By Josh Bergeron
Noam Chomsky, Gilbert Achcar, Paul Le Blanc, Suzi Weissman, Tithi Bhattacharya, Charlie Post, Robert Brenner, Gayatri Spivak, Alex Callinicos, Ashley Smith, Eric Toussaint, Marc Cooper, Etienne Balibar. These are a handful of the over 500 signatories on an open letter directed to the blockaded Cuban government on July 12 demanding "respect for the democratic rights of all Cuban people" and the release of "dissident Marxist" Frank García Hernández and his comrades from jail after the protests of July 11.
While these signatories differ among themselves over their characterization of the Cuban government and its revolutionary tradition - ranging from the view that Cuba is a “state capitalist” that harbors no revolutionary potential to the view that the once-revolutionary state has become an intransigent bureaucracy that is still preferable to the neoliberal model - all seem to find common ground with co-signer Gilbert Achcar’s warning about “the anti-imperialism of fools.”
Achcar condemns those who oppose U.S. imperialism no matter its target, because he believes this misses the “nuanced” view that U.S. imperialism might be instrumentalized by popular movements in the pursuit of their own liberation. Our “knee-jerk” rejection of the notion that any positive could ever come from the machinations of empire, in Achcar’s formulation, puts us in the camp of “defending murderous regimes.” Ostensibly, sharing co-signature real estate with the likes of Achcar would suggest that the other petitioners agree with him that anti-imperialism is not always a principled position and the events in Cuba are an example of a situation in which they do not want to end up on the side of “fools.” So without further investigation, they and 500 others signed an open letter condemning the Cuban government for its “repression and arbitrary detentions” of “critical communists.”
