Kerry, Cuba and Democracy

At the beginning of this month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Saudi Arabia to calm the absolute monarchy’s reactions to military action — which President Obama had promised — not being carried out against Syria.

There, he met with King Abdullah, the 90-year-old Saudi monarch, whom he thanked for granting him an audience because he knew that “he is not seeing enormous numbers of people these days” and assured that the relationship between Riyadh and Washington is “on track.”

“Right now we have some very important things to talk about to make certain the Saudi Arabia-U.S. relationship is on track, moving forward and doing the things that we need to accomplish,” said Kerry.

Assuming the supersystem of global espionage his government organizes has not informed him well, I do not know if Kerry has read some of the things written on Wikipedia, not EcuRed, about Saudi Arabia:

“The Saudi government is made up of an absolute monarchy, which means that the king has complete authority, having legislative, executive and judicial power under his control. In accordance with the Basic Law of Saudi Arabia which was adopted in 1992 by Royal Decree, the governor’s power is limited by Islamic law — better known as “Shariah” — and the Koran. The latter, together with the ‘Sunnah,’ form the national constitution. Additionally, it continues to be the only Muslim country which has not had elections since its creation. There are no political parties and according to the journal The Economist, in 2010 it was confirmed that Saudi Arabia was the seventh largest authoritarian government of the 167 studied countries. It can also be said that the political system in the country is closely related to Wahhabism.

“The legal system is divided into two parts. The first is the Shura council which consists of 150 scholarly members and experienced people selected by the king, and the second is the governmental cabinet where the ministers, all male members of the royal family, meet. This is in order to discuss or debate with the king about punishments which need to be applied to people who commit crimes.

“Another part of the government that the country is famous for and for which international organizations have raised a lot of complaints is the treatment of women, since they do not have permission to leave their homes alone, use public transportation or travel without their husband’s or family’s consent. They are strictly forbidden to drive although many do it to defy the law and in doing so intend to gain more freedom. It is also one of the countries which uses the death penalty the most in the world, including on minors. It is principally used for rape, drug-trafficking, owning animals in one’s home or homosexuality.

“Both the government and the royal family have been accused of corruption for several years. In a country which is thought to belong to the royal family and which receives its name from it, the line between state property and the principle fortune of the main rulers is blurred.”

I do not think he has read it because, 15 days later, in a speech at the headquarters of the Organization of American States in Washington, the same Mr. Kerry — I have carefully looked at the photographs, and I swear they are of the same person — justified the wrong track his country is on with its relationship with Cuba, referring to “the authoritarian reality of life for ordinary Cubans.”

If authoritarianism results from having a single party in Cuba, in contrast to Saudi Arabia, and like China and Vietnam — countries with which Washington maintains good communications and strong economic relations — someone much more trustworthy than Wikipedia – Noam Chomsky – has recently written very clearly about the American parties and democracy:

“In the past, the United States has sometimes, kind of sardonically, been described as a one-party state: the business party with two factions called Democrats and Republicans. That’s no longer true. It’s still a one-party state, the business party. But it only has one faction. The faction is moderate Republicans, who are now called Democrats.”

Although he retracted what he had said earlier this year — labeling Latin America as the “backyard” of the United States and declared the Monroe Doctrine era had passed — contradictorily, this time, Kerry did not resist the temptation to define what democracy should be for those of us who live south of the Rio Bravo. On the topic of Cuba, he slyly transformed the wish of the U.S. government into a continental one:

“The entire hemisphere — all of us — share an interest in ensuring that Cubans enjoy the rights protected by our Inter-American Democratic Charter, and we expect to stand united in this aspiration,” when the only desire unanimously expressed in Latin America and the Caribbean, also just approved at the United Nations by 188 votes, is that the U.S. eliminate the economic blockade and change its policies toward Cuba.

Recalling the carrot the U.S. used with the U.S.S.R. during the period of Perestroika, Kerry asked the Cuban government to embrace “a broader political reform agenda that will enable its people to freely determine their own future.” And then, the U.S. will help us, like it did the former Soviet republics in the task — when mafias would take over their economies and democratic leaders, like Boris Yeltsin, would bombard their parliaments and assassinate their oppositions.

The secretary of state said, “we also welcome some of the changes that are taking place in Cuba which allow more Cubans to be able to travel freely and work for themselves,” although U.S. citizens, despite what their secretary of state believes them to be — “ambassadors of our ideals, of our values, of our beliefs” — cannot freely travel to the Caribbean island. As far as “[working] for themselves” goes, it is something Americans, who are surrounded by banks and mortgages, can do less and less, but I do not know if Kerry’s satisfaction with what Cubans can do extends to the rest of Latin Americans, many of whom work for McDonald’s, Coca Cola or Chevron.

Kerry paraphrased recent statements in Miami by his president, Barack Obama, expressing that they must be “more creative, more meditative and keep on adapting its policies” in the relationship with Cuba. This is good and well, but believing that allowing Americans to visit the until-now forbidden island is going to topple the revolution is grossly ignorant of the reality in Cuba. I remember once listening to Fidel saying that, if that happened, it would be the revolutionary government itself asking Cuban families to rent out their houses.

The fear Cuban leaders have of Kerry’s “ambassadors” reminds me of the refrain of a song popular on the island during the 1990’s: “Let the wild animal come, I’m waiting for it.” More objective is his recognition that “our governments are finding some cooperation on common interests” — an old proposal by the Cuban government to agree to confront scourges, such as drug trafficking, terrorism and hurricanes. However, how can this be done in a country that, in the face of logic, facts and domestic and international public opinion, Washington places on the State Sponsors of Terrorism List on a yearly basis. Any step would imply removing Cuba from that spurious description.

Regarding democracy, I anticipate that the secretary of state is closer to an idea that has few supporters in Cuba — despite the money the U.S. wastes in promoting it — and according to which, the Cuban government should allow the market’s “invisible hand” to decide on things, from the education children receive to the vaccines they are given, like in the Latin American “democracies” John Kerry praises, based on a concept that is so costly for Washington: If everything is a commodity, why not also politicians and politics? This way, we would be more pleased with the secretary of state, who is on the right track with Saudi Arabia, but we would renege on the the result of the debate, in which more than 8 million Cubans have approved that a planned economy take precedence over the market, that there be equal opportunities for everyone, a pipe-dream for many on this continent.

The last time Barack Obama spoke rather extensively about Cuba, he did it from Sebastián Piñera’s Chile, on the eve of student protests breaking out, showing the democratic invalidity of a country the U.S. uses as a model for the region. José Steinleger brilliantly explained the cause in his text “Piñerachet – Mattheichet = Bachelet” about the elections — their celebration just ending there, with 51.4 percent abstaining — the “marriage” between Pinochetism and the Concertación:

“It has been called the democratic alternation which, for 40 years, frustrated the true sons of Chile the right to their love. Political crime — which began to emerge in 1973, and took legal form with the Pinochetista Constitution of 1980, observed eight years later by the parties that installed Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin as the constitutional president in 1990 and then particularly looked up to all of the politicians who, as a sort of new apartheid, profoundly marked the differences between people and society.”

For anti-democracts, the scenarios the U.S. has chosen to speak about on Cuba are symptomatic: the Chile of Pinochet’s heirs, the house in Miami of the president of the terrorists of the Cuban American National Foundation and the headquarters of the OAS — symbol of the taxation of Latin America’s puppet and dictatorial governments by Washington, where the Cuban “exception” has been rejected but democrats to America’s liking such as Anastasio Somoza, Alfredo Stroessner and Fulgencio Batista were admitted.

It is as the Brazilian sociologist Emir Sader said, “To democratize our societies is to decommercialize them, it is transferring education, health, culture, transportation, housing from the commercial sphere to the public sphere, it is recovering as rights what neoliberalism instilled as commercial.”

From that perspective, which Kerry seems to ignore, Cuba is the most advanced country in the democratization of its society. The United States — the largest enemy in the history of democracy in Latin America — knows well that, as people and society in Latin America become closer, its interests in the region will fare worse, and therefore, it has used all methods — from armed aggression, terrorism and economic blockades to the perestroikan carrot — to derail the dangerous Cuban example.

But the reality has changed, and now, in Latin America, very few pay attention to Washington regarding Cuba or nearly anything else. It is not, as Kerry stated at the OAS headquarters, that “the 21st century will continue … to leave the Cuban people behind,” but that the world, like Chomsky recently wrote, will be free of America.

Rather, they believe that he and Obama are daring in taking a leap over here in January to listen to all the Latin American presidents, who will visit Havana for the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, over which Cuba is presiding.