Coup and propaganda

By Arturo López Levy

From CubaNuestra Digital

(Author’s Note: This article was submitted to Encuentro en la Red, where my articles have routinely been published without censorship. According to my friend Pablo Díaz, the editorial board decided not to publish the article because it questioned Carlos Alberto Montaner’s political career only one week after Montaner was attacked by Granma. I disagree with that decision. First: This article is not based on Granma’s attacks but on the writings of Montaner himself. Second: I don’t view Montaner or any political or government politician as a sacred cow whose political career or arguments may not be criticized, regardless of whether or not he has been attacked by Granma. If Fidel or Mariela Castro or Marta Beatriz Roque can be criticized — something with which I am in full accord — why can’t Montaner be criticized? The best contribution the exile community can give to democracy in Cuba is to practice what the exiles preach: an open, rational debate without insults. Let the reader judge.)

Granma’s assertions about Carlos Alberto Montaner, in which the newspaper accused him of being an “adviser” to the putschist government of Roberto Micheletti in Honduras, created a big stir in the Cuban exiledom. Aside from the details of Montaner’s relationship with Micheletti’s government, the main question is: Was there a coup d’état in Honduras? The validity of any questions about Montaner’s ethics depends on the answer to that question, not on whether or not Montaner met with Micheletti. Yes, there was a coup. Montaner’s support of that coup is ethically inconsistent with his purported promotion of democracy in Cuba.

Was there a coup in Honduras?

On Sunday 28 June, a Honduran military commando unit burst into the house of President Manuel Zelaya Rosales. They put a rifle to his chest and told him that if he attempted to use his cell phone they would kill him. Zelaya was kidnapped in his pajamas and forcibly taken to Costa Rica aboard a military plane.

Col. Hebert Ineztrosa, legal adviser to the Honduran Armed Forces, acknowledged that “a crime” was committed and that the military cupola decided on its own to expel Zelaya. Once the president was on his way to Costa Rica, the military officers summoned Congress to appoint a new president, using a false resignation letter dated three days before the coup. Justice is not the appearance of justice or the retroactive simulation of a due process; it is respect for constitutionality. The proceeding used to replace Zelaya was neither just nor legal.

Democracy is based on the equality of citizens, without exclusions. This is valid both for Cuba and Honduras, which has had, ever since the 1982 transition, a bipartisan oligarchic system pitting a right-of-center party, the Liberal Party, against a right-wing party, the National Party. Every time alternatives from the left have prospered, the Army has repressed them. It is clear that in Cuba the opponents of communism are excluded, but is the Honduran oligarchic model defended by Montaner a democratic system?

Colonel Ineztrosa said the Honduran Army officers would not obey a leftist government. Montaner must explain: since when Army officers in a representative democracy choose their government? With what ethical authority can the Cuban right and Carlos Alberto Montaner talk about democracy for Cuba while they support a coup and those oligarchic behaviors?

A game between propagandists

Anybody who has gone to school for more than a free lunch knows that Granma is not an objective source about the opponents of the Cuban government. Not that it never tells the truth, but — more than a classic periodical — Granma is a tabloid of agitation. As in Cuba the opponents of the government do not enjoy freedom of expression, the task of the functionaries who write in Granma is to divine what percolates in the minds of their Communist Party superiors and phrase it with greater or lesser creativity.

The clumsiness of the Honduran putschists leads me to doubt that Carlos Alberto Montaner, an intelligent politician, ever advised them. For example, Enrique Ortez, the first foreign minister and now the usurpers’ interior minister, reminds me of Trotsky’s opinion of the liberal intellectual Dwight McDonald. “Everybody has a right to be stupid, but comrade McDonald is abusing that privilege.” Ortez abused the privilege by saying that “the United States is no longer the bastion of democracy” and that Obama is “a little black guy who doesn’t even know where Tegucigalpa is.”

Why do the Honduran officers need Montaner? Paradoxically, to do the same that the communists do against him: to engage in propaganda, disinformation, and “special measures” typical of totalitarian governments. To that end, Montaner, Lucía Pinochet and Álvaro Vargas Llosa have lent their pens.

Montaner disinforms when he says that President Zelaya sought indefinite reelection. Montaner knows that, on the Friday before the coup, Zelaya made clear that, in his summons to a Constitutional Assembly, his own reelection was not possible and that if the people approved it, it would be valid only for his successors. Zelaya repeated this in a speech at the United Nations the Tuesday after the coup. Montaner knows this, but repeated the anti-reelection argument as a justification against Zelaya.

Montaner has presented Zelaya and his foreign minister, Patricia Rodas, as the main obstacles to a solution in that country. In a column he wrote about Oscar Arias’ mediation, he called Zelaya “inflexible,” and denounced his “stubborn and unconstitutional insistence” on dragging his country down to “21st-Century socialism.”

Montaner portrays Zelaya as ousted by Congress by the crimes that Zelaya “probably” committed. How does that version jibe with the false resignation and the Army officers’ acknowledgment that Congress and the Supreme Court acted after they had kidnapped Zelaya? If Zelaya is a criminal, why don’t they let him land in Tegucigalpa and try him in a court of law?

Third: Montaner created the theory of a humanitarian coup d’état a posteriori, in diametrical opposition to President Barack Obama’s statement that the coup is “a bad precedent” in the region. According to Montaner, the coup must remain in place and the elections must be moved forward by the usurping administration so as to prevent “a bloodbath.” So it turns out that the resistance of the constitutionalists — not of the putschists — is the cause of the confrontations. Who in his right mind believes that Romeo Vázquez and his coup-crafting officers can organize free and fair elections in Honduras?

Fourth: Giving examples of the same slander he denounces, Montaner attacked the O.A.S’s Secretary General, José Miguel Insulza, charging that he lacks credibility “because of his partiality toward Chávez” and “the appalling image he created upon Hondurans.”

What evidence does he provide? Is it that only the coup-plotters are Honduran? Where does he get the idea that to use the Democratic Charter to defend Zelaya is to be partial toward Chávez, whereas the O.A.S. voted unanimously against the coup? Where does he get the idea that the putschists are more popular than Zelaya? Montaner has even said that the O.A.S. is condemned to disappear because it does not serve the interests of the United States. Is the function of a multilateral organization to serve only one of its members?

Where does he get the idea that the interests of the United States are the same as those of the Latin American oligarchies?

Ideology aside, Montaner is as much a propagandist as Lázaro Barredo. If the coups d’état come from the right, he supports them shamelessly.

A bag of contradictions

Montaner’s inconsistence regarding the Honduran crisis is not surprising, because his alleged liberal thinking is a closet of contradictions bigger than the National Theater.

In principle, the classic liberal position is not consistent with the universal declaration of human rights, which postulates that political and civil rights are as important as the economic, social and cultural rights. As demonstrated by professor Robert Dahl at Yale University, the modern democracies are mixed economies. They cannot be command economies or unregulated market economies.

But that’s not the reason I criticize Montaner; I do so because he’s not even consistent with the liberalism he professes. As an example, take Montaner’s support for the embargo against Cuba. If I learned anything at the Cato Institute, a bastion of classic liberalism in Washington, it was to think twice before questioning Milton Friedman from those positions. Friedman, like the Cato Institute, opposed the embargo. From a classic liberal logic, the promotion of commerce (the less regulated, the better) advances freedom. Commercial embargoes are justified only in relation to strategic materials, such as nuclear weapons.

The ban on travel is another illustrious case. Liberalism considers freedom of movement to be an unalienable right and a vehicle for the transmission of ideas. The government has no authority to regulate it. Montaner supports the ban on the travel of Americans to the island.

Other than the state’s functions in order and security, there is no justification — in the classic liberal argument — for it to charge taxes or spend its money in other functions. How does Montaner justify that, if taxes cannot be spent on public health, he receives money from the American taxpayers to present his opinions on TV Martí. Subsidized opinions and a free market. How do they jibe?

Now that Obama is president, Montaner accuses the United States of being “a banana republic” because it doesn’t have a balanced budget. Why didn’t he say that when Bush was president and the current economic crisis did not exist? As a good propagandist, he knows that the errors of like-minded people are criticized in the past, not in the present.

Without subterfuge

Montaner’s putschist militancy represents the right but not the Cuban opposition in general. In an action worthy of praise, concealed not only by Granma but also by the exile media, the Progressive Arch condemned the coup immediately.

It is lamentable that the right embarks so unthinkingly on its support for the coup d’état in Honduras. Calling the supporters of the deposed president a “mob” smells of the oligarchic liberalism that the Cuban Republic began to quell with the 1933 revolution. The younger Cuban right, above all the Christian Democrats, should produce a modern doctrine that includes all the rights and all the citizens.

Montaner tied himself to Micheletti’s mast. Let him condemn the coup with honesty or cast his lot with ignominy. Without subterfuge.

Arturo López Levy is a lecturer and doctoral candidate in International Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He holds a Master’s in International Relations from Columbia University in New York City and a Master’s in Economy at Carleton University in Ottawa. He holds a degree in International Studies from the University of Havana, 1992.

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