Noam Chomsky on the Cuban Five: "A High Mountain to Climb"

From: "Political Prisoner News"
Date: Tue, September 15, 2009


http://www.antiterroristas.cu/index.php?tpl=./interface.en/design/reading/special-article.tpl.html&aNews_lang=en&aNews_obj_id=1002003

Bernie Dwyer
2009-09-15


Professor Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, (MIT) Boston, talks by telephone
from his office at the MIT to Bernie Dwyer for
Radio Havana Cuba on 11th September 2009.

Bernie Dwyer interviewed Professor Chomsky for
Radio Havana Cuba on the eve of the 11th
anniversary of the arbitrary arrest and detention
in Miami of Cubans Antonio Guerrero, Ramón
Labañino, Gerardo Hernandez, Fernando Gonzalez
and Rene Gonzalez, who after a legally flawed
trial in Miami District Court, are incarcerated
in US prisons for infiltrating anti-Cuba Miami
based groups of terrorists with the aim of
defending Cuba against US based terrorism. As
Professor Chomsky says in this interview “They
weren’t criminals. They were heroes”. He points
out “that the only way to remedy the injustice is
to withdraw the charges completely”.

Bernie Dwyer (RHC)-: The five Cubans arrested and
held in Miami in 1998 are now entering their 12th
year of incarceration. You have often commented
on the United States government’s hostile policy
towards Cuba. Would you see the Cuban Five as
victims of that hostile policy towards Cuba
rather than criminals who have committed crimes
that deserve to be harshly punished?

Noam Chomsky: They weren’t criminals. They were
heroes. I mean they were exposing to the US
government crimes that are being committed on US
soil; crimes the US government is tolerating and
theoretically should be punishing itself. The
government should have welcomed that, fine, we
can put an end to the crimes. The five Cubans
took a risk in doing that and that was a heroic
act and instead of being honored for it they are
being severely punished for it.
And that’s why global opinion is so appalled by this travesty.

RHC: Three of the Cuban Five are back in Miami
District Court on the 13th October for
re-sentencing. Would you see this as an
opportunity for the US judicial system to right
some of the wrongs perpetrated against them?

Noam Chomsky: It’s certainly an opportunity but
the proper way to remedy the injustice is not
just to improve their prison conditions and allow
visits and reduce the sentence but it’s to
withdraw the charges completely since they are
completely illegitimate. Unfortunately I don’t
anticipate that. The courts rarely go against
state policy to that extent. In fact I doubt very
much if the courts are even aware of the
background. Remember there is an atmosphere of
dense, intense propaganda on this.

RHC: So you would feel that independence of the
judges is not holding forth here or do you think
that the judges were punishing these men as part of US policy?

Noam Chomsky: I don’t have any personal knowledge
of the judges in the case but my guess would be
that they must know about the illegal
irregularities and the sometimes absurdities but
they probably accept the general government line
on this. Most educated people do. It’s a very
indoctrinated society. And it’s not surprising,
as they don’t hear anything else.

RHC: The US Partnership for Civil Justice Fund,
acting on behalf of the US National Committee to
Free the Cuban Five, filed a lawsuit on September
9, 2009 against the US Broadcasting Board of
Directors (BBG) because it has "unlawfully failed
to disclose specific U.S. government-paid
contracts with journalists" who published
materials that were negative to Cuba and
prejudicial to the case of the Cuban Five. How
does this reflect on the BBG and journalists and
media who publish the material?

Noam Chomsky: As far as the propaganda arm of the
government is concerned, one doesn’t expect
propaganda agencies to do anything else but to
produce propaganda by whatever means they can get
away with. But it reflects very badly on the
journalists and the journals that permitted this.
I think the case may go forward for that reason.
It’s a revelation of practices that the journals
would like to prevent people from knowing about
because it undermines their own credibility.

RHC: Is it not fair comment to say although the
BBG is the propaganda arm of the US government,
it is outside their brief to pay people to write
incendiary material during a trial where the US government is prosecuting?

Noam Chomsky: It’s the wrong thing to do. It may
be even criminal but it doesn’t mean that I
didn’t expect it. That’s the way states behave.

RHC: You would expect that to happen?

Noam Chomsky: Unfortunately

RHC: If the US public were more engaged in the
case of the Cuban Five, do you think they could
effect some change in their status as prisoners
serving long sentences in US gaols or even bring about their release?

Noam Chomsky: They could but that is more
generally true about relations with Cuba. Polls
have now been taken I think for about thirty
years on whether the United States should
normalise relations with Cuba, and it’s fairly
steady. Roughly two thirds favour normalization,
which is pretty remarkable since they never hear
any positive comment on Cuba. Everything you hear
is bitter condemnation. But nevertheless, the
majority of the population thinks we should
normalize relations. If there were any meaningful
discussion and interchange allowed, it would
almost surely be considerably higher than that.
But it has no effect on policy, including Obama. It’s a very interesting
case.

There are many cases where public opinion and
policy diverge very sharply but the standard
situation is that policy corresponds to the
interests and concerns of the business world. But
not in this case; in this case too, quite
substantial components of the corporate sector
favour improvements or normalisation of
relations; pharmaceutical corporations,
agribusiness, energy corporations and so on who
are usually quite influential in determining
policy. But this is one of those cases. There are
interesting ones where state policy, not only
diverges from public opinion, which is normal,
but also diverges from the interests of the
business world which is far from normal. So something separate is involved.

There are other cases like this. And I think what
is involved is a sort of principle of
international relations that is not recognised by
the profession and is not studied very much, but
I think it is significant. We might call it the
mafia principle. If, say some small store keeper
doesn’t pay protection money, the god-father
doesn’t just send goons out to collect the money,
they make an example of the person. They kill
him, beat him up, and destroy his store or
something. They make an example of him.

Now you can’t accept disobedience, not even from
the smallest guy not because the god-father needs
the money, maybe it’s an insignificant amount of
money but it’s because if disobedience succeeds,
it can spread. It can have a demonstration
effect. If one small store keeper disobeys and
gets away with it, another one might. And then
the whole system of control unravels. But it’s
often based on fear rather than real exercise of
power. So that’s a significant principle. It’s
standard in criminal enterprises like say the mafia.

But it also enters into state behaviour. The
problem of Cuba for the United States as is
explicit in the internal documents is
disobedience. Go back to declassified internal
documents of the Kennedy, Johnson and the liberal
periods, the documents refer to “Cuba’s
successful defiance of US Policies” tracing back
then 150 years, leading to the Monroe doctrine.
So it’s nothing to do with the Russia but that
Cuba is disobeying a principle that says the
United States must dominate the hemisphere.

Of course in the1820s, it couldn’t dominate the
hemisphere but in later years it became capable
of doing so and disobedience is not accepted,
it’s dangerous for them on the principles of the
mafia. If one country disobeys and gets away with
it, the others will get the same idea and pretty
much the system unravels. And you find that
steadily in the internal secret documentary
record. For example in the case of the overthrow
of the Allende government in Chile, the national
Security Council, while supporting taking the
measures to overthrow the government, explained
that the problem is not just limited to
Chile. As they put it, if we can’t control Latin
America, how are we going to control the rest of the world?

So this is our backyard and if we cannot keep it
in order, other people are not going to be
properly afraid of us so we won’t be able to
control them. Going back to Cuba again, when John
F Kennedy came into office, unlike Eisenhower, he
was going to pay attention to Latin America. So
he had a Latin American Study Group headed by
Arthur Schlesinger, well-known liberal historian,
and they came back with recommendations which
were given to them by Schlesinger who wrote that
the problem with Castro, he says is the Castro
idea of taking matters into one’s own hands
instead of listening to us and obeying us and if
that succeeds, it could be a spreading danger in
other places of Latin America where people face
pretty much the same problems as in pre-Castro
Cuba. And then the system will unravel.

And you find this in case after case. I won’t run
through examples but the mafia principle is often
there. It makes sense and it makes policies very
resistant to change because there is a state
interest which has to do with long term problems
of domination and control and it tends to be
resistant to public opinion which is normal but
also to business opinion which is less normal. There are other current cases.

Take US policy towards Iran. Most of the world, a
large majority thinks that Iran should have the
same right to enrich uranium as any other signer
of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The majority of
Americans agree. That’s certainly not government
policy. In fact it’s not even on the agenda for
government policy. A large majority of Americans
think that there should be a nuclear weapons free
zone in the region including Israel, Iran and any
American forces deployed there; that’s over 80%
but that’s not even imaginable.

Furthermore a strong majority is opposed to
threats against Iran quite contrary to policy.

As in the Cuba case, larges sections of business
agree. The energy corporations, who are usually
quite influential in policy formation,
particularly in the Middle East, many of them
would appreciate normalization of relations. Iran
has unexploited reserves of oil and gas, very
substantial ones, and they would like to be in on
the profit-taking from them but they are blocked
by the state policy. So we again have a situation
in which public opinion, crucial sectors of the
business world and others, are in favour of
moving towards some sort of normalization of
relations and negotiations and settlement on the
basis of Iran having the same rights as other
signers of the Non Proliferation Treaty but the
state won’t accept it. And again I think it
traces back to successful defiance. In 1979
Iranians overthrew the tyrant who the US had
imposed twenty five earlier in a military coup
and they had remained independent and that’s dangerous on the mafia
principle.

The fanatic hostility to Hugo Chavez is another
case. You can think what you like about Chavez,
like him, dislike him, whatever it may be, but
the demonization goes vastly beyond any rational
assessment of the policies he’s carrying out. And
the demonization began when he showed he was
going to be independent. In the early days of his
presidency he was treated like a bad boy who we
just couldn’t get civilized but when it became
clear he was going to pursue his own policies,
the demonization took off. It’s more of that
¨taking matters into your own hands¨, which could
have appeal elsewhere and could cost the system of control to erode.

And I think the case of the Cuban Five falls into
that category unfortunately. So, yes to get back
to your question, public opinion can make a
difference but it’s a high mountain to climb in this case.

This interview was first broadcast by Radio
Havana Cuba on the 12th September 2009

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