Castro Worship at Counterpunch

Say this for Counterpunch, Alexander Cockburn’s ultra-leftist newsletter: it’s pretty funny. Not intentionally, of course. But there’s no other way to describe the recent series of interviews – if that is an appropriate term for the slavering exercises in hero-worship Counterpunch publishes under the title – that the newsletter has conducted with Ricardo Alarcon Quesada.

An Interview with Ricardo Alarcon (Part I)

An Interview with Ricardo Alarcon (Part II)

Quesada, who is, tellingly, both the vice president and president of the Cuban National Assembly, is among the more faithful of Castro’s running dogs. As such, he does el Commandante’s bidding with a disdain for reality so assiduous that one is compelled, by a kind of perverse mystification, to reproduce a portion of it. Here is the representative of that miserable little tyranny at once threatening the United States and rewriting Cuban history:

"It will cost a lot of lives if the Americans would attack us, more than those dying in Iraq, because this is not a divided country or society that has been suffering under a dictatorial regime. The opposite is true. You will find here a free society, finally emancipated from half a century of oppression and corruption imposed by the US. We attained our independence in 1959 – from US domination. That is a fact of history."

Quesada’s interviewer, one Saul Landau, does not challenge these "facts," presumably because he believes them to be accurate. Come to think of it, he doesn’t even challenge Quesada’s job description as a member of the "National Assembly." Precisely how, one wonders, does a rubber-stamp legislature representing only one party, the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), qualify as an assembly? One explanation for Mr. Landau’s reluctance to engage his interviewee on the points is that he is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, about whose long record of coddling Cuba more can be read here. That Counterpunch considers it worthwhile to give space to Cuban propaganda is nonetheless no great surprise. To adopt Mencken’s adage, no one ever went broke underestimating the ability of Counterpunch to kowtow to Castro.