CUBA & DEMOCRACY

During the Clinton administration, the sentiment has been proclaimed on many occasions by the president and other political leaders, and dutifully reiterated by the media, that the thesis "Cuba is the only non-democracy in the Western Hemisphere" is now nothing short of received wisdom in the United States. Let us examine this thesis carefully for it has a highly interesting implication. During the period of the Cuban revolution, 1959 to the present, Latin America has witnessed a terrible parade of human rights violations -- systematic, routine torture; legions of "disappeared" people; government-supported death squads picking off selected individuals; massacres en masse of peasants, students and other groups, shot down in cold blood. The worst perpetrators of these acts during all or part of this period have been the governments and associated paramilitary squads of El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Uruguay, Haiti and Honduras. Not even Cuba's worst enemies have charged the Castro government with any of these violations, and if one further considers education and health care -- both of which are guaranteed by the United Nations' "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" and the "European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms" -- areas in which Cuba has consistently ranked at or near the top in Latin America, then it would appear that during the near-40 years of its revolution, Cuba has enjoyed one of the very best human-rights records in all of Latin America.

U.S., Cuba and Democracy
by William Blum
ZNet

William Blum is the author of "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower." The book has been endorsed by Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Oliver Stone, A.J. Langguth (former NY Times Bureau Chief), Thomas Powell (Pulitzer Prize winning journalist) and Dr. Helen Caldicott (international leader of anti-nuclear and environmental movements)