Cuba And Radicalism

Reading your special issue, Cuba: The Invasion and Its Consequences, was indeed a painful experience. In the aftermath of the Cuban “fiasco” surely more could be expected from a magazine that claims to be democratic socialist and radical than this equivocal scolding of the Administration and the recommendation of a set of proposals, the first of which is to reimburse the American investors in Cuba for their losses. (Even Business Week, which supports the Administration plan for government reimbursement of future nationalization, did not have the audacity to suggest such a proposal.)

My chief complaint, however, is the total vacuum in which the article is written and the facile dismissal of any attempt to set a context for U.S. foreign policy as “pseudo-Marxist” or “corrupted Marxist,” etc. Although Walzer opens the article by pointing out that the U.S. throughout its history has treated Latin America as a colony, he continues to assume that Castro’s anti-Americanism was a “fantasy-ridden world view” and some kind of xenophobia. He also comes to the unsupported conclusion that the Government has learned its lesson with the Cuban invasion and that we may now expect a radically different policy.

There are several underlying assumptions in the article which are completely incompatible with democratic radicalism. 1) The assumption that a complete and unequivocal condemnation of American foreign policy is R...