[Ppnews] Noam Chomsky on the Cuban Five

[Political Prisoner News]

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

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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