Libertarian Editorials (August 1980)

Viva “scum”

When the 10,000 Cubans who had sought asylum inside the Peruvian Embassy in Havana were finally given permission to emigrate in late April, Fidel Castro became the face that launched a thousand ships. An amazing private flotilla set sail from Florida, funded by many of the 750,000 Cubans who had abandoned the island workers-paradise since 1959. Though many of the boats were owned by Cuban-Americans, others were operated by so-called profiteers who quite rightfully charged high fees for a hazardous rescue which risked their own lives and vessels in rough seas. They have been accused of overloading their craft in order to make more money, but in fact the boats were overloaded by order of Cuban authorities trying to rid themselves faster of dissident “scum.”

Our own dear President Carter, meanwhile, apparently in need of a new pretext for appearing indecisive, alternately welcomed the Cubans with “open arms and hearts,” and threatened the boat operators with seizure, and with fines high enough to surpass their rescue fees. But for a while, even after Carter demanded an “orderly” (i.e. government directed) air and sea lift, Cuban authorities refused to cooperate, and the private effort continued. In an amazing show of organization and self-responsibility, American Cubans donated living quarters, jobs, tons of food and clothing and millions of dollars; and private agencies began reuniting refugees with long-lost families. In fact, it wasn’t until the U.S. Immigration authorities took over the processing of the refugees that things began to bog down.

The media fretted over rumors about Cuban hospitals and prisons being opened and Castro dumping his human “refuse” upon the U.S., but the incidence of disease among the refugees was, according to Newsweek, “lower than for the U.S. public as a whole.” And, in fact, out of the 112,000 Cubans who have entered the country in the past six months, only 700 have criminal pasts. Many refugees stated when interviewed that their so-called criminal records were for the crime of “dangerousness”— a lack of sympathy with revolutionary goals or anti-social conduct.

On May 18, in order to counteract the loss of face caused by the defections, and to protest such U.S. actions as occupation of the Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, continued spy flights over Cuba, and the economic embargo, an estimated one million demonstrators marched past the U.S. interests compound in Havana. Although some of the demonstrators stated that they had been happy to participate, many said that they had been afraid not to march, lest they be accused of lacking in revolutionary fervor.

Back in the States, reactions were, predictably, mixed. Libertarian presidential candidate Ed Clark joined the Cuban community and civil libertarian groups in castigating President Carter for threatening the refugees’ rescuers with fines and imprisonment. On the other hand, the Klu Klux Klan, always ready to demonstrate for the cause of bigotry, threatened marches in many cities. And a projected 59 percent of the U.S. citizenry, afraid of the effect of the immigrants on the already deepening recession and increasing unemployment, told pollsters they were against any more Cuban immigration. As if it could seriously be argued that Cuban refugees cause our unemployment or the recession, or that these ills are incurable, or that political dissenters in a country eighty miles from our shores should be left to rot in totalitarian prisons because we are unwilling to give up self-destructive and restrictive economic policies.

Every new wave of immigration in this country has aroused fear of unemployment and overcrowding in those who are themselves the sons and daughters of earlier immigrants. Yet the new ar-rivals have always stimulated the economy, performed jobs that older residents refused to do and added immeasurably to the culture as they became a part of it. In 1959, when he arrived, says Carlos Arboleya, a Florida banker who was interviewed by Newsweek, “Everyone said there was no room, no jobs, but things worked out well and they will work out again.”

It is this past Cuban success in our country which makes American Castro-sympathizers pooh-pooh the present Cubans’ refugee status, and argue that these are not victims of political repression at all, but merely greedy future members of a consumer society. The refugees tell a different story. A Cuban poet, quoted in Newsweek, said “The biggest crime in Cuba is to think. Any man who thinks collides daily with the system.” And of course Castro has control over who is allowed to emigrate in the first place. He did not release any internationally respected figures who might be willing to testify against the Castro regime, such as Armando Valladares, a poet and artist who refused the intellectual limitations required by “revolutionary fervor” and has therefore been imprisoned for the last nineteen years, or Eresto Diaz Rodriguez, who managed to smuggle out a book of poems titled An Urgent Testimony and whom the Cuban Department of Political Police has therefore threatened to silence by any possible means.

The new Cuban-Americans in Florida have escaped a bloody dictatorship on their own initiative and with the aid of family and friends. The 59 percent of the American people who do not want to pay for the freedom of these immigrants by losing their jobs and paying higher taxes have less to fear from their new neighbors than from their own government, which is going to force them to pay for unnecessary immigrant welfare bureaucracies and for concentration camps in small towns where the local population is afraid of the “invasion of foreigners.” In the meantime, the freedom-seeking foreigners wait for months in boredom and disillusionment. These refugees have more than enough strength and help to make it on their own, without government “assistance”—these people Fidel Castro calls “scum.”

—Victoria Varga

Computers are watching

Nineteen eighty seems to be the year that the U.S. government wants to get to know you. It has just taken the most comprehensive census in our history, and even before it has completely digested that, it is attempting to register all 19 and 20 year olds for the draft.

Totalitarian dictatorships make people carry identity cards. But if you can get people computerized, you can put your finger on them without making them carry cards — and it looks as if Jimmy Carter is the man to do it.

In 1976, he campaigned in favor of mandatory voter registration of all people over 18. (Some people have even referred to that as a campaign promise.) And some areas have indeed instituted involuntary registration. Right now, in the state of Michigan, for example, high school principals and college authorities are filling out voter registration forms for young people when they turn 18. Do this on a national scale, and the government knows who and where everyone over 18 is.

But a lot of advocates of states’ rights, not to mention advocates of individual liberties, might balk at the idea of national mandatory voter registration. Why not start an open-ended registration of young people, in the name of national defense, instead? Americans are always for national defense and “a strong foreign policy.” And indeed, registration for the draft was all right with Congress, despite the valiant attempts of Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR) to block it.

The Army already has a pretty good fix on who those young people are. Some school districts have been routinely giving Army recruiters lists of graduating seniors. And the Educational Testing Service, the organization that administers the Scholastic Achievement Test to all college applicants, passes its information along to the military as well as to colleges. In June, the head of the Selective Service System, Dr. Bernard Rostker, said in an interview that he intends to use such information to help enforce draft registration.

Meanwhile, Carter is planning to make this process even more efficient by computerizing the Selective Service System. According to an article by Bertram Gross in The Nation last spring, “To handle all the data that will be flowing up, Selective Service will expand its computer capacity and also complete the creation of a computer network tied in with the data banks of the military, the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration.” You can see why no registration cards are to be issued to those scheduled to register this summer. No cards will be necessary.

It’s a good thing for the Administration computers that this was a census year, however. Otherwise, they might not have enough of a cross-check on who is and isn’t registering—this is the start of universal registration, after all, and the data isn’t coordinated yet. Not all 18 year olds graduate from high school — the national high school dropout rate is estimated at 25 percent. And not all high schools give information to the armed forces.

But if enough people answered the census questions honestly and trustingly, and told the ages of all their children, the Administration should be able to get that computer network running in time for 1984.

—Joan Kennedy Taylor