Tricky Ricky has some nerve

Alarcon is a joke

Earlier today, I dismissed a French academic's attack on Reporters Without Borders, and simultaneous defense of the Castro dictatorship, as the work of an idiot. Admittedly, my retort was not too sophisticated, but the piece was not worth much more of time or energy than that.

About the same time, The Nation, one of the bastions of the American left, posted an opinion column by Washington editor David Corn, who similarly dismisses Cuban parliament speaker Ricardo Alarcon's recent commentary on C. Wright Mills, the author of "Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba," a book published in the early 1960s considered sympathetic to Fidel Castro and his revolution.

Corn writes:

Alarcon decries the FBI for having attempted to undermine Mills' book. The Bureau unsuccessfully tried, Alarcon notes, to persuade Mills' publisher to put out a competing book criticizing the Cuban revolution. The FBI was spying on Mills at this time, and Mills, according to FBI files, believed he might be targeted for assassination by the FBI or another American agency. "Mills's friends," Alarcon writes, "recall that he was concerned not only for himself but for his family, and that he had indeed acquired a handgun, which he even kept next to his bed while he slept." After Mills suffered a heart attack, Castro invited him to recuperate in Cuba. Alarcon's narrative: while the FBI chased Mills, Castro sought to help the noble intellectual. "C. Wright Mills paid a high price for his passionate love of truth," Alarcon declares.

Alarcon's hypocrisy, Corn adds, is overwhelming.

Mills was hounded for challenging the conventional wisdom of his day. But Alarcon's concern for the plight of this one author is comical -- in a dark fashion -- for he heads a government that does not allow its citizens to challenge openly the conventional wisdom of the Castro regime. There is no free press in Alarcon's country, no freedom of expression. There is no "passionate love of truth" among the rulers of Cuba. Alarcon is crying for Mills, while his government does even worse to Cuban writers than the FBI did to Mills. (emphasis added)

Corn concludes:

Imagine a Cuban who wants to write and publish a Cuban version of "The Power Elite" (ed note: another book by Mills). That person would be locked up in a modern-day dungeon by Alarcon and his comrades. Alarcon, thus, has no standing to bemoan the harassment of Mills or to pontificate about the glories of pursuing establishment-defying truths. (Stating the obvious about the gross absence of political and human rights within Cuba should not be equated with support for the economic embargo maintained by the Bush administration against Cuba. The wrongs of each side do not justify the other.)

"Today," Alarcon writes, "Cuba forges a path to craft its own unique socialist system, rooted on its own historical experience and with the active participation of its people." Not the active participation of anyone who wants to write or report news and ideas not sanctioned by Alarcon and his colleagues. It takes nerve for a person who runs one of the ten most censored countries to praise a pioneering and influential free thinker. That's why Alarcon's accolade for Mills is best read as farce. (emphasis added)

Read the whole thing at Corn's blog.