On Sunday 12/28/2014 the New York Times Published an Editorial, "Shifting Dynamics for Cuba's Dissidents."
This is my push-back (it is unlikely to be published as an OPED)
EDITORIAL
Thinly Veiled Anti-Communism Will Back-Fire
in Brazil
Martha K. Huggins, University of Sao Paulo’s Cold War Research Group
The New York Times (Editorial 12/28/2014: 18) urges Brazil’s President
Dilma Rousseff to “speak up unequivocally for democratic values that are
embraced by most nations in the Americas…and be [a] strong champion…of Cuba’s
opposition leaders….” After all, “as a
former political prisoner, a leftist and the leader of one of Cuba’s main trading
allies,” President Dilma would “arguably carry the most weight” in supporting
Cuban dissidents who want political
change in their country. Isn’t there a
contradiction between Brazil’s (and the rest of Latin America’s) awful
experience with US interference into their internal affairs and asking them to
do likewise in Cuba?
The NYT’s editorial declares
pontifically that, in Cuba, “State surveillance is widely assumed to be so pervasive
that…wary Cubans pop out the batteries of their cell phones if they want to speak
privately, fearing that the state’s
extensive armies of domestic spies can listen in on virtually anyone at any
time.” One can be sure that Brazil’s
president has not forgotten that the US
National Security Agency (NSA) tapped
into her personal phone conversations. NSA’s
spying on President Dilma, not to speak of US citizens in North America, may have left
her inured to the New York Times’ self-serving images of Cuban government
surveillance.
Brazil
knows all too well the dangers from Cold War thinking about politics. Brazilian General Carlos Brilhante Ustra, who
headed Sao Paulo’s murderous DOI/CODI—an organization with which the US had
interactions including during the period that its agents were torturing Dilma--was out to cleanse his country of political enemies----communists, ‘rebels,’
and students labeled ‘leftists.’ The NYT
goads those Latin American governments that it says have previously “coddled,
or appeased, the Castro regime” to become “strong champions of Cuba’s
opposition leaders….” This seems to
assume that naive Latin American leaders living under the overarching might of the US
never had any politically-reasoned strategies for their geo-political
actions. Hardly the way in the 21st
century to get Latin American leaders to do US bidding. President Dilma, the Brazilian Congress, and the
people of Latin America’s biggest democracy will surely see through the NY
Times’ condescending invitation.
Identifying Brazil as among the
countries that have shown a “traditional reluctance to meddle in other
countries’ internal affairs,” Brazil is asked to do just that. Yet many Brazilians--especially after release
of Camillo Tavares’
film,
“The Day That Lasted 21 Years,” remember with great caution US having assisted
elements within Brazil’s military in
toppling their country’s democratically-elected President João
Goulart. That 1964 golpe began a US-supported internal war against Brazilian citizens
that lasted over two decades; the military regime’s human rights abuses are
systematically documented in a report recently released by Brazil’s National
Truth Commission. Something tells me that President Dilma will not fall for the
NYT’s trap: She’s too smart to do such a
thing and her country is too politically savvy to let her.
Martha K. Huggins, living
90 miles from Cuba, is a researcher with the Universidade de São Paulo’s Cold
War Group. Having written extensively for
40 years on human rights in Brazil, two of her 7 books focus specifically on
torture and killing of assumed dissidents
there, Political Policing: The US and
Latin America (Duke, 1998) and Violence
Workers: Brazilian Torturers and Murders
Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities (U of California Press, 2002).
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