I wanted to blog something about Cuba last week, but frankly, I was too stunned. "Castro-supporting leftist" is one of those stereotypes that I doubted could be found in the wild any more--until Castro stepped down and the Castro apologists crawled out from under their rocks. "Okay, dictatorship bad, but--universal health care! And he really stood up to Uncle Sam, which is, like, totally awesome!"
Leave aside the extreme dubiousness of the proposition that Castro has, in fact, made his countrymen better off. This is like listening to those conservatives one occasionally encounters in the darker corners of the movement who drop gems such as "Well, I don't excuse Pinochet, but Chile wouldn't have a privatized social security system without him." I've never managed a snappy comeback to this because my jaw is always too firmly glued to the floor. Chile's Social Security system is really pretty great. But it's not so fantastic that it's worth purchasing via a reign of terror. Neither is universal health care--particularly when the free clinics are short of medicine and equipment, making them worth about what you pay for their services.
Even more bizarre were arguments along the lines of "Well, Cuba only has about a hundred political prisoners . . . " Only? That's a lot of prisoners of conscience for a small island nation. Moreover, it fundamentally misunderstands the problem with dictatorship. The Cuban government doesn't need to use force to punish any but the most glaring and vocal dissenters, because it has widespread powers of economic coercion. As a Russian co-worker once told me, "Americans have a silly idea about communism. It wasn't that if you told a joke about Brezhnev, the secret police would arrest you--it was that you'd lose your job. And in Russia, there were no other jobs." When the government controls your paycheck, your housing, and your ration card, it doesn't need to put you in jail; you are in jail.
Nor is it much of an excuse that Bautista was awful; dictatorships almost never follow stable governments with sensible leaders who command the support of the majority of the population. Allende was a disaster who was rapidly driving his country down the road to economic ruin--and yet, still not a good reason to staff up the secret police and make his supporters disappear. There are some things for which there is no excuse. Pinochet's regime was one of them. Castro's is another.
At any rate, I was reminded to deliver this rant by Mahalanobis, which has a good post on life in Havana.
"When the government controls your paycheck, your housing, and your ration card, it doesn't need to put you in jail; you are in jail."
MM,
How is that different, if it is, from the state of affairs here, in the US?
Did Hillary Clinton endorse her husband's decision to send escaped slave Elian Gonzalez back to his masters? Remember, at the time Cuban Foreign Minister Perez Roque said that Elian was "property of the [Cuban] state."
It's all part of the politics-as-religion meme that infects the left once you get farther away from the moderate center. Castro had the correct religious label (socilistic left-wing) and unimpeachable doctrine (numerous state-run services beginning with socialized healthcare, preening opposition to western-style democracy and capitalism). Therefore, his excesses in exercise of that faith (lousy quality of services, political repression, extraordinary personal wealth while the nation went imporverished) were just as easliy excused as a die-hard medieval Catholic could defend the righteousness of the pope even while watching his neighbors be looted and burned by agents wielding papal bulls.
At any rate, if one were ever in the mood for cheap entertainment, it was sufficient to confront a left-wing Castrophile with the photographic evidence of Cuba's third-world healthcare and then contrast Castro's personal wealth as reported by Forbes. This was pretty much guaranteed to invoke a full-out Rumplestiltskin charade.
You said: "Chile's Social Security system is really pretty great."
It is indeed really great - for the five or six companies that manage it. For the population, though, it's wretched. When you retire, the amount you managed to pay into the system (plus some interest, like any savings account) is simply tallied up and divided by the number of months you're expected to live, before being paid back to you.
Payments cease the month you were predicted to die, so God help you if you live too long. And what you receive before death is almost inevitably such a small fraction of your working income that you simply can't afford to retire. The number of 70-ish schoolteachers (to cite just one example) still working as a result of this is stunning. Two of my daughter's teachers have died of old age in the last three years!
Chile's AFP system, as it's known, is simply not Social Security. It's no more than a government-mandated forced savings account that uses a slightly different mechanism for calculating interest than banks do. And there's a reason people don't rely on savings accounts to survive retirement.
To those who praise the Chilean example, I would simply ask you this: If the system Pinochet imposed is so good, why did he prevent it from being applied to his own armed forces and police!? These folks still have pay-until-you-die government pensions, which is precisely what Social Security is.
Not to defend a dictator but ...
In his reign of terror, Pinochet killed ~3,000. That's pretty low as oppressive dictators go. It's definitely lower than the death toll that would have resulted under the socialist he replaced, who was more than willing to put into place Cuba-like policies that would have screwed over, if not killed, many more than 3,000.
He also was not able to terrorize in the economic way that you describe in Russia because the economy was much more free.
Yes, Pinochet committed lots of murder. But it is nowhere near the level committed by Castro. Do not compare the two.
There are HUGE differences between Pinochet and Castro or any dictator. Pinochet took a country in very bad shape in a continent full of awful dictatorships and left it with the best standard of living in Latin America.
Pinochet's government was always thought to be a temporary means to recover democracy.During this term, in many ways Chileans had more (civil but not political) freedoms than with prior governments. And once the military government was over, Pinochet ran (and lost) a bid to be the first fully democratic president under the new system (getting 43% of the vote). This new system, under the constitution he enacted and that is still in force, gave unprecedented freedoms to Chileans and is the key to understand why Chile continues to do better than its neighbors and why another Allende or Chavez is very unlikely.
It is true that many abuses took place during the military government in Chile. Most of them are inexcusable (although some people in the USA find ways to justify torture now). But those abuses were concentrated in a very short and violent period of time (a couple of years out of the many that the military were in power) and by rogue elements that over-reacted to the terrorism of the left. And those who committed the crimes are (slowly) paying for them (although none of the terrorist of the 70s and 80s have had to answer for their crimes).
A Chilean in California
There are HUGE differences between Pinochet and Castro or any dictator. Pinochet took a country in very bad shape in a continent full of awful dictatorships and left it with the best standard of living in Latin America.
Pinochet's government was always thought to be a temporary means to recover democracy.During this term, in many ways Chileans had more (civil but not political) freedoms than with prior governments. And once the military government was over, Pinochet ran (and lost) a bid to be the first fully democratic president under the new system (getting 43% of the vote). This new system, under the constitution he enacted and that is still in force, gave unprecedented freedoms to Chileans and is the key to understand why Chile continues to do better than its neighbors and why another Allende or Chavez is very unlikely.
It is true that many abuses took place during the military government in Chile. Most of them are inexcusable (although some people in the USA find ways to justify torture now). But those abuses were concentrated in a very short and violent period of time (a couple of years out of the many that the military were in power) and by rogue elements that over-reacted to the terrorism of the left. And those who committed the crimes are (slowly) paying for them (although none of the terrorist of the 70s and 80s have had to answer for their crimes).
A Chilean in California
"Well, Cuba only has about a hundred political prisoners . . . "
How would he know?
"Castro-supporting leftist" is one of those stereotypes that I doubted could be found in the wild any more
According to the Times: "Harriet Harman, Deputy leader of the Labour Party, says that she believes Fidel Castro to be a "hero of the left".
http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/02/in-an-extraordi.html#comments
So long as no one important believes this...
No amount of economic reasons are enough to justify three thousand dead people without due process and thousands of exiles. The argument that killing people is a necessary evil to rectify a country's direction is so absurdly immoral it's not even wrong.
Spoken like one who's never overthrown a fascist regime.
Rudd-O, it's your moral philosophy that's not even wrong. Oh, it's all fun and games to thump our chests and express indignation about the murder of innocents. Rah, rah, let's go get a Wiesenthal award.
But the hard question remains: *compared to what?* What would have happened if Pinochet hadn't taken over? What if Allende kept on his own murderous reign, including supersecession of the judiciary?
There may very well be a sound argument that a different alternative to violent pro-market revolution was morally superior. But it would have to involve more nuanced reasoning than "killing bad".
A coup is just a civil war that ended quickly, and 3,000 deaths in a civil war is pretty low, but I'm an ugly realist also. I think that many of the comments about Pinochet in the comments underline the differences between him and Castro, but let me summarize. Pinochet took a struggling country and left it better off. Castro took a struggling country and left it worse off.
And Pinochet left sooner than Castro did. Pinochet had his faults, but he showed enough respect for his country that he didn't think that it was his personal fiefdom. I doubt Castro could be accused of that.
This is like listening to those conservatives one occasionally encounters in the darker corners of the movement...
Uh, sure, only in those dark corners.
Those who consider the democratically elected Allende a victim of the US and CIA have examined the historical record in a very superficial manner. Three weeks before the coup, the also democratically elected House of Deputies passed by 81-47 a resolution titled the “Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy.” An excerpt follows.
"5. That it is a fact that the current government of the Republic, from the beginning, has sought to conquer absolute power with the obvious purpose of subjecting all citizens to the strictest political and economic control by the state and, in this manner, fulfilling the goal of establishing a totalitarian system: the absolute opposite of the representative democracy established by the Constitution;
6. That to achieve this end, the administration has committed not isolated violations of the Constitution and the laws of the land, rather it has made such violations a permanent system of conduct, to such an extreme that it systematically ignores and breaches the proper role of the other branches of government…"
In general and in specific, the resolution could be interpreted as an invitation to a coup. Allende himself called it such. The democratically elected members of the House of Deputies would not have passed such a strongly-worded resolution by a commanding 63- 37% majority if their constituents, the Chilean people, were not also disgusted with the Allende government’s repeated violations of law and democratic procedure.
Chilean President Patricio Aylwin, the first elected President after the Pinochet years, had been head of the Christian Democratic Party during the Allende years. He played a leading part in the crafting of this resolution.Alwyn, a supporter of a Declaration that was an invitation to a coup, is later a leader in the NO vote in the 1988 Referendum that means that Pinochet has to leave office, and subsequently gets elected President in a center-left coalition. History is messy.
Indeed, the comparison of Pinochet to Allende is egregious. And it's not just a matter of numbers... the fact is, a great number of those 3,000 who were killed were in fact communist terrorists attempting to overthrow the government violently. A good many of them were killed in the act of engaging in violence. Were some killed unjustly? Of course. Name me a civil war where no one is.
The price that Chileans had to pay for avoiding 30 years of communist gulags was amazingly low. I think if you asked most Cubans still living in Cuba if they would've chosen to have had their own Pinochet, the bad with the good, if it would've saved them 40 years of Castro, most would have wept that the choice wasn't a reality.
A Cuban in New Jersey.
Qwinn
When I was on the forum for Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine an author there devoted a thread on Pinochet's death. His view was that Pinochet was a positive good, not a necessary evil, and eulogized him as a hero.
I think both things "Pinochet is Great" Rightists and "Castro is Great" Leftists are more common than you believe. I think there's an element of the intelligentsia that on some level is always going to love a dictator. Or that just has a thinly veiled contempt for "the masses", which dovetails to sympathy with one.
There are three very simple ways to see if a country is a police state:
1: Do leaders step down, hand power to total strangers, and still die of old age?
2: Do the border guards exist to keep people in, or keep people out?
3: Do people who oppose the government vocally die of old age?
Pinochet fails only one, and Castro fails all three. I think it's pretty safe to say that Castro is far worse than Pinochet. As unpleasant as Pinochet was, he did something very remarkable: He stepped down peacefully, and lived a comfortable old age. That is exceedingly rare, and rarer still in Latin America.
Let's not debate the relative unpleasantness of Pinochet compared to the hypothetical extension of the Allende regime. That is about as useful as sitting up late in the dorm room, puffing on the tobacco water pipe and pondering the consequences of the ants being really big and us being really small.
From a quick perusal of the Internets, torture and murder were defining characteristics of Pinochet's rule contrasted with the "peaceful road" of Allende. I also find that those killed or imprisoned under Castro were attempting to overthrow the government violently early on after the revolution. So the Castro-Pinochet comparison seems apt, while the defense of Pinochet vis Allende appears unjustified. The best I can tell, this blog attracts a disproportionate number of moral retards.
This is like listening to those conservatives one occasionally encounters in the darker corners of the movement---
[looks upthread]
"--this also has been one of the dark places of the earth."
Have you no sense of irony, miss? At long last, have you left no sense of irony?