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ZNet | Cuba
Discussion on the Cuban Five
by Noam Chomsky
February 26, 2006

Screening of "Mission Against Terror", a documentary about
the Cuban Five. After the showing of the film, Professor
Chomsky answered questions from the audience. For more
information on the on-going case of the Cuban Five, visit
http://www.freethefive.org .

Woman: Since we are in the business of torture, and the
country has swung very far to the right, what are the
realistic chances of getting a fair trial for the five?

Noam Chomsky: Well, first of all it is not really true that
the country has swung far to the right. Though the press
systematically refuses to report it, there are extensive
public opinion studies taken in the United States. We know a
great deal about public opinion, and I can give you some
detail if you like. But what the studies shows,
consistently, is that both political parties and the media
are far to the right of the public on issue after issue, on
a host of issues.

To give one example, the Federal Budget came out yesterday
and today. Well there hasn't been time yet for a study of
public attitude towards this budget, but it's about the same
as the budget that came out a year ago, February 2005. Right
after that the most prestigious institute that studies
public opinion in the world, based in the University of
Maryland, carried out a study of what people thought the
budget ought to be, okay. And it was very striking. It was
the exact inverse of the budget. Where federal spending was
going up, the public wanted to go down: military spending,
supplemental for Iraq and Afghanistan; where spending was
going down, the public wanted to go up: social spending,
health, education, veteran's benefits, renewable energy,
support of the United Nations peacekeeping missions, on and on.

Furthermore, they were an overwhelming majority; and the
scale of cutback and rises . . . increases the public
wanted, were enormous. Well, in a democratic society, one of
the things you want to know is what your neighbor thinks. I
mean if each person says "look, I am some kind of a lunatic,
everything I read is something else," you are not going to
get a functioning democracy. So we, therefore, want to know
what happened to this information. I am willing to bet that
almost none of you saw it. The reason is it was not
published in a single newspaper in the United States, at
least a single newspaper that's accessed by the stadard
database. Well, okay, so people don't know about it. I
suspect the same is true of this budget. And you'll probably
have the same study and the same suppression.

So it just isn't true, I mean there is case after case like
this, it's just not true that the population has swung to
the right. The government has, the parties have, the media
have, the public hasn't. And does that mean they can get a
fair trial? Well, yeah, I tend to agree with Leonard
Weinglass on that, it's possible. Not in Miami, of course.
But can you get fair coverage of it? Well, that's really up
to people like us. If there are delegations at the Boston
Globe day after day saying why don't you publish some of
this stuff, then chances are it'll get published. It's the
same elsewhere. If there is public engagement and
involvement, things change, otherwise, they don't. They'll
keep drifting to the right, and the public will be somewhere
else, with a huge gap between public opinion and public
policy. It's startling, in fact, when you look at it.

Man: Hi, professor Chomsky, I am under the impression there
is a sort of internal American electoral motivation to
appear to be against Cuba in order to keep carrying Florida
or something, can you address the. . . . The various
political parties want to try to keep winning Florida. Can
you address the motivation for us to be so nasty to Cuba?

Noam Chomsky: I don't. . . . I mean, that's certainly a
factor, but it's very minor. We are lucky that we are in a
very free country, the freest country in the world. That
means we have more information about what our government
does, thinks and plans, than any other country in the world.
On the other hand, we are unlucky to be in a highly
indoctrinated society. That means to find out the facts
about this you have to carry out. . . . Virtually carry out
an individual research project, very much like trying to
find out what public opinion is. Well, fortunately that's a
little of an exaggeration, there is some material you can
look at, there is groups working on it and so on. But if you
do look at it, you'll find out what the reasons are. They
are very clear. It goes right back to the time when the
terrorist war began.

Remember, it's not just a terrorist war, it's also combined
with the most extreme embargo that's ever been imposed. It
goes right back to our liberal doves in Camelot, the people
from Boston, Cambridge, you know, MIT and Harvard that went
down to make plans and so on. They picked up from the
Eisenhower administration. Since Cuba liberated itself in
January 1959, within months the Eisenhower administration
formally decided to overthrow the government. And they began
some sabotaging acts, but also an embargo, and they said
exactly why, and now we know, since it's public. The idea is
to punish the people of Cuba, not Castro, because if they
suffered enough, from starvation and disease and so on,
they'd get rid of the government. Okay, so therefore there
had to be efforts to make the population suffer, as the
under secretary of state put it, "they are responsible for
the government, therefore they had to suffer to get them to
overthrow the government."

Well, Kennedy picked that up, immediately. The reasoning was
made explicit, he picked up the same thing, yeah, the
population has to suffer. Kennedy right off launched an
invasion of Cuba, the Bay of Pigs. That was beaten back. The
reaction of the Kennedy administration was, as it was
described there by insiders, as savage. They needed a plan
of action immediately, they couldn't tolerate this defeat.
They instantly launched a major terrorist war, they one Phil
Agee (former CIA agent interviewed in the film) was talking
about, Operation Mongoose, which was a very serious
terrorist war against Cuba. The purpose of it, we know. The
person in charge of it was Robert Kennedy, president's
brother, the attorney general. He took it as his highest
priority, and his goal, in the words of his official
biographer, historian Arthur Schlesinger who was right
inside the administration. His goal was to "bring the
terrors of the earth" to Cuba, so that the people would
really suffer. Well, they almost brought the terrors of the
earth to the entire world. That was one of the major factors
that lead to the missile crisis which came within a hair of
a major nuclear war.

Miraculously we escaped a nuclear war. Immediately, Kennedy
re-launched Operation Mongoose, the terrorist war,
immediately. The reasoning was explained, internally, the
reason for it. I mean, it was a kind of fanaticism which
goes on right to the present, in a minute I'll talk about
this morning's newspaper, where you can see another example
of it. The fanaticism is extreme, and the reason is
explained in the internal documents, the State Department,
the CIA, the liberal. . . . We are not talking about the
right wing here. . . . The liberal administration, Kennedy
and Johnson, their prime concern was what they call Cuba's
"successful defiance of US policies going back 150 years."
It has nothing to do with the Russians. Going back 150
years, which meant to the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe
Doctrine declared that the US would control the hemisphere.
In the 1820s, the US couldn't do it, the deterrent. . . .
The British fleet was in the area, that's why the US never
succeeded in conquering Canada and conquering Cuba and so
on. But the planners recognized that sooner or later that
the US will become powerful enough so that it could chuck
the British aside, move over, and take it over, that's the
Monroe Doctrine. Well, Cuba was engaged in successful
defiance of this doctrine, and you don't tolerate that.
Successful defiance is intolerable.

If you don't understand why, ask your favorite mafia don. If
some small store keeper doesn't pay his money, you don't
just send goons out to get the money, you send them out to
beat him to a pulp, so everyone understand that's not
tolerable behavior. Furthermore there is an additional
problem with Cuba. It's what's called in the internal
planning record "a virus." That's Henry Kissinger's phrase,
"it's contagious, it may spread an infection to others." The
infection is successful independent development. There was
great concern of what they called "the spread of the Castro
idea of taking matters into your own hands." Which would
possibly inspire others in the hemisphere who are suffering
from the same kinds of problems. They might want to do the
same thing, and that's dangerous, the whole system of
control could erode.