Stalinist Cubans Fighting Revolutionary Criticism (I)

By Dmitri Prieto

Stalin’s “cult of personality” is “old well-dried shit,” as German-American writer Charles Bukowski once said.

If one reads “Un grano de maíz” (A grain of corn), the book that contains an interview of Fidel Castro by Tomas Borge, it is clear that the commander-in-chief choose to explicitly state his disagreement with Stalin’s ways of “making socialism.”

The Cuban leader’s critical attack included among his targets the infamous secret protocol of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact through which Soviet Union and the Third Reich carved up all of Eastern and Central Europe.

The signing of that accord facilitated the Nazi’s attack on Poland and the “official” beginning of the Second World War in Europe.  (However, that war had begun years before in Asia with the Japanese attack on Manchuria, and in Africa with the fascist Italian occupation of Ethiopia.

However, as we know, Euro-American culture is myopic; so myopic that the “official” chronology of World War II does not include the “civil” slaughter in Spain in which Nazis and other fascists participated, which was even captured on canvas in a painting by Picasso; nor does it include the abhorrent Munich Pact, in which the democracies of the West counterbalanced in advance the future treachery of “socialist” Stalin when they abandoned Czechoslovakia – the only living democracy in Central Europe – to nationalist-dictatorial appetites.)

Therefore, Cuban television has featured reports from Poland by journalist Julio Acanda in homage to the 70th anniversary of the fateful date of September 1, 1939 – which marked the German invasion of that country and the outbreak of World War II.

Julio Acanda is a good journalist, very critical and well respected.  But from what I’ve seen up until now, he hasn’t mentioned the Nazi-Bolshevik pact in his reports.

Nor has he touched on the time following the invasion and partition of Poland when two red flags waved side by side: one with the golden hammer and sickle and the other with the black swastika.

In fact, they waved together some time, and in more than just one soccer match between the armies of “socialists” “friends.”  Thank God such an outrage did not last for a long time.  In fact, I am surprised by the cruel and sad irony of the sentence I have just written, because their conspiracy was ended only with the German attack on the USSR during the summer solstice of 1941.

Julio Acanda doesn’t know that history?  False.  And if he didn’t know it, more than one Pole should remind him of the facts.

Despite Stalin’s cult of “old well-dried shit,” he survives in Cuba as a particular social structure, which – to be demonstrated – one needs only turn to the charismatic icon of that revolutionary Georgian turned Russian dictator.