Remaking Antigone : the Cuba Five
"I will do my duty, - and yours if you will not - to a brother. I will
never be false to him." (1) So says Sophocles' protagonist Antigone.
Listen, twenty five hundred years on, this too is the voice of
humanity:
"At this precise moment the world is witnessing the clearest
demonstration of double morality by a government which on the one hand
frenetically condemns terrorism, incites wars under the pretext of
fighting terrorism and on the other hand imprisons five Cubans fighting
against terrorism and protects the main terrorist active in this
continent, Luis Posada Carriles.... in the name of my fellow relatives,
now that we have no room for more grief in ourselves, we appeal to the
sensitivity of the noble and generous people of the United States to
stop the shameful disgrace of setting a terrorist free...", the voice
of Carlos Alberto Cremata (2) at a commemoration of the terrorist
bombing of a Cuban airliner in which over 70 people were killed
including his father.
Most people in the United States and its allied countries will almost
certainly not have heard this voice. Humanity's voice is one the
corporate media regularly censor when its message is inconvenient to
the people whose interests they serve and protect. UN forces are once
more murdering innocent people in Haiti. Israel continues its genocide
against the Palestinians. Criminal aggression continues against
civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US and its allies never cease to
collude with dictatorships from Pakistan to Equatorial Guinea to Egypt.
Its fascist allies in Mexico are currently murdering and raping unarmed
peaceful demonstrators in Oaxaca with impunity.
In such a grim context, perhaps the fate of the five Cuban
anti-terrorists (3) infamously imprisoned by the morally corrupt,
racist, cynical United States justice system may seem insignificant.
With such enormous injustice happening by the minute elsewhere,
attempts to focus the wholly justifiable outrage and protest necessary
to achieve justice for the five men concerned may seem futile. But
perhaps in fact one should think somewhat differently. The very fact
that the Five have faced down the grotesque banality of US government
hypocrisy in its own streets, in the guts of its wretchedly hollow
legal system, makes their heroism as effective in its own way as
people's heroic resistance in Oaxaca, Palestine, Haiti and Iraq.
To bury one's dead
Antigone was condemned to die of starvation walled up in a sealed cell.
Her crime was to seek to bury her dead brother in accordance with the
customary rites. Since their arrest in September 1998, the Cuban Five
have been walled up in their cells, sealed off from their families.
When they originally set out to uncover US government supported terror
networks attacking their country, only part of their mission faced the
future, anticipating new attacks.
The symbolic impact of their bravery, knowing that at any time they
might be discovered and killed by the murderers they were
investigating, represented too a homage to the dead. Not just the
victims of the airline bombing who perished at the hands of assassins
like Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch : over three thousand
Cubans have been killed by US promoted terrorism over the years. The
sacrifice of the Cuban Five is both a homage to those three thousand
and a challenge that their memory be duly and rightly honoured.
Their challenge puts on trial the supreme hypocrisy of the United
States in all its official spheres. Their case throws the US justice
system into disrepute at least as seriously as the cases of the
hundreds of men imprisoned in Guantanamo. The recent farcical collapse
of the trial of Colombian guerrilla Simon Trinidad (4) reminds us that
what the US is presenting to the world in all these cases is the
spectacle of Stalinist or Nazi style show trials. The US authorities
want to look tough, authoritative, self-confident. But everything about
their behaviour reeks of the spurious, the fake and specious, of
illegitimacy.
Globalizing illegality, immorality
In some ways the case of the Five is similar to those of courageous US
political prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier (5) and
many, many others. Perhaps the main difference is that with the Five
the US government is trying to stake out yet one more claim to absolute
arbitrary power. The imperialist monster is no longer satisfied with
imposing racist injustice within its own borders. As the stunning
illegality of the "extraordinary rendition" torture program shows, the
US government wants to globalise the abolition of habeas corpus in
parallel with "preventive" military aggression against strategically
useful or resource-rich victims.
But as happened to the tyrant Creon in Sophocles' play, or in Humphrey
Bogart's brilliant portrayal (6) of moral collapse at the end of
the film of "the Caine Mutiny", the world is walking out on the United
States. The country's political leadership long, long ago fell into
contempt in the eyes of most of the rest of the world as votes in the
UN General Assembly demonstrate with monotonous regularity. US leaders
look into the mirror of their corporate media and still get told they
are the most powerful and righteous of all. Like an ageing gunslinger
in some cheap, made-for-TV western, the old homicide still commands
forced respect, just. But out of sight and earshot people make their
own plans regardless. Its enemies look on in scorn as the US military
titan teeters on moral feet of clay from one crisis to the next.
True friends of the US, people like Carlos Alberto Cremata, like people
all around the world are waiting for this monstrous doppelganger to
vanish, to wither away into dust so what they recognise in all
sincerity as the noble and generous people of the United States can
return their country to humanity. The words of Antigone and Cremata
reach out in sisterhood and brotherhood across time and genocidal
economic sanctions, putative anti-immigrant walls and the torture rooms
at Guantanamo. They recognize nobility and generosity well beyond the
ken of functionaries, bureaucrats and judges.
These willingly let themselves be gagged and bound by faith-based codes
whose absolute presuppositions - that government acts in good faith,
that government faithfully represents the people - are very clearly
absurd and whose byzantine interpretation permits every kind of
deceitful, dishonest, immoral manouevre. No one is surprised that US
governments - Republican or Democrat - should at every step act to lead
the reputation of the United States deeper and deeper into disrepute.
There is no end to their criminality because they are gangsters who
recognise no other rationality except what they have the power to do.
They re-enact Thucydides' account of the sack of Melos (7) as
interpreted by Teddy Roosevelt and "Big Bill" Taft, by Al Capone and
Meyer Lansky, by Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, Anastasio Somoza and
Papa Doc Duvalier, by Sese Mobutu or Ferdinand Marcos, by Dick Cheney
and Donald Rumsfeld. From one gangster to another the names are readily
interchangeable, their legacy identical : misery, havoc, death.
Posada Carriles : terror hinge
One has only to remember that the Bush regime and its allies, like John
Howard and Tony Blair, are so cynical that they expose many thousands
of their own servicemen and women to radiation poisoning even though
they know very well reliable science has already demonstrated beyond
doubt the appalling short and long term effects of exposure to
depleted uranium munitions. These polticians are utterly
amoral. If they do that to their own soldiers, clearly they will
perpetrate any horror on peoples who resist their will. They behave as
if they were nietzschean Supermen, beyond good and evil, zipping
through the skies in government jets, far above the merely human crowds
mired in reality below. From Iraq to New Orleans to Haiti or Palestine,
self-evidently human life means nothing to these global-elite frauds,
unless of a variety that can be fooled by fear-mongering into voting
them into power from one election to the next.
A fitting cipher for the global elite's sadistic political practice is
the sinister figure of Luis Posada Carriles, self-confessed
mass-murderer, torturer and co-organizer with Oliver North and others
of the US government's terror campaign against Nicaragua after his
escape from prison in Venezuela in 1983. Posada Carriles is currently
under arrest in the US on immigration charges. His own case is
intimately entwined with that of the Five. Perhaps the most
extraordinary thing about Posada Carriles is why the US government
protects this murderer. All the relevant international legal
commitments of the US government indicate that Posada Carriles should
be returned to Venezuela to face trial for the murder by bombing of
over 70 civilian passengers on board a Cuban airliner flying out of
Caracas in 1976.
What does Posada have on the US government that they do not return him
for trial in Venezuela? One of the more plausible conspiracy theories
on the Dallas assassination of J.F.Kennedy in 1963 puts
anti-Castro Cuban exiles into the frame so as to explain the infamous
"magic bullet" supposedly fired by Lee Harvey Oswald all on his own.
Posada Carriles and his cronies were raw from the Bay of Pigs debacle
back then. Is this what murderers like Posada Carriles and Orlando
Bosch, long left to wander freely in Miami, have on the Texan political
mafia of which the Bush family are leading lights? (8) That would
certainly explain the repeated actions of different members of the Bush
family over decades to protect Posada Carriles and Bosch, as well as
the vicious treatment of the Cuban Five.
The 5 and the "war on terror"
Such speculation apart, one has to contend with the sheer
vindictiveness of US government ersatz-legal overkill, deceit and
cruelty against the Five. It is as if the Bush regime is venting on the
Five and their families the accumulated concentrated bile of nearly
fifty years of pathetic failure from one US government administration
to the next to defeat the Cuban revolution. They mounted hundreds of
anti-Castro assassination attempts and thousands of indiscriminate
terrorist attacks as well nearly 50 years of criminal economic
sanctions deliberately targeting the general Cuban population. Despite
it all, Cuba now sits above Mexico in the UN Human Development Index
making nonsense of the nauseating "free market" promotional flim-flam
propagated endlessly by the international corporate media. Over the
next few days Fidel Castro is celebrating his 80th birthday in Havana,
respected by most of the world as an emblematic humanitarian and symbol
of resistance to the rapacious greed of failed corporate capitalism.
The Five's indefatigable defence lawyers led by Leonard Weinglass (9)
have refused to succumb to dismay in the face of the relentless
dishonesty of ideologically driven Bush regime prosecutors and
roller-coaster judicial rulings that lurch from condemnation to
vindication and back again.. Outside the US, the UN Working Group on
Arbitrary Detentions ruled in 2005 that the US government should act to
remedy the injustices apparent in the original trial.. On August 9th
that same year, an appeal court, agreeing with the UN Working Group's
opinion, reversed the convictions and ordered a new trial. That
decision itself has been reviewed and a decision in August this year
returned the case to the apellate court so the Five face a further
excruciatingly long drawn out process of legal argument that could last
for as long as two years or more.
Overseeing the government's prosecution case is Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales, architect of the specious legal arguments for the
Bush regime's use of torture and general trashing of the Geneva
Conventions and other long established international humanitarian and
human rights norms. So there is a direct link between the "war on
terror" and the show trial prosecution of the Five. Both are
thoroughly bogus. Both are designed to facilitate wider political and
economic ideological aims. The Bush regime's assault on the physical
and moral integrity of the five Cuban anti-terrorists obviously stems
from the deeply rooted terrorist ethic of the US government itself -
"do what we want or else..."
The undying distinction of the Five is their admirable dignity and the
absence of hatred they have consistently shown. They are as relentless
in their integrity as the Bush regime is incorrigible in its
wretched hypocrisy. The Five are rewriting Sophocles' script for
Antigone. The harder the Bush regime flunkeys work to seal up the Five
in their prison cells, subjecting them to savage illegal punitive
measures and denying them family visits, the more isolated and
contemptible the US government becomes before world opinion. Perhaps
before too long a majority of the US people will finally wake up to the
domestic social and economic disaster and the catastrophic foreign
policy debacle their corporate one-party political system has brought
upon them.
When they finally do snap out of it, Antonio, Fernando, Gerardo,
Ramón and René will probably be among the first to
greet them.
Notes
1."Antigone", by Sophocles. Cribbed from the translation by R.C.Jebb.
2. http://www.ain.cubaweb.cu/2006/febrero/07edcarta.htm
3. www.freethefive.org and
www.counterpunch.org/alarcon08272005.html and
www.counterpunch.org/alarcon07232005.html
4. http://www.anncol.org/es/site/doc.php?id=2637 and
upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/474/1/
5. Leonard Peltier - www.freepeltier.org. Mumia
Abu Jamal - www.mumia.org
6. www.filmsite.org/cain.htm
7. In his history of the Pelopponesian War Thucydides famously reports
Athenian delegates to the besieged city of Melos saying, "The powerful
do what they have the power to do. The weak accept what they have to
accept."
8.
http://milfuegos.blogspot.com/2006/04/jfk-assassination-and-bushs-refusal-to.html
9. www.counterpunch.org/weinglass01132006.html and
www.counterpunch.org/pertierra04272006.html
10. www.trabajadores.cubaweb.cu/
antiterrorists_ingles/historia/official.htm