Antony Loewenstein

Credit where it’s due. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg may have spread propaganda about Saddam, Iran and Israel, but he can write and his latest dispatch about meeting Fidel Castro (here’s the first) is fascinating:

There were many odd things about my recent Havana stopover (apart from the dolphin show, which I’ll get to shortly), but one of the most unusual was Fidel Castro’s level of self-reflection. I only have limited experience with Communist autocrats (I have more experience with non-Communist autocrats) but it seemed truly striking that Castro was willing to admit that he misplayed his hand at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis (you can read about what he said toward the end of my previous post - but he said, in so many words, that he regrets asking Khruschev to nuke the U.S.).

Even more striking was something he said at lunch on the day of our first meeting. We were seated around a smallish table; Castro, his wife, Dalia, his son; Antonio; Randy Alonso, a major figure in the government-run media; and Julia Sweig, the friend I brought with me to make sure, among other things, that I didn’t say anything too stupid (Julia is a leading Latin American scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations). I initially was mainly interested in watching Fidel eat – it was a combination of digestive problems that conspired to nearly kill him, and so I thought I would do a bit of gastrointestinal Kremlinology and keep a careful eye on what he took in (for the record, he ingested small amounts of fish and salad, and quite a bit of bread dipped in olive oil, as well as a glass of red wine). But during the generally lighthearted conversation (we had just spent three hours talking about Iran and the Middle East), I asked him if he believed the Cuban model was still something worth exporting.

“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” he said.

This struck me as the mother of all Emily Litella moments. Did the leader of the Revolution just say, in essence, “Never mind”?

I asked Julia to interpret this stunning statement for me. She said, “He wasn’t rejecting the ideas of the Revolution. I took it to be an acknowledgment that under ‘the Cuban model’ the state has much too big a role in the economic life of the country.”

Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg – a man fond of war, Israel and conflict with Iran – is invited to Havana to meet and converse with Fidel Castro.

There is much to digest but this is especially interesting:

He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. “This went on for maybe two thousand years,” he said. “I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything.” The Iranian government should understand that the Jews “were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here’s what happened to them: Reverse selection. What’s reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation.” He continued: “The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.” I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me. “I am saying this so you can communicate it,” he answered.

Fidel Castro during his first TV appearance in many years:

US foreign policy is better described as the policy of total impunity.

This is what liberal Zionism has come to. Asking, almost begging, for understanding about Israel but nothing like demands for one person, one vote. Palestinians should be given equal rights in Israel? Perish the thought. Here’s American Jewish writer JJ Goldberg in New York a few days ago:

I’m beginning to feel like Amos Kenan…[who in 1969 wrote] a Letter to all good people, in which he said I have been rejected by the left that I belonged to all my life. I love Cuba, I believe in Fidel Castro, but I am not allowed to love Cuba because I’m an Israeli and a Zionist. I’m frozen out of the left because I believe in supporting my own people.

And I will begin to feel like that. No I won’t support dismantling the Israeli state. Again, your goal is to have Israel stop being a Jewish state. Israel aspired, originally aspired, to be as Jewish as France is French. That is, it should have a culture that reflects its majority–aspirationally the majority will remain Jewish–[and] that all citizens should be full citizens. And again it has not lived up to that. It’s gone better and it’s gone worse. But the goal is not to deprivilege the people who aren’t Jewish but to make a state that adheres by what we regard as traditional Jewish values in which all citizens are equal.

If it doesn’t go there, then I will be very very sad, and I will feel my life’s work essentially to have been a failure. But I don’t think it will get that far. Because if Israel launches another operation and kills 5,000 or 10,000 people, the pressure in the world community will be so great that it will be forced, it will be forced to sit down and negotiate to withdraw to the 67 borders. That’s what the world wants, the European union wants, the Arab League wants.

I recently debated in Sydney on the motion that governments shouldn’t censor the internet. ABC TV broadcast the discussion and our team included a robust explanation on the principles of free speech.

An edited version of the debate was broadcast tonight on ABC Radio National Big Ideas:

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My following article is published today by the Sydney Morning Herald/Age online:

We live under the illusion that governments can protect us from the evils of the world.

Paedophilia, extreme violence, lessons in self-harm and suicide, race hatred and terrorism. We have every right to expect governments to monitor hate and terror sites and arrest and prosecute those who aim to do harm to others.

But censoring the internet will have no effect on insulating us from these horrors. It’s false security, comforting election-cycle rhetoric to convince fearful parents and scared teachers.

And that’s just in the West.

Having spent time in numerous repressive states, such as Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China, there is no indication that these nations are any better at protecting their citizens from the darkest recesses of the internet or the mind. Millions of users find ways around filtering services provided by Western multinationals.

Besides, tell me how trying to ban YouTube videos of men kissing or women driving – both illegal acts in brutal, US-backed Saudi Arabia – proves anything other than officials will filter material that suits their political agenda? Who here trusts our government, of any stripe, to transparently only block content that is harmful to children?

Already in Europe there are debates about banning websites that allegedly endorse terrorism. But who decides? Resistance movements that oppose American and Australian actions in Iraq and Afghanistan? Elected Palestinian parties such as Hamas backed by millions of Arabs? The powerful Lebanese group Hezbollah, regarded as a terrorist organisation in many Western capitals, but lionised across the Muslim world?

We are not far from the day in this country when shrieking voices will advocate the filtering of political content that offends certain sensibilities, ethnic groups, racial minorities or political parties. This does not mean it’s good public policy designed to improve social harmony. Censorship is always about a form of control. No society has complete freedom of speech but we should be very mindful of any governments that tell us filtering will be painless and cost-free.

Although tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and mobile phones are invaluable in connecting dissidents, activists and protesters, as we saw in Iran last year during the post-election uprising, authorities can equally use the same technology to monitor and find perceived enemies. This is censorship on heat, killing any chance of web utopia.

Democracy doesn’t arrive through the net; it comes through people power. Government censorship merely reinforces the fear of change and shows citizens how afraid dictatorships are of true democracy and public engagement. If anything, it can harm democratic aspirations of the oppressed by giving unprecedented insight into people’s private lives and movements.

Social ills are not reversed. For example, in Iran heroin addiction is soaring due to its easy accessibility from a chaotic neighbouring Afghanistan. Blocking websites that either celebrate its use or provide information how to find the drug of choice has had no effect on the problem.

The internet is unlike any other medium. Books, films and art can be relatively easily banned, mass distribution stopped with the flick of a pen. Websites can move, evolve and re-emerge days, weeks or months later.

Respecting the intelligence of a parent to monitor a child’s activities is seemingly beyond the capability of many Western states, including Norway, Finland, the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands and New Zealand, nations that have all blocked sites said to contain child pornography but impacts on limiting access to the obscene content has been minimal.

We don’t oppose schools, teachers and parents implementing methods to help protect children from harmful online content but the Rudd government appears incapable of understanding that imposing a draconian system only brings suspicion and resistance. In a modest sign of self-policing, Facebook UK recently announced increased online safety, including a 24-hour police hotline and education campaign to manage cyber-bullying and stalking.

Let’s look at some classic overseas examples. The implementation of internet censorship in Iran is comical. Type the name of former American vice-president Dick Cheney into a search engine and you’ll be blocked from going any further. “Dick” is a supposedly sexual word for repressed Iranian officials. But Richard Cheney is fine. Also “teen”, “oral”, “cock”, “Asian” and thousands of others are banned. Even singer Bruce Springsteen was inaccessible during my visit in 2007 because it contained the word “teen”. The word “woman” was sometimes filtered. “Queer” and “wanker” are OK words but many gay and trans-gender sites are blocked. Unsurprisingly, enterprising individuals are designing software to bypass these rules.

The Islamic Republic is an extreme case – aided and abetted in their censorship by companies such as Nokia and Siemens who sold a monitoring centre to Tehran in 2008 – but growing numbers of countries see Iran and China as the model of “stability”. Market freedom but political repression.

Perhaps it’s time to admit in the West that we don’t know what we’re doing. While internet use is booming across the world – in the past year alone, more than 21 million Indonesians from fewer than a million 12 months before now use Facebook, making it the world’s third largest Facebook community – many non-democratic nations are using similar arguments to Western states in monitoring the web. In late April, the United Arab Emirates announced that the interior ministry would check the identity of anyone using the internet in public places to fight cyber-crime and child pornography. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy surely gave the UAE his talking points.

The web is as powerful as its users and as influential as we all want it to be. It’s not infallible or perfect and any democracy should care what content is available. But for governments to be trusted to censor content, with the churches riding bareback alongside their ideological colleagues, should worry us all.

This is an edited version of a speech given as part of the affirmative panel at Tuesday night’s iQ2 debate on the proposition that governments should not censor the internet. Antony Loewenstein is a Sydney journalist and author of My Israel Question and The Blogging Revolution.

The US embargo remains insane and counter-productive but aging dictators are equally killing their country:

Parque Trillo used to be a lively pocket of Havana. A small open space bounded by four streets, it was where Cubans came to gossip, shop, play baseball and dance.

On the surface little has changed. Pensioners chat on benches, housewives trawl the food market, teenage boys take turns swinging a bat, and the Palacio de la Rumba nightclub throbs after dusk.

Things are gritty – buildings are dilapidated, grass is strewn with rubbish and the park’s blue pillars are discoloured and peeling – but that is hardly new. Jaime Valdés, however, has noticed one big change. “It’s a lot quieter these days. Young people are disappearing. The ones in their 20s and 30s, they’ve left.”

From his bench the retired chemist pointed to San Rafael street. “Fifteen from there, gone.” He pointed to San Miguel street. “There, another nine or 10, gone.” From Aramburu street, another eight, and from Hospital street, about a dozen, said Valdés. “It’s an exodus.”

Neighbourhoods across Havana report the same phenomenon. Young people, especially well-educated professionals, are fleeing the island. Tens of thousands have emigrated in the past two years. The exodus has alarmed the communist government but remains largely unreported, a taboo topic for state media.

“It’s a sign that the revolution has failed, so they don’t want to talk about it. We are losing our future,” said Ricardo Martinelli, a university professor who has seen many of his students and his only child, a 23-year-old technician, emigrate in recent months.

What’s the problem with this story (via The Cable)?

The U.S. government-sponsored television and radio stations aimed at bringing objective news into communist Cuba aren’t doing the job and need new leadership and direction, according to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In a new report by the committee’s majority staff, led by John Kerry, D-MA, lawmakers are calling out Radio Marti and TV Marti, both of which are funded by Congress, for a lack of quality programming and for failing to uphold the standards of a free and fair journalistic enterprise.

The aim is to bring “objective news” into Cuba? Please. It’s to replace one form of propaganda (pro-Castro rants) with pro-Washington diatribes.

I was interviewed this weekend on Radio New Zealand National Saturday Morning with Kim Hill on issues of Israel, Zionism, Jewish identity, blogging and internet censorship. It was a long interview (over 40 minutes) and offered a rare opportunity to explore key areas of Zionist responsibility for occupation in Palestine and why blogging and journalism can be a good mix:

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I was interviewed recently by Michael Hershman of Radio Free Europe about the civil situation in Cuba. My main message is that democracy in some form may well come to Cuba one day but at the moment both the insane US embargo and authoritarian Havana regime makes this very unlikely:

Civil society in Cuba, long-embattled, appears to be gaining new momentum following the death of a political prisoner and fresh support from the Catholic Church.

Recent events have focused attention on Cuba’s imprisoned opposition activists. On February 23, jailed activist Orlando Zapata Tamayo died after a hunger strike lasting more than 80 days. Classified as a political prisoner by Amnesty International after his arrest in 2003, Tamayo had launched his fast to protest prison beatings and other abuses.

The day after his death, another jailed dissident, Guillermo Farinas, began his own hunger strike.

Farinas’s health has since deteriorated, and he has been kept alive through periodic intravenous feedings. Should Farinas die, another activist has already announced he will take up the hunger strike.

Cuba’s Cardinal Jaime Ortega has appealed to Farinas to end his hunger strike.

But earlier this week, the Catholic prelate, in an outspoken interview with a local Catholic newsletter, said Cuba was facing its deepest crisis in years. He urged the communist authorities to free all political prisoners and said there was a national consensus that the government must change — and change “quickly.”

Difficulties Facing Government, Opposition

The Caribbean island state is facing its deepest economic slowdown since the Soviet Union collapsed. Three hurricanes, the global financial crisis, and the continuing trade embargo by the United States have piled further pressure on the authorities.

The Ladies in White take part in a protest march in Havana on March 18.

The wives and mothers of Cuban political prisoners have redoubled protests of their own, hoping to keep the focus on their jailed relatives. This group, called the “Ladies in White” because of their white dress, has been harassed by the authorities.

After years of peaceful Sunday demonstrations, the group was informed two weeks ago that it will need official permission for future protests.

“Not only the hunger strike but the gatherings of the women [Ladies in White], I believe, will have a very powerful political impact,” says Jose Botafogo Goncalves, a longtime Brazilian diplomat and former minister.

“And with international communications today making censorship difficult, news [of what is happening in Cuba] will disseminate through the world media. I believe this will accelerate political transformation in Cuba.”

According to Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a scholar at the California-based Independent Institute and the son of one of Latin America’s leading intellectuals, the Cuban authorities are feeling increasingly under threat at home.

Vargas Llosa says that the effect of recent events have been “so powerful that you’ve seen for the very first time in half a century Castro — in this case Raul Castro — publicly speaking against a domestic opposition. Until now they had even refused to recognize that there was such a thing as a domestic opposition.”

Whatever its international reach, Cuba’s opposition still struggles with its own internal communications.

Due to government policy, less than 5 percent of Cubans are online — one of the lowest rates in Latin America. Journalist Antony Loewenstein says Cuban dissidents have relied on photocopiers more than the Internet to spread their message.

“Their main form of getting information out was through using a photocopier,” Loewenstein says. “Now in many other countries these days you may as well put up flyers around the city, but again most people communicate or get information out — like in Iran, say — by the web, via blogs, via Facebook, via Twitter, whatever it may be. But in Cuba that is simply not the case.”

Not In Vain

Despite these difficulties, Cuba’s opposition seems to have gained new resolve.

Veteran National Public Radio correspondent Tom Gjelten, who has covered Cuban events as well as dissident movements in the former communist world, says he does not expect change to happen quickly.

“Unfortunately I think that the dissident movement in Cuba, unlike the dissident movement in the former Soviet bloc and Eastern Europe, is very weak. People largely are unfamiliar with the dissidents, they don’t have much of a following in Cuba,” Gjelten says.

“I think there is a tremendous amount of alienation and cynicism in Cuba, but I think when the end of that regime comes it’s likely going to come more from people within the regime itself.”

Vargas Llosa, on the other hand, is more optimistic, saying that “the dynamics that destroyed other communist regimes in the last three decades have clearly not been in play with the same force inside Cuba.”

“But for the first time you begin to see something that wasn’t there before which is a certain level of organization, a certain level of resistance, and the willingness to take the sacrifice all the way to actually a life and death situation,” Vargas Llosa adds.

Vargas Llosa says the Cuban hunger strike, at the very least, could redefine the current concept of martyrdom. He says young people today tend to associate the concept of martyrdom with terrorism.

“So the notion that [in] this tiny corner of the world in the Western Hemisphere called Cuba, suddenly a group of people [are] willing to sacrifice their lives,” he says, “not in order to cause harm to anybody else and not for a cause that is delegitimized but is actually quite legitimate — which is the cause of freedom in a country that has been under oppression for 50 years — is really quite remarkable.”

The LA Times notes a small change in Cuba (but in reality, the island will stay remarkably similar until either the Castro brothers die or reform or the Obama administration removes the insane and counter-productive embargo):

So, a Cuban walks into his neighborhood barbershop for a trim and a shave on a Havana afternoon. In all likelihood, haircutter and customer argue about baseball. Maybe they discuss CompaneroCompanero Fidel’s latest column in Granma. When they finish, the newly coiffed client pays for the services in Cuban pesos; about 15% goes to the state for taxes, and the owner legally pockets the rest.

Private profits in communist Cuba? This is no joke. It’s Havana’s latest, limited experiment with the free market. The government is divesting itself of hundreds of state-run barbershops and beauty shops with three workstations or less, turning people who have been wage-earners for decades into small-time entrepreneurs who will pay the state 15% of average revenues in the area for the right to operate. Like some Cuban growers who are allowed to rent stalls from the government in farmers markets, and some cooks who run modest restaurants out of their homes, these hairstylists and manicurists will be entering the world of free-market competition. They will be allowed to set their own prices and presumably will succeed or fail on the quality of their cuts and mani-pedi services. Now, imagine that.

Since the 1959 revolution, Cuba has privatized most of its economy, with about 90% of legal activity now concentrated in government hands. President Raul Castro appears committed to the basic model, at least as long as his big brother is alive. But the latest shift is driven by necessity. In addition to the U.S. trade embargo, Cuba is suffering the same hardships as most other countries in the global recession. Tourism, nickel exports and remittances from the U.S., all of which are key sources of foreign currency, have fallen off. Cuba’s elderly are living longer and the young need jobs. Castro recently declared that the government has a million employees too many on its payroll.

The cautious measures appear designed to relieve some of the pressure on the state without risking political challenge or creating significant private wealth. Furthermore, they are meant to limit opportunities for corruption, to encourage people to work harder and to draw some cash from the illegal, underground economy into government coffers; officials also have approved new licenses for private taxis while cracking down on unauthorized so-called gypsy cabs.

The changes are less ambitious than we’d wish and aren’t irreversible. The government legalized self-employment in several retail services in 1993, then strictly limited the number of licenses available. But for Cubans, who deserve a better standard of living, these are positive steps — profit-making jobs and free-market pedicures.

Fox News interviews reporter Judith Miller recently on the Anat Kamm case. Host Shep Smith seems outraged that supposed democratic Israel would censor information and put an individual under house arrest. “This is very Fidel Castro”, he says. He tells viewers that when anybody says anything even mildly critical of Israel they are accused of anti-Semtism. Miller quickly says that she’s not “anti-Israel” for writing about the case: