but to annoy drivers and eventually discourage them from driving.

20 . "1917-1987: Socialismo em Debate," Instituto Cajamar, Sao Paulo, 1988, pp. 133-134. Valdés also quoted in Gonzalo Guimaraens, "Cuba comunista: el miserabilismo como escuela de ateísmo," Diario Las Américas, April 7, 2001.

21 . Ibid., p. 133.

22 . Ibid.

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