[Peace-discuss] Gore Vidal on world/Us history.

[Morton K. Brussel]

Gore Vidal is always interesting, and entertaining. Lightheartedly,  
he skewers standard explanations of historical events.
He may even be right most of the time.
This from Counrterpunch.
It could have used some editing.  --mkb

"I'm Jealous of Cuba"
An Interview with Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal interviewed by
Rosa Mariam Elizalde
January 19, 2007
CounterPunch
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Havana – Gore Vidal was in Cuba for five days, following a frantic  
and packed program that took him from the University of Computer  
Sciences, the Latin American School of Medicine, the University of  
Havana's main campus, to the National Ballet School, from Old Havana  
to the park in honor of John Lennon where a bronze replica of the  
lead Beatle is found, seated as if he were a nearby neighbor.


For the brief span of an hour, Gore Vidal agreed to chat with us for  
this interview. He is the most erudite American writer of his  
generation and the most corrosive critic of the present Republican  
administration. But Vidal does not simply speak to us. He interprets  
what he says. Modulating his voice, he brings to life George W. Bush,  
Eisenhower, FDR, an obscure Pentagon bureaucrat, and even himself,  
mocking all of them with the irony contained in a visage that belies  
his 81 years of age.

He is more interested in being remembered as an historian than as a  
novelist. Although his works easily triple his age (we can find in  
his bibliography novels, tragedies, comedies, memoirs, essays, film  
and television screenplays), he has a singular obsession: the loss of  
the Republic. "The main bit of wisdom that I learned from Thomas  
Jefferson, and he from Montesquieu, is that we cannot maintain both a  
Republic and an Empire simultaneously. We have been rapacious  
imperialists since the Mexican War in 1846."

The Birth of an Empire

RM: In Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams and Jefferson, you  
talked about the first imperialist war in modern history, with the  
intervention of the United States in Cuba. Was the island the desired  
treasure?

GV: American imperialist history started long before. It was  
inevitable that the original English settlers, not to mention the  
Dutch and the French who occupied the eastern seaboard of the US,  
would look west where there was more wealth. It's curious that the  
only American president that liked democracy, Thomas Jefferson, was  
the first to push the limits of the Constitution. We have to  
recognize that our founding fathers hated democracy and they hated  
tyranny so they made sure we wouldn't have a Hitler and we wouldn't  
have chaos, which is how they thought the Athens of Pericles was.
Ironically the third president, Thomas Jefferson, who gave us our  
identity in the declaration of independence, had recourse to weapons.  
He not simply told us that all men are created equal, but that they  
have inalienable
rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. No government had  
ever said that before. So we began in a rather special place, it  
didn't last long thanks to Jefferson, he bought up that which is now  
20 States and made the famous Louisiana purchase. Millions of people  
were added to the US because of the vast amount of land that he  
bought, rather illegally. And so, we just aimed west and inevitably  
we were going to turn imperial against our neighbors. The first of  
our neighbours that we attacked was Mexico in 1846 en route to what  
we really wanted which was California and that was at the time of  
President [James] Polk.

RM: Up to that time the Americans had been furious land conquerors,  
but only in their own continent.

GV: Our first deliberate imperial president, (Jefferson was a  
reluctant imperialist), was Theodore Roosevelt, and he was looking  
around for more property to add to the US, which is where Cuba comes  
in. Theodore Roosevelt was ambitious and very imperial. In the summer  
recess of those golden days (I was brought up in Washington DC) the  
heat was so great that the entire government left town, we've never  
had such peace, such prosperity as when the American government was  
on vacation. During that time however, something happened on this  
island when a certain battle ship of the US was sunk and the yellow  
press of William Randolph Hearst blamed it on the Cubans, because in  
back of the Cubans was the Spanish Empire which was our real target.  
Cuba was used to inspire an anti-Spain sentiment that would justify  
the involvement of the US in the war. Hearst claimed that he had made  
it up, but it was actually Teddy Roosevelt who pulled the strings of  
those events.
First as William McKinley's vice president, and later, when he died,  
as president of the United States. So, Roosevelt and several friends,  
one of them Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, very powerful in the Senate;  
and another one, Henry Adams, our great philosopher of history, they  
decided that we really should expand. Adams said, "Whoever controls  
Shanxi province in China" – which is now Manchuria and parts of  
Korea – "controls the world,"
because it is the richest section in minerals, in mining, in energy  
and the Chinese empire was crashing. All of Europe was trying to get  
a piece of China and we decided we'd get our piece.

RM: Cuba was a stepping stone to reach the Philippines.

GV: Yes. That's when we made an alliance with the Philippine  
insurgents, revolutionaries, who wanted to separate from Spain in  
order to have their own republic. We promised them we would do it, we  
would have a "noble"
movement in the United States called Cuba Libre, which was the  
official motto of the Spanish American War, which in the end had  
nothing to with Cuba Libre, which ended up as a rather disagreeable  
drink of rum and coca cola.

RM: So, they went marching off to war

GV: So he went to war; the first thing Roosevelt did – McKinley was  
out of Washington –  was to send our fleet to Manila, to "help" the  
insurgents. He lied to them. He made them think that we were going to  
establish a Philippine government and then we didn't, so Spain is now  
finished as an imperial power. The United States, with McKinley and  
Teddy, opened a new stage of imperial American expansion, and  
continued the greatest comedy in our history.

Hypocrisy is always terribly funny. McKinley said "I got down and  
prayed to God, after we seized Manila. What am I to do now with these  
people, these poor people? What will we do for them?" And he said,  
"God spoke." (It sounds very familiar today), God spoke to him and  
said, "We must help these people and we must Christianize them." The  
Secretary of State responded, "Mr.
President, they're already Roman Catholic," and McKinley said "that's  
what I mean!" So there we were on a religious mission in the  
Philippines on the edge of the richest section of China and that was  
the first great imperial adventure in the midst of which Cuba was no  
longer 'Libre'. The United States was already occupying it and Puerto  
Rico also. We were taking over much of the Caribbean and we retained  
it for a long, long time, under special mandates and so forth and so on.

RM: During your years in Guatemala you established a friendship that  
warned you of US intervention in that region. Did you see it coming?

GV: Well, I thought that our expansion was finished in 1898. Between  
1846 when we got Mexico, 1898 when we destroyed the Spanish Empire  
and we got the Caribbean and we got the Philippines, which was really  
what we wanted. I just thought why would we do that? After all we had  
conquered Germany and we'd conquered Japan, we were occupying both  
countries and each one was a world and not just a nation. We had the  
first global empire thanks to President Roosevelt, another imperial  
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He  
wanted to destroy European colonialism wherever it was; the United  
States would then take over with some sort of mandate to "look after"  
the countries that we had "liberated", as he liked to put it. And  
that got us, formally, into the business of empire.

Mario Monteforte Toledo, a good friend of mine, was vice president of  
Guatemala and he was also in charge of the assembly there, the  
Parliament.
He used to come to Antigua where I had a house. He was living in  
Guatemala City where the government was, and he said "well we don't  
have much longer you know," and I said "what are you talking about?"  
and he said "your government has decided to seize Guatemala" and I  
said, "oh, come on, we just got Germany, we just got Japan, what are  
we going to do with Guatemala? It's not worth our while!" Oh, he  
said, "It's worth the while of the United Fruit Company and they  
control these things." And this is the first time I understood  
hemispheric politics. Yes, I knew about yanqui imperialismo, I knew  
all about that, but I thought much of it was exaggerated and you  
know, we had conquered the world in 1945. It was the end of the  
pretensions of the European powers and also of Japan so I said "Well  
Mario, I don't believe it." Well he said, "as we are speaking  
President Arévalo," a very nice man, and elected as a pure democrat,  
with a small "d", and Arévalo had said, "well we've got to have some  
revenues, and the United Fruit Company has never paid taxes. We're  
going to tax them minimally on the bananas and so on that they sell  
all over the world. We make nothing, they make everything."
Simultaneously, the ironies of history, Henry Cabot Lodge – son of  
the Henry Cabot Lodge who was a Massachusetts senator, who was in  
favor of the conquest of the Philippines – called President (Dwight  
David) Eisenhower, and said Arévalo and his group in Guatemala are  
"communists" and they are going to seize all the lands of United Fruit.

We know what happened afterwards. They forced Arévalo to leave  
Guatemala and then it finally came to a head in 1954 when the freely  
elected president of Guatemala Jacobo Arbenz was dismissed by the  
American Ambassador, John Peurifoy, and General Carlos Castillos  
Armas was put in his place, and from that moment on we have put  
nothing but warlords in charge of Guatemala. It's been a bloodbath  
for its citizens for most of these years. It is better now, but it's  
still not very good.

Mark Twain said after our refusal to grant free government to the  
Filipinos, "the American flag should be replaced not with the stars  
and stripes, forget them, it should be the Jolly Roger, the skull and  
crossbones, because we bring murder wherever we go."

Banana Republic

RM: in The Golden Age you said FDR could have avoided the Pearl  
Harbor attack that took the US out of its peaceful isolation and  
decided its entry into the war. To what extent is that true?

GV: Well nations, like individuals, tend to work from templates;  
there is a plan in their heads which worked once before and may work  
yet again. We've always found that whenever a president is murdered  
it's always a "lone crazed killer" who is evil. He does it for no  
reason. No reason is ever given because we might find out what the  
politics behind it were. The American people are never told the  
politics about anything. So we've always had this reluctance. Our  
rulers don't want us to know why things are done.

So Roosevelt, with the best will in the world, saw that Hitler would  
be dangerous not only to Europe but in the long run to the United  
States; after all we are a mercantile power. We trade. With Hitler in  
charge of Europe, life was going to be very difficult for us. Eighty  
percent of the American people in 1940, and I was one of them, were  
against going to war in Europe against Hitler. Roosevelt did the next  
best thing. He was our great Machiavelli, who knew more about how the  
world worked than any previous president, and Roosevelt, who saw that  
sinking our ships, which got us into war against Germany in 1917, was  
not going to get us into the war against the Germans in 1941. He  
needed something to cause an important trauma and made the Americans'  
mind up regarding the war. Therefore, he provoked the Japanese into  
attacking us at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

It was a brilliant plot and it worked. The Japanese had just signed  
an alliance with Germany and Italy, the Tri Partite alliance. If  
anyone attacked one of the three the other two would come to their  
aide. It was a defensive, not an aggressive, treaty. The Japanese  
realized that Roosevelt had them in the bag. He had given them an  
ultimatum, one: get out of China; well they'd already created a  
country called Manchuria, out of the northern part of China. They had  
been trying for years to conquer China, and now they get orders from  
four thousand miles away, "get out!" He said, if you don't, I will  
turn off all of your benzene, particularly aviation fuel, which they  
needed for war planes, and for war ships, and scrap metal, cause they  
had no supplies.

Everybody thinks, how crazy it was for this little country to attack  
such a big country as the United States, well they weren't crazy,  
what they intended to do, was give us a big shock, which would make  
us think about other things for a time, by attacking, sinking the  
fleet at Pearl Harbor.
During that period they thought it would take the United States a  
year to build another fleet, which was about right. They would then  
go south to Java and Sumatra and seize the Dutch oil fields, taking  
Singapore, Malaysia, everything else along the way. It was a good  
plan and it worked, but Japan had no idea of the speed with which we  
could re-arm. Roosevelt did. Remember we were once a great industrial  
power. We're not anymore. The first sign of our industrial power was  
assembly line automobiles, and steel plants. We could do everything  
fast. We turned out thousands of B-17’s, the flying fortresses. This  
was indeed the plane that won, for the United States at least, WWII.

RM: You were a privileged observer of that pre-war period.

GV: I was raised in Washington D.C. during the Roosevelt  
administration. So Roosevelt, during our economic depression,  
designated 8 billion dollars to re arm the United States. 1940 marked  
the end of massive unemployment. For the first time in years, people  
were quite content, because we'd had the depression and we were on  
our way to have the greatest war machine on earth, something which  
has since become a curse.

RM: Do you blame Harry Truman for the United States becoming the  
authoritarian country it is today? Many Americans do not share this  
opinion.
George W. Bush, for example, has said recently that the man who  
dropped the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a good president.

GV: Well, remember two things: most Americans have no information at  
all on history, on geography, or on what's going on in the world.  
They don't know about these things. Roosevelt had made arrangements  
so that we would detach the colonies from France, Holland, Portugal.  
By 1945 when the war in Europe and in Asia ended, we would get them,  
and we would become their masters.
Americans knew none of this, and they still don't know. They're not  
taught this; the rulers do not want them to know it.

Truman was personally rather popular. He was a nice little man. He  
knew nothing at all about geography, history, religion, he knew  
nothing. Behind him he had a Prince Metternich, who was Dean  
Achinson, the Secretary of State, a great international lawyer. And  
he knew everything. He was the one who then designed the totally  
militarized state that emerged by 1949/50 under Harry Truman. And it  
all comes down to one document, the National Security Council  
document number 68. There were several points. We were to be forever  
at war with somebody. We were going to fight communism everywhere on  
earth even if it didn't threaten us. It was a holy war, just as now  
we've made one on terrorism and Islam, equally stupid and equally  
irrelevant.

The man who should have been president in 1945 was Henry Wallace.  
However, he was replaced by a Mr. Nobody, a southern right winger  
named Harry Truman, from Missouri; who took over the government when  
Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945.

So we got a terrible president because he was so bad that they built  
him up into an idol, everybody's. Everybody who knows nothing admires  
Harry Truman, and they don't know why. He's just such a nice little  
man. He was a nice little man, but he ended the Republic and set us  
on this wave of conquest.
He went yelling and screaming to the people that the Soviet Union was  
on the march, that they were about to seize Greece, that they were  
immediately going into Italy, they could then cross over to France,  
and cross the Atlantic at any time. We hear echoes of this in the  
current little man, Mr.
Bush, who says: [imitating GW Bush] "well we can't fight them over  
there we're going to have to fight 'em over here." We don't have to  
fight them; they have no way of getting here. But no American can ask  
questions like that because they will be thought unpatriotic or silly.

RM: According to your own words, "the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995  
are explained according to a law of Physics: there is a reaction to  
every action". You were speaking about the hatred spread by the  
United States around the world and in its own country. Was this a  
prophecy?

GV: Well I wouldn't directly connect it with what happened on 9/11.  
What happened after McVeigh did what he did, except that we now know  
that he really didn't do it by himself, somebody else was involved,  
quite a few people were involved. But essentially the Clinton  
administration ¬and we now look back on it as being a very American  
one, in the best sense of the word – drew up his Draconian rules  
about terrorism in the United States just to get revenge on the ghost  
of Timothy McVeigh.

And that became the USA Patriot Act. After 9/11 happened the Bush  
Administration found these papers, from the Clinton administration in  
the Justice Department. They activated all of them and that is the  
USA Patriot Act. It has just about removed our Constitution. It just  
annulled everything about sacred liberties and that was the result of  
McVeigh.

A child of five who knows nothing about the law can tell you that  
9-11 requires a police response. We've been hit by the Mafia. You  
can't go to war without an enemy nation to attack. You can't have a  
war without a country, try and explain that to an American, I don't  
think they know what a country is. We certainly know 80% of them  
believe that Saddam Hussein that had a country called Iraq was  
working in tandem with Osama Bin Laden, who was living in a beautiful  
palace in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It's all nonsense.
They had no connection the two. But Bush wanted to complete the work  
of his father, and to show that he was bolder than his father, he  
would be "Bush of Baghdad" not quite Lawrence of Arabia. Americans  
think they are the same person, and that both of them attacked us on  
9/11.

RM: A recent CBS poll shows that 75% of the population in the US is  
not in favor of him or his policies. His popularity has plummeted to  
historic levels. Will Bush be the most hated president in US history?

GV: When I said I am not a prophet that doesn't mean I can't  
occasionally guess what's coming. I knew that what those they call  
the neo conservatives in the United States (the old word that was  
used to describe them was "fascist"), they want to use American power  
in order to get the corporations which are generally gas and oil to  
maximize profits. They want to manipulate the constitution so that it  
is rendered meaningless. They want supreme power, and circumstances  
allowed us to elect a man that's a real fool, literally a fool.

If the American people had a free press, an alert media, he could  
never have been elected anything. He's not competent; if you listen  
to him talk for ten minutes its clear he doesn't know what he is  
talking about. He's desperately trying to read a teleprompter and  
nothing really makes sense, and without one of his advisors he can't  
face anybody when it comes to a question.´

Since Woodrow Wilson left the oval office in 1921, no US president  
writes his own speeches. The president reads what other people write.  
Sometimes the President agrees with it, and sometimes he doesn't.  
Eisenhower used to read his speeches as if he were discovering  
something new on the paper. During his first presidency, the country  
was astonished when he said in the middle of a speech: "If I'm  
elected president I will go to Korea!?" He was serious.
Nobody had said anything to him before that surprise. But anyway, he  
went to Korea.

Well had the American people seen that and if we had a media that was  
interested in the Republic, and not in profits, the whole story would  
have been different; after all, Albert Gore did win the election in  
2000 by the popular vote, some 600,000 votes ahead of Bush. And  
eventually the intervention of the Supreme Court into that election  
falsified the entire election. So we became overnight a banana  
republic without any bananas to sell. And that is our problem at the  
moment.

RM. The Bush administration has led the country into such a disaster  
that Fidel himself said recently that he believes the United States  
public will oust President Bush before he finishes his term. Do you  
see this happening?

GV: The people running the Bush Administration are so mindless and  
radical that they're apt to start bombing Russia, or start bombing  
Iran. They would have to start a diversion, so they can scream: "true  
patriots come to the aid of the Commander in Chief in war  
time" [imitates Bush]. That's their rubric. Well that's all nonsense.  
In other words, they create events. They create panic.

Two days after 9/11 there was somebody in the government saying,  
"it's not if they attack again, it's when!" The nonsense had already  
begun. Then we say, well it's been seven or eight years and they  
haven't attacked and they say "well that's because of the precautions  
that we take at the airports oh!
You don't like them! Because you have to take your shoes off, but at  
the same time that is what has saved you from an attack." Well, prove  
it! We can't prove it, they retort, without revealing our secret  
sources. It's circular.

I hope that the Democratic Congress which comes in, with the  
chairmanships of congressional committees, including the Judiciary,  
gets every last one of them under oath before Congress to answer  
these questions.

RM: What would be necessary to re-establish the Republic?

GV: Listen to the great words of our greatest president, Mr. Franklin  
Delano Roosevelt, at his first inauguration. The country was  
collapsing, economically the banks were coming down, money was short,  
and he struck a great political note which other presidents have  
generally imitated until we get down to this junta he said [imitating  
Roosevelt] "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." That is the  
basis of the Republic. Don't be taken in by fear. There are people  
who make money out of fear. That's their job, just to frighten.

I'm not for real revolutions, because they always bring you the  
opposite of what you want. The French Revolution brought the world  
Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis XVI after all, was not as bad as that. So  
you very seldom get what you want if you have a violent revolution. I  
think we're going to have one due to economic collapse.

There was a headline in one of the big American papers the other day  
that the army was begging the administration for money. They don't  
have the money to make fools of themselves in Baghdad. They've got to  
raise it somewhere; we have no tax revenues because all the rich  
people have been exempted from tax as well as corporations. It used  
to be that 50% of the revenues of the Federal government came from  
the taxes on corporate profits. Its about 8% now, they've just  
eliminated it. Corporations don't pay tax and rich people don't  
either. So they've not only helped all their rich friends who now  
have enough money to finance the Republican Party with billions of  
dollars so they can tell lies about anybody in the country and  
pretend that the patriots of the country are traitors. It's a very  
good trick both economically for them and it's a bad trick on us real  
Americans, we don't like it. We've lost the Bill of Rights; we lost  
the Magna Carta, on which all of our liberties are based for 700  
years. No, it's not been an amusing time.

We have a crisis of rights

RM: In your memoirs, you mention that during a conversation with JFK  
he told you about his plan to assassinate Fidel, and that his  
alliance with the extreme Cuban American right had become a nightmare  
for him and his brother, Robert. Are these groups related to their  
deaths?

GV: Well it had total control, I think it is much less now, Kennedy  
had to give his life for it, you know. Though the assassination we  
now know was done by Mafia, out of New Orleans, and a man called  
[Carlos] Marcello was in charge of it. They were trying to get Bobby  
Kennedy. Marcello who was the boss of New Orleans and also of the  
Havana casinos at one point, [Santos] Trafficante who ran the Mafia  
in Tampa Florida, said we've got to get rid of Bobby, they have this  
recorded, the FBI. We've got to get rid of him, and Marcello said,  
"if a dog bothers you, you don't cut off the tail," and that was the  
death sentence for Jack Kennedy.

RM: What is your perception of the true influence this Cuban American  
community has had on US policy towards Cuba in the last 40 years?

GV: They managed to have an enormous influence on the country, and I  
think this is less now. This has always been a very corrupt state;  
Florida has been a corrupt state from the beginning, from the days of  
the confederacy.
The addition of a bunch of angry Batista lovers did not help the  
political situation down there, and a lot of these people had a lot  
of money or they made a lot of money and could be counted upon to  
support anybody who hated Castro and hated what is being done in the  
modern Cuba and they'd vote for him. Florida is a big state, it's a  
key State. We have something called an electoral college which often  
decides elections and it has so many voters which are based on how  
many representatives get elected to Congress and so on. Well Florida  
is beautifully situated for any demagogue who appeals to the  
Batistaites, or just anybody who still wants to fight communism.  
They're still marching, and they're going to arrive on the beaches in  
no time at all. They are very slow to understand, obviously, partly  
because they've been misinformed, misinformed. By their government,  
by the media, which worked with the government. And so we have a  
misinformed population and Florida is still one of the first places  
candidates go to and try and get votes. But it's much less now, so,  
count on that, it's a bit of luck.

It's a very complex 18th century machinery to keep us from having  
democracy.
Our founders didn't like democracy, I find I often have to repeat  
that a few times, but they didn't like it. And now of course we're  
bringing democracy to Iraq and all these other countries who are  
longing for it.

RM: Silence and lies have kept five Cubans unjustly imprisoned in the  
US.
Could you comment on what you know about the case and your opinion on  
it?

GV: I know of the case through lawyers, not through the media. And it  
seems another stupid thing our government is doing. It is my  
understanding that President Clinton and President Castro got  
together on this one, to try and stop the terrorists in Miami who  
were bombing tourist offices to discourage tourism to this country.  
The two presidents were in agreement that this was a bad thing and  
that they should try and stop it. So Clinton put the FBI on it and I  
don't know what Castro did, but he went along with it and then the  
FBI suddenly starts to arrest five Cubans who were dedicated to  
protecting Cuba and innocent tourist owners of tourist agencies from  
terrorism, from bombers.

We love imprisoning people almost as much as we like the death  
penalty which is just the brightest star in our diadem. So you have a  
country mad about torture, murder, and execution, lifelong sentences  
in prison. The mindset is all there, it goes back to I'm not going to  
go into the background but it is protestant Puritanism: everyone must  
suffer, if they've done anything wrong.
If you're rich God loves you: that's the proof. And if you're poor,  
he doesn't like you: that's the proof. It's not a healthy mindset for  
any people and I'm afraid the State of Florida has got a great many  
of those people as well as what they've picked up from the Batistaites.

So, the Five, the Cuban Five as they are known in legal circles in  
America, I think are all in prison with what seem like eternal  
sentences for having obeyed two presidents one here and one in  
America to stop these crazy bombers from killing innocent civilians.

And the government that will do that, knowing the consequences, you  
know our government in not as stupid as it seems, it does evil things  
because that's the way you keep control. Don't think they didn't  
learn a lot from the twentieth century dictatorships. And so it is  
very important that they behave like this to insure that we don't  
stop the people who are bombing the tourist agencies in Miami. We are  
now almost lawless because we've lost so many of our protections  
under the Constitution. So we have a crisis of law, a crisis of  
politics, and a constitutional crisis.

RM: Oliver Stone was recently sanctioned by the US State Department  
for violating the blockade against Cuba. His crime was traveling to  
Cuba to make two documentaries about Fidel. Are these measures  
constitutional?

Gore Vidal: Well of course it's a violation, as the first amendment  
grants us freedom of speech, the fourth amendment of the constitution  
is the bill of rights, which guarantees our rights to assembly and so  
forth. We have had since 9/11 a coup d’etat in the United States,  
the first we've ever had, in which a group of rather dishonest oil  
and gas people were able to seize the power of the State and by so  
doing they ended up with the Congress in their hands, they ended up  
with the presidency and much of the judiciary and much of the courts.  
It happened very fast. It's quite unique. It will be a great story  
one day at the moment it's just something the people don't understand.
What they've never seen before doesn't exist really. Well they're  
seeing it now, in situ, as archaeologists, and it's a very unpleasant  
sight. Out of that come the sanctions, as you put it, on Oliver  
Stone, who has every right to make any movie that he wants to make  
and in whatever circumstance, as long as he breaks no laws, and no  
laws have been broken here. They [Bush and Cheney] just don't like  
it, oh! My goodness me!

RM: Are you afraid of any reprisals against you when you return to  
the US?

GV: I trust they'll never like anything I say or write or do.

RM: One last question. You've been here for a few days already. Is  
Cuba anything like what the media presents to North Americans?

GV: [Laughs] Are you crazy?!!! NO! We're told everybody hates it  
here; everybody is starving to death, and they put out stories in  
Cuba on how they have wonderful doctors but in fact they are terrible  
doctors and nobody goes to them, any Cuban who is sick goes to the  
Mayo Clinic in America!

There is no lie that our government will not tell and has not told.  
So no correct picture gets through. One of the reasons I'm doing  
television here, is I feel every now and then I do have some audience  
out there. I can talk about what I've seen. I've seen the influx of  
doctors, would be doctors into Cuba. I've been in that building which  
used to be a Russian Naval Base, and is dedicated to teaching a whole  
generation about medicine, about community services, something  
Americans hate, you know, everybody is help for himself, grab all the  
money you can and then run away, to Tahiti or someplace. I was  
talking to 8 or 9 Americans from New York, Massachusetts, who are  
studying medicine here. I said, "well, is it as good as they say,"  
they said, "oh yes it is, its rather better, better than anything we  
could get at home, going to ordinary medical universities." Why don't  
we do the same for the health of our people and other countries? I  
see what you've done with medicine, from Africa to the deepest Amazon  
or wherever.

We had a great Constitution, and a great legal system. Only by the  
restoration of that can we have a country with aspirations and with  
indeed successes like Cuba. Don't think I don't get extremely jealous  
for the United States, since I am a super patriot; I get very jealous.

RM: Will you return?

GV: Never make predictions.


Rosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist living in Havana. She is  
the editor of Cubadebate, a Cuban online publication, and she has a  
weekly column in Cuba's daily newspaper Juventud Rebelde. She is the  
author of several books, including Los Disidentes, Chavez Nuestro and  
El Encuentro.
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