Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Blog

Questions and Answers about Fidel Castro’s Resignation

by Philip Brenner

I answered many questions for reporters on February 19th about Fidel Castro’s statement that he will not be a candidate when the Cuban National Assembly chooses Cuba's president on Sunday. Readers of Rowman and Littlefield’s blog -– and of its recently published anthology, A Contemporary Cuba Reader, of which I am a co-editor –- also deserve to know the answers to these questions. So here are a few of the Frequently Asked Questions about Castro, and my answers.

Question: Is Fidel Castro finally stepping down from power?

Answer: Not quite. He holds three key offices: President, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, and Commander-in-Chief. When he became gravely ill on July 31, 2006, he temporarily turned over these positions to his brother, Raúl Castro. It appears that he may continue to hold the titles of First Secretary and Commander-in-Chief. Those are not at issue in Sunday’s election. Raúl Castro is the Minister of the Armed Forces, and in effect heads the military. If Fidel Castro remains as First Secretary of the Communist Party, it is likely that he will essentially serve as Cuba’s titular leader. Raúl Castro, if he is elected President on Sunday, will be the official head of state and operational head of the government.

Question: Well, this still seems like a pretty big change. What kind of transformation in Cuba can we expect from this?

Answer: The transition in Cuba has been underway already for more than 18 months. Contrary to expectations in Washington, there was not a huge explosion when Fidel Castro gave up the reigns of power in 2006. Instead, there was extraordinary calm, and daily life for Cubans continued without a blip. Fidel Castro actually had stopped running the daily affairs of the Cuban government several years earlier, and the people he designated as the collective leadership in his absence had been the very people who were already doing those jobs. And so, we have a fairly good picture of what is likely to happen in the near future. Raúl Castro tends to prefer working in a team, and to delegate considerable responsibility to others. The values of the group of men in the collective leadership – which includes Vice President Carlos Lagé, Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque, Central Bank President Francisco Soberon Valdés – very much resemble those of Fidel Castro. These officials are determined to maintain as much social equity as possible in the country, and to avoid plans that will increase inequality. They are also very wary about economic or political reforms that they believe will make Cuba more vulnerable.

Question: So, does this mean that there will be very little political change in Cuba?

Answer: No, and yes. There already has been some change. Notably, Raúl Castro’s daughter initiated a round of criticism about the government in a public statement that was printed one of Cuba’s major papers. Raúl himself has attacked corruption and poor services. Recently, the president of Cuba’s national assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, had an open meeting with university students in which he discussed some very harsh critiques they made about current affairs. Last week, several dissidents were released from prison, well short of their full sentences. There may well be some relaxation of the stringent requirements imposed on those who want to open small businesses. The number of such operations has declined 50% in the last 10 years, but there is a great clamor for more to open. On the other hand, there is not likely to be a major restructuring of the economy that would permit Cubans to invest in large enterprises, that would allow foreign capitalists to operate without much restraint, or that would establish political liberalization – with a free press and elections. Apart from concerns about equality, the Cuban leaders fear that the United States would seize the opportunity that such openings provide, to intervene covertly, in order to destabilize the regime.

 

Question: Aren’t such paranoid rantings simply a show -– do Cubans really believe the stuff they say about the United States?

Answer: They do believe it, and not without reason. The official U.S. policy calls for regime change in Cuba. The main law governing the U.S. embargo against Cuba–- the Helms-Burton law –- stipulates in its first paragraph that the law’s purpose is to bring about regime change in Cuba. The United States government has spent more than $100 million in the last four years to support opponents of the Cuban government, to fund studies on how to bring about a change in the Cuban regime, and even to fund an office in the State Department for a U.S. government official named the Cuban Transition Coordinator – much like the position Paul Bremer held as transition coordinator in Iraq after the U.S. occupation there. Moreover, the United States has a sorry history of abusing democratic processes in countries where it disapproves of the policies. Latin Americans readily recall, for example, how the Central Intelligence Agency paid newspapers in Chile, Jamaica, and Nicaragua, to print lies that discredited leftist governments. Cubans are astounded that the United States has not prosecuted Luis Posada Carriles, an acknowledged international terrorist who entered the United States openly and remains free. He was convicted in Venezuela –- well before Hugo Chavez became president –- of planning the bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner that killed 73 people in 1976.

 

Question: But now that Fidel Castro will no longer be Cuba’s president, and George W. Bush will soon be out of the White House, isn’t it likely that relations between Cuba and the United States could improve?

Answer: Sadly, no. Cubans view the three remaining U.S. presidential candidates as having essentially similar policies towards Cuba. John McCain has called for toughening the already draconian economic sanctions against Cuba. Hillary Clinton has said that she favors continuing the policy of the Bush Administration. Barack Obama advocates relaxing the embargo so that Cuban-Americans would be able to travel to Cuba without restrictions. (In 2004 the Bush Administration tightened regulations so that Cuban-Americans are now permitted to visit immediate family members, for emergencies, only once in three years.) Sen. Obama also has said he would be willing to meet with Cuban leaders during his first year in office. But unless the United States is willing to renounce its ambition to overthrow the Cuban government, negotiations are not likely to accomplish much. In fact, unless the Helm-Burton law were changed, the next U.S. president would not be permitted to have normal relations with Cuba Helms-Burton stipulates that its sanctions can be lifted only if the Cuban government "does not include Fidel Castro or Raúl Castro." Moreover, Cuba has much more self-confidence now that it did sixteen years ago, when the Cold War ended and its economy went into a free fall without Soviet support. It needs the United States much less than it once did. The U.S. embargo was intended to strangle Cuba and isolate it. Instead it has isolated the United States. The U.N. General Assembly, by a vote in November of 184 - 4, condemned the U.S. embargo for the sixteenth year in a row. In January, Brazil and Cuba negotiated a major agreement under which the South American giant will explore Cuba’s coastal waters for oil, where there may be vast reserves. China is modernizing Cuba's nickel mines, which hold the third largest reserves in the world of that critical metal. And throughout Latin America, as the presidents of Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Nicaragua attempt to chart new directions that depart from the dictates of the United States, they appreciate that they are the children of Fidel Castro. They are taking a path that is different from the one on which he led Cuba. But they believe that his success has made their dreams attainable.

 

Philip Brenner is professor of international relations and director of the Inter-Disciplinary Council on Latin America at American University. He is co-editor of A Contemporary Cuba Reader: Reinventing the Revolution with Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirk, William M. LeoGrande, and Sad and Luminous Days: Cuba's Struggle with the Superpowers after the Missile Crisis with James G. Blight.

Valentine’s Day in DeKalb: Two, Three, Many Virginia Techs?

Ben Agger and Timothy W. Luke

Last Thursday, February 14^th, 2008, Steven Kazmierczak reportedly shot and killed five students, and then turned a weapon on himself at Northern Illinois University. At least sixteen students were wounded in the rapid-fire shootings in this large NIU lecture hall during class. We have few certain details about the shooter, except that he used four weapons, two of which were purchased legally within the past week—a shotgun and a 9mm Glock semi-automatic handgun. Ironically, he purchased two magazines and a holster for the Glock from the same online vendor which sold Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, one of his guns through a dealer transfer last spring.

Apparently, he was a good student (a former sociology major at NIU) who had no police record. He was pursuing graduate studies in social work at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. It was also rumored that he recently had ceased taking mood-modifying medication and had broken up with a live-in girl friend. He was 27 when he died in the large NIU lecture hall. Yet, there was another side to him. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in September 2001, but soon was “administratively discharged” within six months. More recently, he took a job as an officer at the Rockville Correctional Facility in Indiana in September 2007, but he failed to complete his preliminary training after only two weeks, and then never returned to work.

The shooting in DeKalb, Illinois occurred almost exactly ten months after the shootings at Virginia Tech last April, when 33 died, including students in classrooms, some of their professors, and the gunman himself. On November 7, 2007 Pekka Eric Auvinen walked into his high school in Tuusula, Finland, and shot eight people, killing five, and then also turned the gun on himself. There are parallels between these three bloody events: The shooters were young males; they used deadly semi-automatic weapons; they burst into school classrooms to do their damage; they took their own lives. There were apparent differences, too, although as yet we know next to nothing about the ‘real’ Steve Kazmierczak. Cho had already been identified in the Virginia mental health system as a troubled individual, and a potentially dangerous one at that. And Auvinen and Cho left video and written manifestos. In his testimony, Cho acknowledged the inspiration of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who killed twelve of their high-school classmates and a teacher at Columbine in Colorado on April 20, 1999.

How are we to understand the sequencing and connections among Columbine, Virginia Tech, Tuusula, and now Northern Illinois? It is unimaginable that the Valentine Day’s Massacre in DeKalb would have occurred in the way that it did without Virginia Tech having occurred, as the December shootings in Finland also demonstrated. Tech is imbedded in DeKalb as its prototype and possibility. Kazmierczak might have found other ways to kill and to die without the example of Tech (and Columbine or Tuusula before it), but he surely framed his actions last Thursday within the scenario of last April in Blacksburg, Virginia.

 

This is not to suggest that DeKalb is simply a copy-cat killing. What did Klebold, Harris, Cho, Auvinen, and Kazmierczak have in common that led them to enact these epic killings and suicides, on school grounds? It seems they were alone in a crowd; they were alienated, lacking social ties. Whether they were mentally ill or not is somewhat beside the point. They might have been stopped, helped, redirected—yes, even medicated. We are intensely interested in the experience of being alone in a crowd, in Cho’s case as an Asian-American outsider on a big-time college/fraternity campus, which considers itself ‘Hokie Nation,’ —the illusion of tight community achieved through the gridiron Gemeinschaft of the Virginia Tech campus. And in the hours after the NIU attack, the response in DeKalb, Illinois and around the nation was to appeal to the school’s athletic mascot, the Husky, and tout “Huskie Spirit.” Perhaps we know only this: people more on the inside do not tend to commit mass murder and then take their own lives.

It cannot escape notice that the killers at Columbine, Blacksburg, Tuusula and DeKalb were men.  Women usually do not embark on shooting/suicide escapades, even though not even a week before on February 8, 2008 at Louisiana Technical College a female student shot two classmates and then herself in a classroom. Four of the five killed at DeKalb were women students, and many of those killed in Tuusula and Blacksburg also were female. This is a potent admixture: social isolation, male gun culture, fantasies of revenge.

Were the killers evil madmen predestined to wreck havoc? Were they beyond social influence and redirection? They committed mad acts, to be sure. But there is a thin boundary between those who keep their demons within, and at bay, and those who erupt. The answer to these acts of deliberate madness lies not in armoring our campuses but in acknowledging people’s interior turmoil and trying to help, where possible. This is difficult amid a sea of faces in large college lecture halls. But can we afford to reduce such acts merely to irreversible psychopathology? Columbine and Virginia Tech have now become a set piece—a media spectacle--with a certain inexorable momentum.

Ben Agger is professor of sociology and humanities at University of Texas, Arlington.  Timothy W. Luke is professor of political science at Virginia Tech. They co-authored a book There is a Gunman on Campus: Tragedy and Terror at Virginia Tech forthcoming in April 2008.

Michael Mann and Johnny Depp Make Public Enemies

By Steven Rybin

The recently ended WGA strike in Hollywood has prevented several new projects from getting off the ground, and several previously announced productions involving film director Michael Mann and actor Johnny Depp have been put on hold, perhaps indefinitely. Several planned Mann projects, including a film with Tom Cruise at Columbia, which Mann would only agree to direct if he could rewrite the script (which couldn’t be done during the strike) and a previously announced project with Depp based on the life of the spy Alexander Litvinenko, were shelved. It is the cancellation of those plans which has allowed Mann and Depp to plan their new collaboration. According to Variety, the project, an adaptation of the 2004 Brian Burroughs book Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the F.B.I., 1933-34, is partially based on the life of gangster John Dillinger and set during 1930s Depression-era America. Mann has made plans to film his own adapted screenplay of the novel with production set to begin in March of 2008.  The film is primarily set in Chicago, an environment Mann knows well; he was born there, and his film 1981 Thief was set in the city.

This is not the first time Mann has announced plans to shoot a film set in the 1930s: an earlier project, announced in the Spring of 2007, was to cast Leonardo DiCaprio in a film noir set in the 30s. That film – announced well before the WGA strike began – never got off the ground because Hollywood studios were unwilling to give Mann the large amount of money the production required (rumored at well over $100 million) in the light of the relative commercial disappointment and budget overruns of his 2006 film Miami Vice. Public Enemies, in many ways, seems a more natural follow-up, given Mann’s own filmography, which provides some explanation as to why the director might be attracted to material involving a dramatization of the FBI.: the federal agency is often a presence in the director’s crime movies, and rarely a sympathetic one. In the 1986 film Manhunter, Mann’s protagonist, Will Graham (William Petersen) is enlisted by the government to help catch a serial killer, an experience which very nearly destroys his relationship with his family, and in the recent film adaptation of the television series Miami Vice, the cavalier law enforcement of Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) is placed in stark contrast to the ineffectual pencil-pushing methods of the bureau. And although Christian Bale has been signed to play FBI agent Melvin Purvis in Public Enemies, it is quite doubtful that the remainder of the (as of now unannounced) actors who will play the other federal agents in the film could carry quite as much on-screen charisma as a gangster played by Johnny Depp, making it likely that viewers’ sympathies will be directed as much towards Dillinger as the authorities chasing him.

Such skewed direction of sympathies, of course, is nothing new for the gangster genre, which has long banked on the likelihood of audiences becoming fascinated with dapper criminality. That Mann’s filmography remains rewarding despite what some would consider familiar crime-film clichés indicates where the strength of his cinema lies; as I have argued elsewhere, the value of Mann’s work largely derives from the way in which he and several very talented collaborators build upon the canvas of the familiar genre conventions with a rich, suggestive film style. But it is not only the conventions of the crime drama that Mann is working within and through: the star personas of his leads, per usual, would also seem to inform his casting. Depp is a veteran of performances casting him as an anti-hero: think of Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, or the more recent Sweeney Todd. And Christian Bale (an exceptional actor who usually finds himself in films that cannot match his talent) seems a perfect choice to play a Mann FBI agent, given that many of his characters struggle with personal demons and character flaws despite finding themselves on the side of the law (think Batman Begins, Rescue Dawn, and the more recent remake 3:10 to Yuma). Genre and star persona, then, as in previous films such as Collateral, Miami Vice, and Heat, will be putty in the hands of Mann, who has quietly (relative to the more heralded careers of auteurs such as Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood) built up one of the strongest oeuvres of any American director since the decline of New Hollywood cinema in the late 1970s.

Steven Rybin teaches in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University and is the author of  The Cinema of Michael Mann (Lexington Books).

Freedom’s Journal receives Honorable Mention

              Freedom’s Journal: The First African-American Newspaper, by Jacqueline Bacon, received an Honorable Mention from the 2007 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. This award commends works published in a given year which extend our understanding of the root causes of bigotry and the range of options we as humans have in constructing alternative ways to share power. For more information about Freedom's Journal, please visit our website http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com/ISBN/0739118935.

The Fresh Face in American Politics

By Gary A. Donaldson

This election cycle has exhibited an important American political phenomenon: the fresh face, the political outsider, the candidate who is the antidote to politics as usual. Accompanying the fresh face is the rhetoric of renewal, change and the implied promises of new ideas and attitudes and solutions toward old problems.

Since the end of World War II both parties have looked in the direction of the political outsider and the fresh face to bring renewed excitement and victory to their parties. Sometimes it has worked, sometimes not.

Perhaps one of the best examples of a political fresh face was Eisenhower. Ike had been in the public eye for some time, but he had only been discussed seriously as a politician since the end of the war. He was always perceived in the American mind as someone outside the political spectrum; and in fact, Ike worked hard to show his disdain for politics by insisting often that he would not run for office, that he had no intention of getting down into the mud and slugging it out with politicos like Truman. At one point, he even admitted that he had never found a need to cast a ballot, and he often let it be known that he had no party affiliation (although behind the scenes he told those close to him that he was a life-long Republican.) In 1953, when Ike became President, he brought to Washington the new outlook he promised—perhaps the fulfillment of the fresh face in politics.

In 1960 the Democrats tapped John Kennedy, the freshest of all fresh political faces. Although Kennedy had been in national politics since the end of the war, he campaigned in 1960 as a political outsider who would bring a new atmosphere to Washington, take the nation in a new direction, and change the old rhetoric—then portrayed by the eight years of the now stale Eisenhower administration. He worked hard to cast Nixon, the presumptive successor to Ike and the Republican nominee that year, as the keeper of the ancien regime, the man who would carry on the old Eisenhower policies.

This placed Nixon in an awful position as the 1960 election approached. Kennedy was winning points (and presumably votes) with his “let’s get American moving again” slogan. If Nixon tried to step out on his own by proposing new ideas he appeared to be criticizing Eisenhower and his policies, even ungrateful to his mentor. If he simply parroted the Eisenhower line, he appeared to have no new ideas, and was little more than Ike’s “lapdog with a five o’clock shadow,” as one pundit described Nixon in this period. So, Nixon fought the 1960 campaign mostly with one hand tied behind his back.

By portraying himself as an outsider and a new comer with new ideas, Kennedy also placed himself at a disadvantage—although he did not have nearly the problems Nixon had. Kennedy found himself answering claims that he was too inexperienced to be president. Clearly, Kennedy could not have it both ways. He could not be the new young fresh face in politics and an experienced politician as well. He spent much of the campaign defending his record in Congress and making such statements that he was older than Christopher Columbus when he came to American, and older than Thomas Jefferson when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Kennedy spent much of the 1960 primary season trying to show that he was experienced enough to attract votes. In office, JFK’s promises and hopes translated into very little legislation, despite a Democratic Congress.

In 1976 the Democrats turned to another outsider, Jimmy Carter. The nation was clearly fed up with the antics of Washington insiders in those years. The conduct of the war in Vietnam and then finally the Watergate scandal had turned the nation away from Washington insider politics. Carter stepped into the breach. A Georgia governor and peanut farmer, Carter actually prided himself on not understanding the workings of Washington—and that seemed to endear him to voters. He was a wonderful campaigner. He spoke good words; he energized the Democratic Party and the nation. But when Carter got to Washington he could not work his will, and to most observers it was because he did not know the nuances of Washington politics. And he foundered. Four years later he was vulnerable to attacks from a Republican outsider, a new fresh face with new ideas from the other side of the political spectrum, Ronald Reagan. Carter went from the outsider to the insider, from the new fresh face to the old politico who needed to be bumped from office.

That brings us back to the current election cycle and Barak Obama, the new fresh face, the candidate with the charisma and the good words. He has energized the Democrats with talk of new ideas and change. Democrats have to ask, will that translate into a good president?

 

Gary A. Donaldson is professor of history at Xavier University of Louisiana. He is the author of many books on American history in the 20th century, including The First Modern Campaign: Kennedy, Nixon, and the Election of 1960.