Where are the ideas?
(An answer to Carlos Alberto Montaner)
By Arturo López Levy
In the 1950s, a new word entered the dictionary: McCarthyism. A word associated with the practices of Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy, it means the use of anonymous accusations, based on slander mixed with half-truths, to censure and persecute those who disagree with the antidemocratic right.
The film “Good Night and Good Luck” shows how McCarthy and his vigilantes seized on pretexts such as a family tie or a subscription to a leftist magazine to accuse their fellow citizens, without evidence or due process. The greater effect did not fall on the stigmatized targets alone; the witch-hunt spread fear among others. Nobody wanted to expose himself to the flood of slander unleashed by the conservative machine against any person who might expose the irrationality of politicians like McCarthy.
Voice assassination
Senator McCarthy has important imitators among some Cuban exiles. The personal attack titled “The Academician Who Wrote Like a Functionary,” written by Carlos Alberto Montaner to refute my article “Coup and Propaganda,” is a typical example. Faced with the presentation of the inconsistencies of his vaunted liberal and democratic thinking, Montaner responds with accusations of espionage that he’s “not sure about” but repeats.
Revealing “secrets” that were never secret, Montaner jumps on my maternal surname, associating it with assorted information about my studies in international relations in Cuba, a cousin who is not responsible for my ideas (as I’m not responsible for his), and my status as an officer in the Cuban Armed Forces from 1992 to 1994. From this fishing expedition into disconnected facts, Montaner concludes — what a coincidence! — that the same person who criticizes his intellectual inconsistency in the Honduran crisis and his sui-generis, pro-embargo “liberalism” is a spy who opposes the Jewish community in Cuba, Israel, “the academic world,” the exile community, and G*d knows what else.
Proof? Sentence? Not needed. For Cuban McCarthyism, the institutions of counterintelligence, with law as a guide, are not sufficient. Montaner and his vigilantes want to lynch, according to their ideological taste, anyone who dares to disagree with the inconsistent policies with which they perpetuate conflicts among Cubans. In this witch-hunt, the right-wing publications reproduce Montaner’s response without publishing my questions. To these classic “liberals,” it is up to the defendant to prove his lack of culpability.
Of course, that way to judge is not democratic. In states ruled by law, like Spain and the United States, where Montaner and I live, every citizen accused of a crime (espionage is a crime) has his day in court, and I don’t mean an ideological tribunal but one that abides by the law. The citizen is innocent until proven guilty. Why don’t the vigilantes who “roundly confirm” Montaner’s accusations submit a legal accusation buttressed with proof? Given the rage displayed, the answer is evident — because they don’t have it.
The slander that Montaner essayed in his article confirms that he practices the same “voice assassination” that, he says, he’s a victim of against those who question the coherence of his ideas. New questions arise. Is it democratic to replace the law and the professional counterintelligence institutions in the United States with the accusations of his group of vigilantes, his version of the CDR? Don’t Cubans, from left and right alike, deserve a debate of coherent arguments without the McCarthyism of unproven accusations of espionage against him or his opponents? Shouldn’t we exiles practice the commitment to the rule of law that we preach?
Double standards and false debates
Let me clarify a “misunderstanding” by which Montaner wants to reroute the debate toward an exchange of caricatures in the style of those he has practiced against Granma for the past 50 years. To be inconsistent and to support the coup in Honduras do not disqualify Montaner “in totum” or “incapacitate” his arguments on the topic of Cuba.
Independently from Granma’s accusations — which I rejected because I consider him a shrewd politician — and his incoherence of ideas, Montaner enjoys the uppermost qualification to debate about our homeland: he is a Cuban citizen. Neither intellectual coherence nor an immaculate life are prerequisites for freedom of expression.
Montaner knows that this right does not exempt him from criticism. A legitimate debate of ideas includes both pointing out “an error of judgment” and questioning the coherence of arguments. That’s what usually happens. Although every historical case is different, coherence, especially on a subject like human rights, is the best defense against accusations of bias. Double standards separate a manipulating propaganda from intellectual integrity.
Honduras
On the basis of Montaner’s own articles, I argued — in “Coup and Propaganda” — that his defense of Micheletti’s junta and the U.S. embargo against Cuba is inconsistent with his alleged democratic and liberal principles. On both topics, Montaner creates significant gaps between what he preaches in the abstract and his position against the actions of the OAS and the freedom to trade with Cuba and travel there.
To condemn leftist authoritarianism while supporting rightist authoritarians presupposes a double standard. The dilemma in Honduras is not Chávez versus Micheletti but the Inter-American Democratic Charter (CDI) versus the kidnapping at gunpoint (and subsequent expulsion) of a president who was elected by his people. As I have written previously, the CDI has important defects, as shown by the OAS’s lack of an early response to the crisis, but it does have a clear virtue: it condemns and isolates coups d’état, no matter what their ideology. That is why Barack Obama called the Honduran coup “a terrible precedent.”
No article in the Honduran Constitution confers authority upon the army to remove the president on its own initiative, as Col. Herbert Inestroza admitted. That is why the OAS resolution that isolated Micheletti’s putschist government establishes that the return to democracy must begin with the reinstatement of the elected President, Manuel Zelaya.
What happened on June 28 in Tegucigalpa was — according to John Maisto, former President Bush’s ambassador to Venezuela and the OAS — a coup. His opinion is shared by all the heads of state in the hemisphere, including Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Mexican President Felipe Calderón, and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whom nobody can describe as leftists.
To justify the coup that he disguises as an “expulsion,” Montaner hides behind a legal argument by Ricardo Arias Calderón, who is not exactly an authoritative source of law. What’s peculiar is that Montaner contradicts himself in a previous article, “Honduras: What’s the Chance of Stability?” where he affirms that Micheletti’s alleged election by Congress, as the result of a resignation letter obtained under pressure, was only “a technical excuse” and that the central motive was that Zelaya had allied with Chávez and attempted to reelect himself, another evident manipulation, since the question about the Fourth Ballot Box said nothing about reelection.
(http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/07/01/whats_the_chance_of_stability_97255.html)
The obduracy of the putschist government in Tegucigalpa has made Montaner’s double standard more evident. As Montaner indicates, Zelaya should desist from organizing a plebiscite on a Constitutional Assembly, against the will of the other Honduran institutions. That’s what Arias said in the declaration he proposed, and that’s what Zelaya accepted.
But nothing is enough for Montaner and his vigilantes. Just when Montaner praised Oscar Arias as the best possible mediator, the putschists rejected the San José Declaration, proposed by the Costa Rican president with the support of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Montaner’s logic is odd: Zelaya, who accepted Arias’ proposal, is the obstacle to peace. The Micheletti government, which rejected it, is a paradigm of flexibility.
The world’s only pro-embargo liberalism
Whether or not he disagrees with Milton Friedman and the Cato Institute, Montaner must explain how he justifies the violation of the liberal principles that are central to the smallest state, and the violation of the freedoms of movement and trade that the embargo against Cuba implies. A blockade against the delivery of nuclear technology to Iran is consistent with the liberal principles; an embargo on commerce and capitalist investment in Cuba, with U.S. taxes used to persecute tourists, isn’t. To paint me a vision of classic liberalism as a monochord movement is no substitute for an explanation for what is a contradiction in his thinking.
Where are the ideas?
Montaner has the right to support the ban on travel to, and commerce with, Cuba, but not to extend his “liberal” prohibitions to us, to stop us from thinking rationally. After 50 years of a failed embargo and evident inconsistencies from the dominant sector of the Cuban exile, with its purported democratic credo, the center, left, and even the most modern sector of the exiled right (the Cuban Studies Group, for instance) are calling for an unconditional end to the ban on travel to Cuba and for a new focus on rapprochement and dialogue with the island’s society and government. It is a question not of ideology but of changing policies that don’t work and are inconsistent with the values we preach.
Where are the ideas of the traditional right to interact with the entire society on the island, achieve national reconciliation and adopt a consistent international posture in defense of human rights? They may exist, but if Montaner restricts himself to exercising McCarthyism we’ll never know them. In any case, we should remember that during one of the hearings held by McCarthy in 1954, John Welch, the Army’s attorney, asked the senator and his assistant, Roy Cohn, to submit “before sunset” the evidence they claimed they had. McCarthy and his vigilantes came up with nothing. When the senator spoke again, Welch interrupted him. “Sir,” he said, “have you left no sense of decency?”
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 Economics from Carleton University in Ottawa.
