Cuba Coverage I was very impressed with your report on Cuba [Sept/Oct, 1995]. It was broad and comprehensive, giving the reader a good sense of the difficult reality facing Cuba today. I also liked the fact that you included viewpoints from a pro- gressive perspective that are opposed to the Castro government. Many Cubans support the revolu- tion but they do not support Castro's autocracy-which is not a contradiction. I would also like to comment on Marifeli P6rez-Stable's assessment of the Cuban Committee for Democracy (CCD) in her essay on the meaning of Cuba. She suggests that it is an organization of moder- ates, and it is true that many of its members are indeed moderates. However, as a member who con- siders himself a progressive, I believe that P6rez-Stable's defini- tion of "moderate" is based on how Cuban politics is perceived by those on the outside. Cubans are either viewed as followers of Jorge Mas Canosa or naive believers who always have an excuse for Castro's wrongdoings. As a U.S.-based coalition that brings together dif- ferent viewpoints and seeks to establish a middle ground, I believe that the CCD represents the vast majority of Cuban Americans. I hope your next effort will include the voices of dissidents that are fighting for democracy in Cuba like Yndimiro Restano. You will be surprised by how progressive some of these people are. Lorenzo Canizares Trenton, New Jersey W hat a thrill it was to pick up your Sept/Oct 1995 issue and read the fine coverage of Cuba. I recently visited Cuba, and one thing everyone seems to agree about is that times are very hard. But the Cuban people with whom I spoke seemed to be up to the chal- lenge and wanted to hold out against U.S. meddling in Cuban affairs. To me the answer for this country is simple: let the Cubans in Cuba decide what path their brand of socialism will take. It's a mes- sage that ought to be understood in Miami-as well as in Washington. Jay Marvin WLS Radio Chicago, Illinois In NACLA's report on Cuba, the editors' introduction to the testi- monies from Cuba and Mexican cartoonist Rius' essay on the mean- ing of Cuba both cite Castro's famous pronouncement, "Inside the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing," as short- hand for the Cuban revolution's cultural policy. I am not sure if it is possible to analyze the present conjuncture using this phrase. Castro said it in a congress of Cuban and foreign intellectuals on June 30, 1961 in a context that was radically different from the pre- sent. Let's remember that in January, 1961, the United States had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, and in April of the same year, it had launched the Bay of Pigs invasion. Those weren't days of mere ideological confrontation; they were days of war. To use the phrase to condemn the current Cuban media, as Rius does in his essay, is like saying that Russian journalism is bad because Lenin said that the role of the media is "to inform, to educate and to Erratum The picture of day laborers in West Los Angeles on page 21 of the previous issue should have been credited to Tom McKitterick / Impact Visuals. organize," in his book, What is to be Done, which he wrote during an all- out revolutionary war. If the idea is to criticize the Cuban media objec- tively and constructively, we would do ourselves a big favor if we used other arguments (of which there are many and very good ones). Moreover, in June of 1961, it was easy to say who and what was the Cuban revolution: it was the beard- ed rebeldes, the anonymous heroes of the Bay of Pigs, the men and women who went to the mountains to teach peasants how to read and write as part of the national literacy campaign, those who volunteered to cut sugar cane in the fields. On the other side were those who burnt down the cane plantations, those who attacked peasants and killed their livestock, those who put bombs in the movie theaters, those who launched surprise attacks on the beaches and machine-gunned sunbathers, those who invaded the country at the Bay of Pigs. Cuban reality today is much more com- plex than in 1961. Where do we draw the line for and against these days? It's clear that socialism (from an ideological point of view) has suf- fered changes in Cuba. It's not clear if we are dealing with a struc- tural crisis or if-to make refer- ence to an old axiom of material- ism, the dialectic-we are dealing with a transition towards another form of social organization, anoth- er idea of socialism. Everything points to the fact that socialism as an ideological bloc will not be the same in Cuba after the present con- juncture. What is interesting is not to dissect the cadaver, but to study under what conditions it can be revived. Aldo Gamboa Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
