Dr Bob Gill
explains how privatisation is destroying the NHS as Starmer & Streeting support
its takeover by vulture capital
If you want to understand why it is that the NHS was so
unprepared for the COVID pandemic and why it is that we have unprecedented
waiting lists, then watch this 20 minute video of Dr Bob Gill who explains it
all quite succinctly.
The NHS was the greatest achievement of the post-war Attlee
government. Gone were the days when if you couldn’t afford to see a doctor or
pay for drugs you simply had to suffer in silence or hope that a charity
cottage hospital would treat you.
We live in the age of neo-liberalism, which is another way of
saying that everything public is bad (except the Police/Army and Monarchy of
course) and everything private is good.
Dr Bob Gill
Yet we cannot rely on the Labour Party under Starmer to
oppose privatisation. His shadow Health Secretary West Streeting openly
supports the involvement of private companies on the pretext that it will help
cut waiting lists.
Yet this is a lie. The way to cut waiting lists is to train more
doctors and nurses, build more hospitals and transfer the money from our
increasing ‘defence’ (i.e. war) budget to health care. Private firms are
interested in one thing only – profit.And where does that come from?Money
that would otherwise go into the NHS (and also further exploitation of NHS workers).
Streeting is a brazen liar. Why else would John Armitage, a
hedge fund founder and manager, who has given over £3 million to the Tories,
give £15,000 to Streeting? The Electoral Commission’s register of donations shows that Streeting reported receiving
this donation in January 2022.
Armitage, number 138 on the 2021 Times ‘rich list’, is
co-founder and director of the Egerton Capital hedge fund. Among
its almost £19bn of investments, Armitage’s fund owns shares worth almost £834m in UnitedHealth (UH), a vast US
private health corporation that has spent millions lobbying US politicians for its
interests.
Not only
Streeting but Starmer himself has received £12,500 from Armitage. Now
why would this be? The answer is clear. Starmer intends to continue from where
the Tories left off. Nothing could better illustrate the political bankruptcy
of the Labour Party today and yet the ‘Socialist’ Campaign Group says next to
nothing. It refuses to call for Starmer to stand down whereas the Labour Right
had no such problems when Corbyn was the leader.
But the
NHS trade unions have also been pathetic. UNISON and GMB have stayed silent.
Indeed it is difficult to know whether or not the GMB is even concerned about
the effect of privatisation on its members.UNITE has called out Streeting over his receipt
of Armitage’s donations but it has not done much else.
If anyone
is in any doubt about what a catastrophe a private insurance health system is
they should look to the United States where some 46 million adults don’t have private health care
insurance.That is almost1 in 5 adults.
What that means is that if you are seriously ill you cannot get treated until
it is classified as an emergency and then you can be admitted via an A&E.
Yet even
if you do have private health insurance you often end up having to pay for extras,
things like drugs and other extra charges. The insurance companies, mindful of
their own profits, haggle over the nature of the treatment and sometimes simply
refuse to pay out if, for example you don’t get their permission for treatment
in advance or if you go to a hospital that isn’t on their list. These are the
benefits of privatisation.
Contrast
this with Cuba, 50+ years under a blockade from the United States. Despite its
lack of resources child
mortality rates (under 5 years, infant and neonatal) in Cuba have been lower than in the USA for many years. WHO
figures for 2016 for under 5 child mortality (U5M) show that Cuba has a U5M
rate of 5.5 per 1000 live births, whereas the USA has a U5M rate of 6.5 and
Costa Rica has a rate of 9.7.1 Cuba has the second-lowest U5M in
the Americas behind Canada with a rate of 4.9.
Despite the fact that one-fifth of its population are
excluded from coverage, the USA spends more per capita on health care than any
other country. Why?Because each stage
of the insurance process sucks up money, the process of billing, accountants etc.
add to the cost plus of course the mega profits at each stage.
So privatisation not only costs more but it is less efficient
all round yet Starmer and Streeting want to increase the privatisation of the
NHS and the trade unions that NHS workers belong say and do next to nothing.
That the GMB says nothing is not surprising.They have been found by the Report they
themselves commissioned to be institutionally sexist (and it implied institutionally racist
too). A corrupt, right-wing union, the main concern of Gary Smith, its General
Secretary and those around him is their own perks and privileges. And defending
the apartheid State of Israel.
We can already see what the future holds for the NHS from the
crisis in dentistry.9/10 dentists
cannot offer appointments to adults on the NHS and 8/10 can’t do the same for
children. The BBC has revealed that we are at tipping point. The British Dental Association has said that the BBC’s research is ‘the most comprehensive and granular
assessment of patient access in the history of the service’.
People are resorting to pulling out their own teeth without
anaesthesia yet our so-calledOpposition
says nothing about this because it’s more concerned with rooting out a
non-existent anti-Semitism.
I recommend watching Bob Gill’s video because what it shows
is frightening.
What is the British Police Involvement in Supporting Colombia's State Repression?
Police arrest a protester during clashes in Cali, Colombia, 10 May 2021. (Photo: Gabriel Aponte / Getty Images)
It
is one of the mysteries of US Foreign Policy that it applies sanctions against
Cuba and Venezuela for ‘human rights violations’ but Colombia, next door to
Venezuela, as America’s favoured child, is immune. Maybe what Roosevelt is reputed to
have said about Nicaragua’s dictator Somoza, is applicable: ‘he may be a son of a bitch but he’s our son
of a bitch.’
Although
there has been a decline in the number of murders in recent years, Colombia is still
one of the most
dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist. At least 14 trade
unionists were
murdered in Colombia between January 2019 and March 2020.
The National Crime Agency building in Westminster, central London. (Photo: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images)
Perhaps
that is why Britain’s National
Crime Agency was attracted to the idea of training Colombia’s murderous
police. An article
in Declassified UK by Matt Kennard reveals that the NCA has spent £2.3 m in
the past 5 years training a police force that has killed 63 people since May
whilst suppressing protests over the government’s proposed tax reforms.
Kennard
describes the NCA as ‘UK’s secretive law enforcement arm that operates globally but which is shielded from any transparency.
The
NCA “engaged” with “Colombian law enforcement agencies to
improve their capability”. However the NCA refuses to answer any questions
as to what that engagement means, its own role or even which police units it is
training.
An
article
in the Guardian on 7th July ‘I
just need my son’: the people who disappeared amid Colombia’s protests’
reveals how 77 people have disappeared since April as the people have risen up
in protests. Of course disappearances
are nothing knew when it comes to American client states in Latin America but
what it does demonstrate is the thread of hypocrisy which runs through US
foreign policy.
Only
Cuba and Venezuela are subject to sanctions whereas in the case of Colombia and
similar death squad regimes, the West trains, funds and supports their military
– all in the name of human rights!
Dolores Barros is looking
for her 17 year old son, Duvan, who disappeared on 5 June. ‘The disappearances have evoked memories of some of the
darkest days of the country’s civil war’.
In
several Colombian cities the Police have detained protesters in extrajudicial
sites, using football grounds and shopping centres to hold people without
formally charging them. People with long memories will remember how Chile’s
Junta detained people in Santiago’s football ground prior to murdering them.
Folk singer Victor Jara had his hands and
fingers crushed or chopped
off by soldiers who then riddled his body with bullets.
Colombia
is a good response to groups like If
Americans Knew who believe that United States support for Israel is because
of the Israel lobby which distorts the true, peace-loving nature of US foreign
policy.
Kendrick Sampson
Kendrick Sampson, the
actor and Black Lives Activist described
his experience of a trip to Cartagena, Colombia where he had
a traumatizing experience with police brutality. Earlier this year in
Cartagena, local civil rights organizations declared a local emergency because
of the number of young Black men being killed by police. And during protests in
Bogota last autumn, at least 13 people were killed in clashes with police after
thousands flooded the streets in protest of the police murdering Javier
Ordoñez. Sampson wrote that:
In the U.S., we need to keep pushing our
leaders to move billions of our taxes out of fundamentally violent systems like
military, police and prisons and move that money into community led and
operated systems that repair the harm done, and center care of those who need
it most. That is what will keep us safe—care and repair. The U.S. has zero
legitimacy in speaking out against abusive policing and militarization if it
continues funding it, here and abroad.
We have to understand the struggle for Black
liberation is an international struggle in solidarity with all oppressed peoples.
From Palestinians in Shiekh Jarrah facing ethnic cleansing, to the Rohingya
people, to police brutality in Brazil and Colombia. We must commit to stand
with all people fighting against state-sanctioned violence and continued
imperialism and colonialism. Our liberation is inextricably linked together.
None of us are free until everyone is free. Let’s get free together.
The
situation in Columbia has deteriorated markedly since "President"
Ivan Duque came to power in 2018 (through fraud & backed by narco
paramilitary funding). He is known to be a puppet front under the influence of ex-president
Alvaro Uribe Velez, listed as
trafficker #82 in declassified US official documents. Uribe is still free
despite having hundreds of legal cases against him for narcotrafficking,
paramilitarism, and massacres of civilians.
The
most horrifying genocide which was perpetuated under his presidency (2002-2010)
was the assassination of 6402 innocent young men who were enticed
under promise of work in distant regions and assassinated and then passed off
as guerrillas(known as 'false positives' but more correctly
extra-judicial executions) in exchange for benefits and holidays for military
officials and to demonstrate to the public that Uribe's "democratic
security" policy was effective against the FARC guerrillas.
The
rate of unionisation in Colombia is less than 4% but trade unionists are still
threatened and killed yearly. According to the latest ITUC report Colombia is
among the 10 worst countries for working people.
Even
after the signing of the Peace Process in 2016, social and environmental
leaders have been murdered at the rate of approximately 1 nearly every day. ie
more than 200/year as well as trade unionists, indigenous and black leaders and
women leaders, adding up to 1180 in the last 5 years
Paramilitary
armies which the state uses to carry out state terrorism are still in their
thousands free to roam the country now that the FARC guerrillas have left. The
government blames "armed drug trafficking" groups but these are not
the main assassins of social leaders. The government turns a blind eye when the
police or army are found to be collaborators with these groups.
Colombia
has extreme land concentration, environmental deprivation, underfunding in
health education, pensions etc.. In other words a savage neoliberalism coupled allied
to a police state. A horror which the mainstream media keeps pretty silent on.
Hence
there are plenty of reasons for the General Strike which has gone on continuously
since the 28th April 2021 and is now in its 61st day.
Over
the last month during the strike 67 people were murdered by the riot police,
more than 1500 injured, about 50 young people have had permanent eye injuries
and sexual assaults by the police. The number is increasing as the strike has
not stopped.
Further Information on the situation in Columbia
Colombia
Solidarity has a revamped
web-site which has some good all-round analysis of the situation in
Colombia.
The Democrats are Reprising
Clinton’s Mistakes. When Will the American Left Dump the Democrats?
Ever
since the onset of COVID-19 I have engaged in Zoom meetings with friends in the
United States and elsewhere every Sunday evening. The Coronavirus pandemic has
changed my lifestyle just like many others. My American friends assured me until
recently that as Trump sank further in the polls as a result of his almost comical
handling of COVID-19, the victory of Jo Biden was certain.
Logically
they had to be right. Trump’s initial dismissal of COVID-19, his refusal to
wear a mask and his railing against the lockdown, coupled with his advice that
people might want to inject themselves with disinfectant, have led to the
deaths, so far, of over 180,000 [see below] Americans. To say nothing of his
taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug for which there is no evidence that it is beneficial.
The death
rates (deaths/confirmed cases) vary widely from 28.85% in Yemen to just
0.05% in Singapore suggest that there have been vastly more cases of COVID in
Yemen than those recorded, whereas in Singapore it would seem that the number of
deaths have been under reported. The death rate in the UK is the third highest
in the world, 12.2% (41,000 deaths out of 340,000 confirmed cases suggests that
there has been a mass testing failure). The United States rate is 3.05% [186,000
deaths out of 6.114 million]
The UK death
rate of 624 per million is the fourth highest compared to the United States
569 per million placing it in 9th place.
Of course the rate
of testing also varies widely with the UK the second highest (259,000) and
the US fourth highest (256,000) per million.
The US has the highest number
of deaths in the world (191,000) with Brazil the second highest 124,000 and the
UK fifth at 41,000.Countries following
neo-liberal policies and herd immunity have topped the list.
Given that UK deaths are far
higher than the official 41,000 (care homes have been massively under-recorded)
it suggests that as Disraeli was rumoured to have said, there are lies, lies
and damned statistics!
Trump
came to power promising that Americans would win again. It is one promise that
has come true with a vengeance as the United States has the highest death rate in
the world.
Trump
has almost perfectly demonstrated why, when society faces a crisis,
neo-liberalism has nothing to offer. Without a sustained intervention by the
State, coupled with a universal and comprehensive health care system, COVID-19
will not be beaten, certainly not without the absence of a vaccine. And unless
a vaccine is available free to all then it will be bound to keep reoccurring.
It
might therefore be thought that all the Democrats had to do in November was to place
the ball in an empty goal. Trump is so obviously a liar, a vainglorious, barely
coherent braggart, clearly corrupt (why else would he resist handing over his
tax records?) handing out free pardons to those who have covered him and who
ran a charitable fund in New York in a criminal fashion.
But
that would be to underestimate the capacity of the Democrats to snatch defeat
from the jaws of victory. If they fear the victory of Trump then they also fear
the consequences of victory.
The
problem quite simply is that the Democrats are as committed to capitalism and
neo-liberalism every bit as much as the Republicans. That was why the Corporate
Democratic Establishment – led by Clinton and Obama – pulled out all the stops
to prevent Sanders winning the Presidential nomination. Whereas 69% of
Americans support
a universal single payer health care system, the Democrats are as beholden to
the US Health Care Companies as the Republicans. Biden has made it clear that
he opposes
any such notions.
In a pandemic neo-liberal
capitalism has no answers. The virus has an annoying habit of crossing national
boundaries and those of social class. Without a universal health care system it
is almost impossible, absent an effective vaccine, to defeat COVID-19.
It is noticeable that China
and Vietnam, which despite capitalist economic systems are controlled by
parties calling themselves communist and where the political system controls
the economic direction have fared so much better in the pandemic.
Cuba fares
even better. It has an infant mortality of 4.76 per 1,000 live births
compared to 5.9 in the USA. Life expectancy is 79.2 years in Cuba compared to
78.8 in the USA.
You would therefore think
that all the Democrats had to do was to campaign for a comprehensive health
care system in which no one would be left untreated because of inability to
pay.
But the problem is that
the Democrats are as wedded to the capitalist system as the Republicans. The
idea of spending more on health care and less on the US’s bloated military
($700+ billion) and instituting a 10% cut in the military budget has been
fiercely resisted by the majority of Democrats in Congress. In July the
proposal was defeated 324-93. The Democrats were split, with 92 voting for the
amendment and 139 voting against it.
This is despite 56% of
voters supporting a cut and the fact that 53% of discretionary federal spending
goes to the military-industrial complex, some $1.25 trillion.
Biden, who hasn’t seen a
war he couldn’t support, is opposed to any cut in ‘defence’ (actually war)
expenditure and fiercely defends the US’s $4 billion donation to Israel’s
military. The Democrats are beholden to the US Health Care System, which
combines massive profitability with the world’s largest per capita expenditure.
Profits over people.
Just as the Hilary Clinton’s
only selling point was that she wasn’t Donald Trump, the same is true of Biden.
He has nothing to offer the 30 million Americans who were left without health
care by Obamacare. Biden has nothing to say to the millions of American workers
who, because they have lost their jobs, have also lost health insurance at the
very time when they need it most.
Nothing can illustrate the
failings of capitalism more than the application of the market, whose only god
is profitability. We can see this in the UK where the growing privatisation led
to the initial massive
failure to provide Personal Protective Equipment resulting in hundreds of
deaths amongst doctors and nurses. By granting a franchise to private companies
to provide PPE, the NHS all but guaranteed that the provision of PPE would fail
in an emergency. These companies not only subcontracted out their own responsibilities
to other companies, providing a tangled network that was as weak as its weakest
point, but it ensured that no one in the government or NHS could do the blindest
bit about it. As George Monbiot wrote:
Four layers of commercial contractors, each rich
with opportunities for profit-making, stand between doctors and nurses and the
equipment they need. These layers are then fragmented into 11 tottering,
uncoordinated supply chains, creating an almost perfect formula for chaos.
The
result is that Trump, the narcissistic bigot and White Supremacist has
engineered a White backlash against Black Lives Matter. Instead of coming out
clearly against the endemic violence and racism of the Police and in support of
Black Lives Matter, the largest such movement in the US’s history and promising
change, including defunding America’s racist police forces, the Democrats have
lined up in support of the Police and against what they call ‘rioting’ - the
mobilisation of the oppressed.
Trump
by way of contrast barely disguises his contempt and hatred for Black people
and anti-racists.His ire is directed at
Antifa and anti-fascists whilst at the same time defending the
murder by a militia member of 2 anti-fascists in Wisconsin and encouraging the
police murder
of an anti-fascist, Michael Reinoehl, in Portland.
Instead
of fighting on an agenda of social change Biden has been forced onto the ‘law
and order’ agenda of Trump. Given Biden’s own record in supporting mass
incarceration and the death penalty, it is little wonder that the polls are
narrowing between Trump and Biden.
It
is of course possible that Biden, given the multiple failures of Trump, may yet
win the election but my own feeling is that the longer the campaign goes on,
the likelier it is that Trump will win again. Literally the Democrats have
nothing to offer but a senile Biden.
On
the major foreign policy issues, there is no difference between Biden and
Trump.Both are equally pro-Israel and
supportive of US imperialism. Indeed Trump has been far more wary of getting
involved in new wars than the Democrats.On confronting China the Democrats are equally warlike.
The
attacks on Black Lives Matter demonstrators in the United States, with the
state giving active encouragement to the militias and white supremacists demonstrate
that democracy in the United States is skin-deep and essentially a lie. Nothing
speaks louder than the hypocritical support of those like the BBC for demonstrations
in Belorussia and Hong Kong whilst staying silent about the militarised police
attacks on demonstrators in the USA.
My
American friends tell me that the US election is now on a knife edge. Perhaps. But
what is clear beyond doubt is that the Left will never succeed in the United
States until it jettisons the Democrats, who have traditionally been the
graveyard of protest. Instead of bowing to the campaign by the Democrat
Establishment Sanders should have stood as an independent in the elections.
Nothing is so necessary as mobilising the working class and poor in the United
States behind a campaign for universal health care, a proper welfare system (rather
than the present one for the super-rich) and the slashing of expenditure on the
military combined with democratic control of the US police and their demilitarisation.
Instead
we see the growing incorporation
of radicals in the Democrat and the move to the
right of people such as New York Congresswoman, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez.
It
may yet turn out that Biden will defeat Trump because even the most stupid
American voter will be able to see through his use of racism as a means of
negating opposition to tax cuts for the rich and impoverishment of the
poor.However I wouldn’t bet on it and
if I were to place a bet it would be on Trump winning.
Either
way the Left in the United States has to abandon any hope that it will be able
to transform a corporate Democratic Party into a vehicle for change. Today the
Democrats, once the party of White Supremacy, is incapable of offering even a
return to the Big Society of Lyndon B Johnson.
Yet
the strategy of triangulation, minimising the policy differences between yourself
and your opponents is the strategy of Keir Starmer. This is what makes the support
of John McDonnell for Keir Starmer’s COVID strategy nothing less than criminal.
At a time
when US imperialism is baring its teeth once again in Venezuela, which like
Iraq is coincidentally another oil laden country, it is good to be reminded of
another American ‘war for democracy’ in Cuba. What is staggering, in view of
the past 60 years of embargos and sanctions (only sanctions against Israel are
hateful, those on Cuba are full of love) is that when the Cuban revolution
happened, it was welcomed in the belly of the beast, the United States.
However
that situation did not last for long.US
Corporations and their spokesmen were not amused at seeing their assets being nationalised.Castro, who at that time had nothing to do
with Cuba’s CommunistParty which had
opposed his driving out of Batista, was forced into the hands of the Soviet
Union by Eisenhower and Nixon. Castro was an anti-imperialist and the United
States was the world’s major imperial power.
Castro with Dr. Grayson Kirk, president of Columbia University. IMAGE: JOHN DUPREY/NY DAILY NEWS VIA GETTY IMAGES
Today
the United States under their idiot President Trump has rolled back the
agreement Obama reached with Cuba. Trump would dearly love to see the overthrow
of the Cuban state but that is beyond his grasp.
Tony
Greenstein
He is either incredibly naive about
communism or under communist discipline. My guess is the former.
When
Fidel Castro came to New York in April 1959, it was a mere four months since
the 33-year-old had led the successful revolution to overthrow the Cuban
dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Castro had pulled no punches in his anti-America speeches, and
he had extensive associations with the political left. Yet the press loved
Castro, and it was the American Society of Newspaper Editors who extended an
invite for his visit to the U.S.
Castro seemed almost super-real, like a character from an action
movie, in his trademark green army uniform, boots and bushy beard. Castro
certainly did not disappoint his journalistic hosts, regaling reporters with
the many tales of his time as a fighter in the Cuban guerilla war.
The police confront a ring of anti-Castro Cubans at 39th Street and Fifth Avenue. They were among spectators who launched a fusillade of eggs when Castro supporters showed up in red shirts for the fifth annual United Puerto Rican-Hispanic parade up Fifth Avenue. Fidel's fans were shouting "Viva Castro" and "Down with Yankees." IMAGE: PHIL GREITZER/NY DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE VIA GETTY IMAGES
President Eisenhower had refused to meet Castro — that job was
handed down to Vice President Richard Nixon. But Castro took full advantage of
his 11-day stay. He hired a public relations firm, ate hot dogs, kissed
ladies like a rock star, and held babies like a politician. He even placed a
wreath on George Washington’s grave.
Youngsters admire Fidel Castro's beard during a visit to his hotel. The children attended a Queens school with Castro's son. The boy was secretly living In New York while his father led the Cuban revolution. Left to right: Gene Wolf, Kathy Johnston, Kathy Tableman, David Friedlander, Karen Leland and Robert Boyle. IMAGE: GEORGE MATTSON/NY DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE VIA GETTY IMAGES
But within a year, Eisenhower had authorized a plan to attack
Cuba. With the CIA arming and training Cuban exiles, the attack when it came —
the operation known as the Bay of Pigs — was a fiasco.
Sixty years ago
this month, the romantic victory of the young Cuban revolutionaries amazed the
world—and led to a surreal evening on the US’spremier variety show “The Ed Sullivan Show”
Ed Sullivan interviews Fidel Castro in January 1959, shortly after dictator Fulgencio Batista had fled the country. , CBS Photo Archives / Getty Images
The world’s most notorious guerrilla
leader was about to invade their living rooms, and Americans were thrilled. At
8:00 p.m. on Sunday, January 11, 1959, some 50 million viewers tuned their
television sets to “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the trendsetting variety revue that
had introduced them to Elvis Presley a few years earlier and would bring them
the Beatles several years later. On this winter’s evening the avuncular
Sullivan was hosting a Latin celebrity who had aroused intense curiosity across
the United States: Fidel Castro, a charming 32-year-old
lawyer-turned-revolutionary, known for his unkempt beard and khaki patrol cap,
who had against all odds overthrown a bloodthirsty military regime in Cuba.
Miss Gladys Feijoo, 19, who was nominated Miss La Prensa of 1959, kisses Castro as he signs an autograph for her collection. IMAGE: GEORGE LOCKHART/NY DAILY NEWS VIA GETTY IMAGES
For America’s most beloved
entertainment program, it was a rare excursion into politics. Earlier in the
hour, Sullivan had presented a more typical array of artistic offerings for the
staid Eisenhower era. Four acrobats leapt and gamboled around the stage (two of
them wearing ape costumes). The Little Gaelic Singers crooned soothing Irish
harmonies. A stand-up comic performed a cheesy routine about suburban house
parties. Finally, Sullivan cut to the main attraction: his friendly interview
with Fidel at the very cusp of the rebels’ victory.
Castro waves to crowds on his way to Pennsylvania Station from the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York City, en route to Boston. IMAGE: CARL T. GOSSETT JR/NEW YORK TIMES CO./GETTY IMAGES
The segment had been filmed at
2:00 a.m. on January 8 in the provincial outpost of Matanzas, 60 miles east of
Havana, using the town hall as an improvised TV studio. Only a few hours after
the interview, Fidel would make his triumphant entrance into the Cuban capital,
his men riding on the backs of captured tanks in euphoric scenes that evoked
the liberation of Paris. It was the electrifying climax of history’s most
unlikely revolution: a scruffy handful of self-taught insurgents—many of them
kids just out of college, literature majors, art students, and engineers,
including a number of trailblazing women—had somehow defeated 40,000
professional soldiers and forced the sinister dictator, President Fulgencio
Batista, to flee from the island like a thief in the night.
The surprising story of Che Guevara, Fidel
Castro, and the scrappy band of rebel men and women who followed them.
Given the animosity that sprang up
between the U.S. and Cuba soon after, the chummy atmosphere of the conversation
today seems closer to “The Twilight Zone.” On-screen, Sullivan and his guest
could hardly look more incongruous. Trying to look casual as he leans against a
table, the thickset 57 -year-old yanqui impresario appears
to have just walked out of a Brooks Brothers ad in his tailored suit and tie,
his helmet of dyed hair neatly combed and brilliantined. (He was often parodied
as a “well-dressed gorilla.”)
Fidel, by contrast, was already a
fashion icon for rebellious American youth, his olive-drab uniform, martial
kepi, and raffish facial hair instantly recognizable. Clustered around the pair
are a dozen equally shaggy young rebels who were known in Cuba simply as los
barbudos, “the bearded ones,” all cradling weapons—“a forest of tommy
guns,” Sullivan later said. Fidel’s lover and confidante, Celia Sánchez, who
often appeared by his side in press interviews, was this time standing
off-camera, wearing specially tailored fatigues and balancing a cigarette in
her finely manicured fingers. The most efficient organizer of the Rebel Army,
she had brokered the media event and now dedicated herself to keeping the male
guerrillas, who were as excitable as schoolboys, from wandering across the set
or talking.
Police and plainclothes detectives ride the miniature railway transporting Fidel Castro during his tour of the Bronx Zoo. IMAGE: OSSIE LEVINESS/NY DAILY NEWS VIA GETTY IMAGES
With his first breath, Sullivan
assures CBS viewers that they are about to meet “a wonderful group of revolutionary youngsters,” as if they are the
latest pop music sensation. Despite their unwashed appearance, Fidel’s
followers are a far cry from the godless Communists depicted by the Cuban
military’s propaganda machine, he adds; in fact, they are all wearing Catholic
medals and some are even piously carrying copies of the Bible. But Sullivan is
most interested in Fidel himself. The sheer improbability of his victory over
the thuggish strongman Batista had bathed him in a romantic aura. U.S.
magazines openly described Fidel as a new Robin Hood, with Celia as his Maid
Marian, robbing from the rich to give to the poor.
Sullivan’s first questions are not
the most hard-hitting: “Now, in school,”
he chortles in his distinctively nasal voice, “I understand you were a very fine student and a very fine athlete. Were
you a baseball pitcher?”
“Yes,” Fidel replies in the halting English learned at his Jesuit
high school and several visits to New York City. “Baseball, basketball,
softball. Every kind of sport.”
“Undoubtedly
all of this exercise you did at school prepared you for this role?”
“Yes.
I found myself in good condition to exist in the mountains . . .”
The hardened celebrity hound
Sullivan is clearly starstruck by his guest, and his delivery is far more
animated than his usual monotonous drone back in the New York studio. Comandante
en Jefe Castro, meanwhile, comes across as earnest, sweet-natured,
and eager to please, furrowing his brow with effort as he grasps for his
English vocabulary. It’s hard not to feel for the rebel leader as he struggles
gamely with the half-remembered tongue.
Some of the interview is haunting
in retrospect. “I’d like to ask you a
couple of questions, Fidel,” Sullivan says, serious for a moment. “In Latin American countries over and over
again, dictators [have] stolen millions and millions of dollars, tortured and
killed people. How do you propose to end that here in Cuba?”
Fidel laughs. “Very easy. By not permitting that any
dictatorship come again to rule our country. You can be sure that Batista . . .
will be the last dictator of Cuba.”
In 1959, Sullivan saw no reason to
argue.
The lovefest now proceeds to its
crescendo. “The people of the United States,
they have great admiration for you and your men,” the host advises Fidel. “Because you are in the real American
tradition—of a George Washington—of any band who started off with a small body
[of men] and fought against a great nation and won.” Fidel takes the
compliment in stride; after all, the U.S. press had been idolizing him for
nearly two years as a citizen-soldier in the very spirit of 1776.
“What do you feel about the United States?” Sullivan asks.
“My feeling to the people of the United States is a feeling of
sympathy,” Fidel says evenly, “because they
are a very worker people . . ."
(“They work hard,” Ed interprets.)
“They
have founded that big nation, working very much . . .”
(“That is right . . .” Ed nods.)
“United
States is not one race [of] people, [they] came from every part in the world .
. . at is why the United States belong[s] to the world, to those who were
persecuted, to those who could not live in their own country . .
.”
“We want you to like us.” Sullivan glows. “And we like you. You and Cuba!”
The show then cuts back to
Sullivan in CBS’s Manhattan studio, where the arbiter of middle-class American
taste lavishes Fidel with the same magnanimous praise he had heaped on Elvis.
“You
know, this is a fine young man and a very smart young man,”
he pronounces, squeezing his arms together in his famous hunched stance. “And with the help of God and our prayers,
and with the help of the American government, he will come up with the sort of
democracy down there that America should have.”
And then the show rolled on to its
next variety segment: a fashion show for poodles.
**********
Today, it is all but impossible to
imagine that moment in 1959 when the Cuban Revolution was fresh, Fidel and Che
were young and handsome, and Americans could view the uprising as an embodiment
of their own finest ideals. As Sullivan observed, here was a people fighting
for freedom against injustice and tyranny, a modern echo of the War of
Independence, with Fidel as a sexier version of a Founding Father and his guerrillas
the reincarnation of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys, the irregular
sharpshooters who helped defeat the redcoats.
A string of other gushing
interviews would quickly follow Sullivan’s, conducted by everyone from the
revered CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow to the Hollywood actor Errol Flynn. A few
months later, in April 1959, Fidel even traveled on a victory lap of the
northeastern United States: he was mobbed by admirers as he ate hot dogs in New
York City, spoke at Princeton, and made dutiful visits to hallowed shrines of
democracy such as Mount Vernon and the Lincoln Memorial.
Meanwhile, American Cubaphiles
flocked to Havana to see the revolution firsthand and were warmly welcomed.
They immersed themselves in the Mardi Gras atmosphere, attending mass rallies
and wacky, radical street celebrations such as a mock funeral parade for a
nationalized telephone company, complete with musicians dressed as mourners and
fake coffins. Havana was a round-the-clock fiesta, with buskers on every corner
singing patriotic songs to raise money for the new Cuban state in a delirious
wave of optimism.
Beat poets wrote odes to Fidel.
African-Americans were exhilarated by Cuba’s overnight abolition of all
segregation laws, just as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining pace in the
U.S., and joined special group tours for black writers and artists. A Creek
chief traveled to meet Fidel wearing a full-feathered war bonnet. Feminists
rejoiced in Cuba’s promise that women’s liberation would be “a revolution within the revolution.”
The entire world was fascinated by
the apparent explosion of idealism: Fidel, Che and Celia basked in goodwill,
entertaining intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. There
was a chance, many felt, that Cuba would become a paradise of political,
racial, and gender equality.
The reason for our amnesia about
how the revolution was received is, of course, political: the popular memory of
the guerrilla campaign was an early casualty of the Cold War. When los
barbudos first rolled into Havana in January 1959, they were showered with
admiration for what seemed a black-and-white struggle for liberty. But Atomic
Age milestones such as the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 and
the near-Armageddon of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, which pushed
the human race the closest it has ever come to extinction in nuclear war,
quickly overshadowed any romance for most in the Western world. It became
widely accepted in the U.S. that Fidel and his supporters had been covering up
Communist sympathies that had lurked in their hearts from the start.
And yet, the story of how a few
amateur subversives defeated one of Latin America’s most loathsome regimes
remains a defining saga of the 20th century. In the words of historian Nancy
Stout, Cuba’s was “the perfect revolution”
for the visual media age that kicked off in the 1950s: it was short; it was
successful; it unfolded in neat stages—“like
an operetta”—and yet with the narrative arc of a paperback thriller. It was
also full of larger-than-life characters. Coinciding with the birth of network
television and the golden age of magazines, it became history’s most photogenic
revolt. Images of the dashing guerrillas and attractive guerrilla women—almost
all in their 20s or early 30s, some of them fresh-faced teenagers—jolted the
world towards the 1960s.
Thanks to the veil of suspicion
and ideology hanging over Cuba today, few are aware of just how improvised the
revolution was; its leaders were largely forced to make up their own brand of
jungle combat and urban resistance as they went along. Even fewer recall the
genuine bravery and self-sacrifice of those years, when ordinary Cubans risked
torture and death every day at the hands of Batista’s henchmen, who were as
sadistic as Gestapo agents. Under Batista, thousands of young rebel
sympathizers disappeared into police torture chambers, their mutilated bodies
strung up in parks or dumped in gutters the next morning. Today, long decades
after el triunfo, “the triumph,”
a few famous images of the main characters—Fidel with his Old Testament beard,
Che in his beret gazing mystically ahead—have become frozen as Soviet-era
clichés.
But by going back to original
letters, diaries, TV and newspaper accounts, it's possible to turn back the
clock to recapture the atmosphere of Cuba in the 1950s, when the actors were
unknowns, history was unformed, and the fate of the revolution hung in the
balance. Imagining history as it was lived helps to explain how the optimism of
the uprising went so badly awry. Were Americans—and the many moderate Cubans
who supported the revolution—duped by Fidel, as hardliners would later allege,
tricked by a Machiavellian figure who had a secret agenda from the start? Or
could the story of modern Cuba, which reshaped international politics so
radically, have gone another way?
