CASTRO’S CUBA

by William H. Benson

January 8, 2009

     The Cuban Revolution was amazingly non-violent. On New Year’s Day in 1959, Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator, boarded a jet and took his fortune, as have countless other Cubans, with him to Florida. Fidel Castro, dressed in green army fatigues and cap, sporting a beard, and smoking a cigar, assumed control of the Caribbean island.

     On January 21, more than one million people jammed into the plaza around the Presidential Palace to hear Fidel Castro speak. Someone released a flock of white doves, and then as though choreographed, one of them perched on Fidel’s shoulder, an event that held incredible symbolic power for the Cubans, who associate doves with Obatala, a deity in their African-derived Santeria faith.

     In April of 1959, Castro flew to Washington D.C., where he met with President Eisenhower, and assured Ike that he was not a Communist, but then once back in his country, he herded his opponents before firing squads and drew himself close to Moscow. On January 3, 1961, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Castro’s Cuba.

     In April, the new U.S. President John Kennedy approved a CIA plan to invade the country at the Bay of Pigs, using Cuban refugees, but because he refused to approve any U.S. Naval support, Castro easily crushed the invasion. In October of 1962, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of the island until Khrushchev removed the Soviet’s missiles, bringing the world close to a nuclear Armageddon.

     The Americans soon discovered that they were dealing with a formidable opponent. “Castro had unquestionable qualities of leadership. Endowed with an extraordinary gift of oratory and an exceptional memory, he would speak extemporaneously for hours.” The lynchpin of his foreign policy was to avoid all U.S. “Yankee” influence; he would be content if he could row his island far out into the Atlantic.

     The severing of political relations and the U.S. embargo has resulted in a deep political chasm between the two countries, with mutually bad feelings on both sides, and has driven the Cuban people into a life of deprivation and shortages. The Cuban people are paid in pesos, which can only buy rationed items, but if they can ever get their hands on U.S. dollars, they can buy cell phones, televisions, and washers and dryers.

     In 1989, James Michener, the novelist, toured Cuba, and was struck by two things: all the buildings needed a fresh coat of paint, and the lawns needed mowing, for he soon learned that paint and lawnmowers are not readily available in Cuba.

     Also, Michener noted that the few cars on the streets and highways were are all vintage 1950’s models, for no U.S.-manufactured cars have been sold in the country since the Revolution. Proud of their “cacharros,” the Cuban people continue to repair and then drive them whenever they can afford and find the gasoline.

     Out of fear of imprisonment, torture, and death, the Cuban people have learned to not complain, but the discontented and the ambitious try to escape the island on pitiful rafts.

     Castro’s government did get some things right, such as in education and health care. The Revolution has improved the literacy rate from the 40% during Batista’s reign to close to 98% now, and there are 80,000 doctors for a population of 11.3 million. But this raises crucial questions: “Why educate people so well and then deny them access to the Internet, to travel, and to the opportunity to apply their skills? Why give them a great education and no life?”

     For the past two years, Fidel’s younger brother, Raul, has headed the Cuban government, but he has done little other than tinker with what Fidel left him. And Fidel has not been seen in public since November of 2006.

     The Revolution is now fifty years old, and Castro has outfoxed ten U.S. Presidents, but even though Barack Obama has promised a different, softer policy with Cuba, changing it will not be easy. One Cuban-American in Little Havana in Miami suggested that Obama should simply: “Lift the embargo unilaterally, put the onus on Cuba. If we negotiate, what do we want from them? They have very little to give.”

     Others are not optimistic. “Cuba is a disaster,” said Jaime Suchlicki, a Cuban historian, “but it will not fall apart. . . . Every past rapprochement has turned to rancor.”

There is no reason to think that Obama will succeed with Cuba where ten other Presidents have failed.   

1968

by Wiliam H. Benson

December 25, 2008

     On January 20, 1968, the Vietcong attacked five of Vietnam’s six major cities, most of its provincial capitals, and fifty towns. The Tet Offensive caught the American and South Vietnam forces by surprise, but within a week they had taken back all the cities and towns that had been lost. It was not the spectacular defeat that the media suggested it was.

     In the following weeks, Congressmen, Senators, and members of the media, such as Walter Cronkite, began to call for an end to the war. Cronkite suggested that negotiation was “the only rational way out.” Public opinion swayed against the war.

     In early March at the New Hampshire primary, the relatively little known Senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, won 42% of the vote, nearly defeating President Lyndon Johnson. McCarthy was running for President with only a single idea: if elected he would end the war in Vietnam immediately.

     On March 16, Robert F. Kennedy announced that he too would run for President, terrifying Johnson, who understood that Bobby’s political draw was greater than even McCarthy’s. Aides to the President told Johnson that he would lose the Wisconsin primary on April 2.

     On Sunday morning, March 31, Martin Luther King gave a moving sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C.: “It seems to me I can hear the God of history saying, ’That was not enough! But I was hungry and ye fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not . . . “

     That same Sunday, at night, LBJ spoke to the nation on television and announced that he would stop bombing almost all of North Vietnam, and that he was inviting the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table. Then, he surprised everyone when he said, “I shall not seek and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” Knowing he could not win the election, LBJ chose to step aside.

     On Wednesday, April 3, in Atlanta at the Masonic Temple, Martin Luther King gave another rousing sermon: “Because I’ve been to the mountaintop, . . . And He’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I have seen the promised land.”

     The next day, Thursday, April James Earl Ray, an escaped convict, shot and killed Martin Luther King while he was standing on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel.

     On June 4, Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, shot Bobby Kennedy while he was walking through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, just minutes after he had given a speech to his supporters for winning the California primary election.

     Later that summer of 1968, the Democrats convened in Chicago. Anti-war protestors marched in Grant Park until Mayor Richard Daley sent in his henchmen to club and gas these Yippies. The mayor was denounced from the podium of the Democratic convention for “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”

     In November the republican candidate, Richard Nixon, won the election, and little did the American public know, but he would greatly expand the war, resume bombing North Vietnam, and even send in troops into Laos and Cambodia.

     On December 21, 1968, three men—James Lovell, William Anders, Frank Borman—atop Apollo 8 blasted off a Florida launching pad, bound for the moon, 240,000 and three days away. They would orbit the moon in a rehearsal for a lunar landing next summer.

     “All of a sudden,” Lovell said, “just sixty-nine miles below, the ancient craters of the far side of the moon were slowly slipping by. We forgot the flight plan. We were like three kids in a candy store window.”

     On Christmas Eve these three astronauts, the first men to be in a lunar orbit, took turns reading to an estimated billion people who were listening back on Earth the first ten verses of the first chapter of Genesis: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. . . . And God saw that it was good.”

     The year 1968 had been a horrible year—a divisive unpopular war, political maneuvering, student unrest, and two horrific assassinations—and yet the year ended on a hopeful and positive note, like a band that has missed all the notes in the song except the last one.

     Have a very Merry Christmas, and may your 2009 be a very happy one.        

SMALLPOX

by William H. Benson

December 11, 2008

     The World Health Organization certified on December 9, 1979 that small pox had been eradicated. Two years before, WHO officials had vaccinated a hospital cook stricken with the disease in Merka, Somalia, and even though the same officials continued treating all other suspected rashes, they never found another case. A disease that had caused great horror among human beings for centuries was gone.

     Caused by the variola virus, it is spread from person to person through the air by inhaling droplets expelled by someone infected Two weeks later, the person aches, runs a fever, and develops a rash that turns into thousands of pustules. Blindness, disfigurement, and death can occur, but fortunately once infected, a person cannot get the disease again.

     Repeatedly, epidemics devastated Europe, Asia, and Africa over the centuries, and when introduced into North and South America, it decimated entire villages. Cotton Mather, the minister at the Old North Church in Boston during the eighteenth century, observed that beginning in 1630 a smallpox epidemic had appeared in New England every twelve years, with one exception—the year 1714. By 1721, he knew it was due.

     It struck Boston with vengeance in April of that year, when an infected sailor from the ship Seahorse, supposedly quarantined on a nearby island, was seen walking about Boston’s streets. Within weeks, cases began appearing, and people began dying. 

     Cotton Mather struck back. He had heard about a method to prevent the disease from his African servant, Onesimus, who showed Cotton the scar on his arm from when he was inoculated when in his youth and living in Africa among his tribe, the Guramantese.

      “People take Juice of Small-pox; cutty skin, and putt in a Drop; then by’nd by a little sicky, sicky; then very few little things like Small-pox; and no body die of it; and no body have Small-pox any more.”

     Mather wrote about this remedy in a pamphlet he entitled Wonderful Practice and that he dated June 6, 1721. He convinced only a single Boston physician, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, to try it, and by December, Boylston had inoculated some 300 people. Only one of them had died, a Mrs. Dixwell, but due to other health issues.

     By December of 1721, the epidemic had infected 5889 people in all of New England, and of those 844 had died.

     In the late eighteenth century, inoculation gave way to vaccination when Edward Jenner, an English scientist, began using the discharge from the pox on cows who had cowpox, for he had observed that dairymaids who had had cowpox did not get small pox.

     By the middle of the twentieth century, “mass vaccination” had rid Europe and North America of the waves of a small pox epidemic, but in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brazil, Africa, and Indonesia it was difficult to get 100% of the population vaccinated.

     An outbreak in Nigeria in 1966 began the evolution of a new strategy called “surveillance and containment.” Once notified that a village had a case of small pox, officials would swiftly rush in and vaccinate those immediately close to the infected person and then those that surrounded them and so on in ever widening concentric circles. They discovered that this strategy could break the transmission chain of smallpox, even when less than half the population was vaccinated.

     What eventually eliminated smallpox was a combined approach of using mass vaccination to reduce the disease’s incidence so that surveillance and containment could eliminate the few remaining pockets of outbreaks.

     “The global eradication of smallpox in 1977 ranks as one of the greatest triumphs in modern medicine, science, and public health.” Although two cases of smallpox occurred in England in 1978 as a result of a laboratory accident, it was gone as a naturally transmitted disease.

A SHORT READING LIST

by William H. Benson

November 13, 2008

     In the June 1, 2008 edition of the New York Times Book Review, nineteen living authors were asked to suggest certain books for the, at that time, three Presidential candidates: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and John McCain.

     The authors’ suggested reading list is worth repeating here and now and might be appropriate reading material for all the recently elected officials—including our next President as well as the incoming Senators, and Congressmen and women. They have two months to read and prepare themselves for the extraordinary jobs ahead.

     One author suggested Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “the timeless tale of how untethered ambition and early predictions may carry a large price tag.”

     Another suggested Joe Haldeman’s novel based upon events in the Vietnam War, The Forever War, lest we forget “the young people we’ve damned to this folly we call Iraq.”

     Scott Turow offered Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, saying it is “the fullest rendering I know of the complexity of human motivation and thus a precious warning against seeing the world as full of villains.”

     His second choice would be any book about the Swedish warship Vasa that was “completed in 1628 and envisioned by King Gustavus Adophus as the most formidable military vessel in history. It sank after sailing less than a mile, drowning dozens of crew members. Many were aware that the vessel was unstable, but all were terrified of breaking the news to the king.”

     Another author suggested any volume by Miss Manners, “who reminds a reader that civility matters, even in presidential campaigns.”

     They should read, one author said, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, written by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. “A half-century of research in psychology has shown that we all overtrust our memory, judgment, and rectitude. Nothing could be more important in a president than an awareness of this universal flaw.”

     Garry Wills offered Samuel Johnson’s essays. “To John McCain he suggested Rambler No. 11, on anger in old age; to Obama he suggested Rambler No. 196, on the illusions of young hope; and to Clinton he presented Rambler No. 79, on demonizing one’s opponents.”

     John Irving thought that McCain should read Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn, an account of the utter folly of Gen. George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. “With any luck, and stubborn though he is, he might learn that engaging the enemy isn’t always such a swell idea.”

     Francine Prose suggested the Norton Anthology of American Literature and read the words and thoughts of Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain, as “a crash course in who—as a nation—we are, and how we got to be this way.”

     Another author thought that she should personally hand out copies of Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, examples of great nations who defied their own self-interest and ended up committing egregious mistakes: Great Britain losing its North American colonies, and the United States fighting to a loss in Vietnam.

     To the above list, I would suggest that President-elect Obama reread The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith’s astonishing idea that an “invisible hand” guides businessmen best. “By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”

     Finally, I would recommend that he pick up Carl Sandburg’s three-volume biography on Abraham Lincoln, especially upon the sixteenth president’s handling of the war against the rebellious states and how he maneuvered his cabinet and his generals and how he controlled his own emotions. Contained within these volumes are timeless lessons upon diplomacy, recognizing others’ feelings, and dedicating oneself to a goal. “[A]s God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.”

PRESIDENTIAL INTELLECT

by William H. Benson

October 30, 2008

     At the founding of our nation and the creation of the government, the intellectuals ruled. Madison, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton had each read the political treatises of the European thinkers, men such as John Locke and Jean Jacque Rousseau, as well as the Greek and Roman political philosophers. That the Founding Fathers had done their homework was evident when they wrote first the Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution. The intellectuals were the elite.

     That did not remain true, especially when Andrew Jackson and his popular form of democracy claimed the Presidency. The night of his inauguration the common people—frontiersmen and rogues alike—stormed into the White House and trashed it. Intellect for a season was checked and replaced with arbitrary decisions and unrestrained power.

     Abraham Lincoln was a self-taught intellect, arguably the best writer and thinker of all our Presidents, and yet, he was first and foremost a politician.

     Lincoln’s general, Ulysses S. Grant, proved himself a brilliant military strategist during the Civil War but an abject failure as a President, who then partially redeemed himself with his Memoirs, an outstanding example of military biography.

     Woodrow Wilson was a historian and a political scientist at Princeton, before becoming Princeton’s president, then the governor of the state of New Jersey, and finally the President of the United States. In spite of his intellect, he was cold, reserved, impersonable, and unbending, such that his Presidency faltered and ended in disgrace.

     Franklin Roosevelt in the early days of his New Deal gathered a privy council, which a reporter dubbed the Brain Trust, to advise him on the intricacies of global and national economics. Indeed, the experts and the intellects “seemed to have free access to the White House while the President kept the politicians at arm’s length.” Not a bad idea.

     The intellectuals then loved Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois, when he ran for President in 1952 and 1956, embracing him “with a readiness and a unanimity that seems without parallel in American history,” and yet the common people loved Dwight D. Eisenhower more.

     Kennedy peopled his cabinet with his own Brain Trust, young men, brash and action-oriented, from the big business world and the universities, men such as Douglas Dillon, Robert McNamara, and Dean Rusk. One day at a meeting of the intellects, Kennedy observed that never before had more intelligent people gathered at one time in the White House, “except when Jefferson dined alone.”

     Carter was knowledgeable about each of the issues, but his Presidency was mired in galloping inflation, a crippled military, a hostage crisis in Iran, and a stagnant economy. Reagan did not possess Carter’s encyclopedic grasp of the facts, but his talent was to perceive the crucial point of each issue and then communicate that to the people.

     Clinton was a Rhodes scholar, a graduate of Georgetown and of Yale Law School, who taught law at Arkansas’s law school before running for governor. His wisdom, training, and breadth of knowledge of the economy and foreign and national policy made for a good government—a balanced budget, low unemployment, slight inflation, and positive economic growth—despite his personal moral lapses.

     When told of the attack upon Iraq in March of 2003, Paul O’Neill, George W. Bush’s first Secretary of Treasury, said, “Trust me, they haven’t thought this through.” Indeed, they had not, and the dire results of this rash decision were quickly evident and still are.

        And now it is either Obama or McCain. Who has the greater intellect, the more focused mental acuity, and the wisdom to gather advice and build a good government?

     Newsweek‘s Fareed Zakaria reported last week that “Throughout the campaign, McCain has been volatile and impulsive. He moves suddenly and unpredictably. By contrast, Barack Obama has been steady and reasoned. McCain’s campaign has been chaotic and ineffective, while Obama has run a superb operation, and done so with little of the drama and discord that usually plague political machines.”

     On Tuesday, the electorate will vote and decide: either for “volatile and impulsive,” or for “steady and reasoned.” We can only hope that by the election process we, the people of the United States, will in return receive a measure of intelligence and of “good government.”