My friend Luis called yesterday (11/24/09) to tell me that his father, Vicente Locay had passed away.
Vicente was not a tall man, but he stood tall at key moments in his life.
Over the years, Luis told many stories about what Vicente said and did in Cuba. One of my favorites was that Vicente, not being particularly religious, had no plans to have Luis christened. But when Castro outlawed public displays of Catholicism, Vicente changed his mind, and made sure that Luis had the benefits of a public christening.
When it became increasingly clear what was in store for Cuba under Castro’s dictatorship, Vicente managed to get his family on a rickety plane, and escape.
In Cuba, Vicente had owned several small businesses. In the U.S., he started over, without ever mastering English. He worked hard remodeling houses to support his family.
For many years, I had hoped that Vicente would outlast Fidel, and would return in triumph to a post-Fidel Havana.
It’s too late for that to happen. The best we can do is to acknowledge and salute a man of courage and strength, who chose freedom.
Category: Communism
Today is the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
(p. 4) The border guards, bereft of instruction from the command system that had trained them to defend this barrier with their lives, plainly did not know what to do. Some stood silent, others engaged in conversation with the crowd; what they did not do was what they ordinarily would have done: Drive them away.
Eventually, the good-natured crowd — “we just want to go and drink a beer over there; tomorrow we’ll be at work!” shouted one man — was allowed into a forecourt. West Berlin seemed tantalizingly close. But then the commander of the Eastern checkpoint sent them away, saying they would have to get visas the next morning from local police stations.
By contrast, I was spotted by the commander taking notes. Unmasked as a Western reporter working without authorization in a border area of the German Democratic Republic, I was declared persona non grata and shoved into a small corridor that led to a passport check and the door into West Berlin. And it was in that narrow passage that I met Angelika Wachs.
Whispering “Ja-a-a-a!” and smiling broadly, she had somehow squeezed in behind me, and had almost nothing of the scared reticence common to most East Germans. A pimply young man, barely in his 20s, sat at passport control. He looked at my British passport, and then at Angelika’s papers, which somehow bore a rare stamp permitting her to visit West Berlin. But it was only valid Nov. 17, he objected. I urged him to consider what was happening. He shrugged. He pressed the switch to open the door. We tumbled through.
It was the only moment in my life when I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming. I had just crossed Checkpoint Charlie with this stranger, a woman exactly my age, 34, a citizen of Communist East Germany.
There were only a handful of West Berliners on hand to cheer our arrival. Shouting that it was “unglaublich,” or unbelievable, Angelika ran off to seek a ride to a friend who had escaped west years earlier, and I headed for a cheap bar where I glommed on to that precious commodity, a telephone.
. . .. . . Americans, unlike Europeans, do not dwell much on the past. Tomorrow is always another day, and yesterday’s lessons fade.
Not so the story of Angelika Wachs. Once I found her name in the long-lost articles, it did not take many minutes on the Internet to track her down. She e-mailed; this past Saturday, we talked. I discovered that she had that precious stamp that night because, some years earlier, her parents had fled west, and she had been granted permission to visit. When we met, she had been working in administration at the Staatsoper, the state opera; her career has continued in P.R.
Ten years ago, she met an Englishman. They married this year, she said, on the deliberately chosen date of July 4 — “a way to mark independence, and freedom.” On Nov. 16, when a conference takes me to Berlin and a gleaming hotel among the skyscrapers that now fill Potsdamer Platz, we will meet for the drink we never had 20 years ago.
For the full story, see:
ALISON SMALE. “When the Future Swung Open in Berlin.” The New York Times, Week in Review Section (Sun., November 8, 2009): 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated Nov. 6, and has the title “Chasing the Story on a Night That Changed All .”)
“20 Years; Angelika Wachs posed last week at Checkpoint Charlie, remembering the jubilation on the Wall’s western side on Nov. 10, 1989.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.
Ukrainian Memorial to the Millions Starved by Stalin’s Communism
“A memorial to the famine, right, opposite a revered cathedral, was dedicated last November in Kiev. A museum is planned there.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
(p. A6) KIEV, Ukraine — A quarter century ago, a Ukrainian historian named Stanislav Kulchytsky was told by his Soviet overlords to concoct an insidious cover-up. His orders: to depict the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s as unavoidable, like a natural disaster. Absolve the Communist Party of blame. Uphold the legacy of Stalin.
Professor Kulchytsky, though, would not go along.
The other day, as he stood before a new memorial to the victims of the famine, he recalled his decision as one turning point in a movement lasting decades to unearth the truth about that period. And the memorial itself, shaped like a towering candle with a golden eternal flame, seemed to him in some sense a culmination of this effort.
“It is a sign of our respect for the past,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “Because everyone was silent about the famine for many years. And when it became possible to talk about it, nothing was said. Three generations on.”
. . .
The pro-Western government in Kiev, which came to power after the Orange Revolution of 2004, calls the famine a genocide that Stalin ordered because he wanted to decimate the Ukrainian citizenry and snuff out aspirations for independence from Moscow.
The archives make plain that no other conclusion is possible, said Professor Kulchytsky, who is deputy director of the Institute of Ukrainian History in Kiev.
Professor Kulchytsky is 72, though he looks younger, as if he has somehow withstood the draining effect of so much research into the horrors of that time.
“It is difficult to bear,” he acknowledged. “The documents about cannibalism are especially difficult to read.”
Professor Kulchytsky said it was undeniable that people all over the Soviet Union died from hunger in 1932 and 1933 as the Communists waged war on the peasantry to create farming collectives. But he contended that in Ukraine the authorities went much further, essentially quarantining and starving many villages.
“If in other regions, people were hungry and died from famine, then here people were killed by hunger,” Professor Kulchytsky said. “That is the absolute difference.”
For the full story, see:
CLIFFORD J. LEVY. “Kiev Journal – A New View of a Famine That Killed Millions.” The New York Times (Mon., March 16, 2009): A6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
Vaclav Klaus: The Czech Republic’s Free Market Crusader
“President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic is known for his economic liberalism.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
(p. A6) To supporters, Mr. Klaus is a brave, lone crusader, a defender of liberty, the only European leader in the mold of the formidable Margaret Thatcher. (Aides say Mr. Klaus has a photo of the former British prime minister in his office near his desk.)
. . .
As a former finance minister and prime minister, he is credited with presiding over the peaceful 1993 split of Czechoslovakia into two states and helping to transform the Czech Republic into one of the former Soviet bloc’s most successful economies.
But his ideas about governance are out of step with many of the European Union nations that his country will lead starting Jan. 1.
While even many of the world’s most ardent free marketeers acknowledged the need for the recent coordinated bailout of European banks, Mr. Klaus lambasted it as irresponsible protectionism. He blamed too much — rather than too little — regulation for the crisis.
A fervent critic of the environmental movement, he has called global warming a dangerous “myth,” arguing that the fight against climate change threatens economic growth.
. . .
Those who know Mr. Klaus say his economic liberalism is an outgrowth of his upbringing. Born in 1941, he obtained an economics degree in 1963 and was deeply influenced by free market economists like Milton Friedman.
Mr. Klaus’s son and namesake, Vaclav, recalled in an interview that when he was 13, his father told him to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to better understand Communism’s oppressiveness.
“If you lived under communism, then you are very sensitive to forces that try to control or limit human liberty,” he said in an interview.
For the full story, see:
DAN BILEFSKY. “A Fiery Czech Is Poised to Be the Face of Europe.” The New York Times (Tues., November 25, 2008): A6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
Bailouts Damage “System Based on the Premise that Risk Can Bring Failure, as Well as Rewards”
Source of the cartoon: online version of the WSJ quoted and cited below.
(p. A8) William O. Perkins III says he turned a $1.25 million profit trading Goldman Sachs Group Inc. stock last week.
You would think that would count as a pretty good paycheck for the Houston energy trader. Instead, the experience left him so angry about the demise of capitalism that he says he has decided to spend his profits on advertisements attacking President George W. Bush’s planned $700 billion Wall Street bailout.
. . .
So he says he bought Goldman Sachs at $129 a share. The stock fell, so he bought more at $100 a share. It fell again, and he bought at $90. The next day it rallied and he sold out at an average price of $130 a share, for a net gain of about $1.25 million over three days of trading, he said.
Trouble was, the stock didn’t rally because of the fundamental strength of the company, Mr. Perkins said. It rallied because the federal government announced that it would rescue Wall Street from its own subprime follies, he said.
“The stock did OK because the government came in and said, ‘No one can fail,'” he said. “It’s capitalism on the way up and communism on the way down.”
His success left him furious, and he decided that someone had to speak out about the damage such a plan would cause to a system based on the premise that risk can bring failure, as well as rewards.
For the full story, see:
MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS. “Trader Makes a Quick $1.25 Million on Rescue, Then Slams It.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., SEPTEMBER 24, 2008): A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
Economist Arrested for Speaking the Truth
Detained Latvian economist Dmitrijs Smirnovs. Source of image: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.
(p. A1) RIGA, Latvia — Hammered by economic woe, this former Soviet republic recently took a novel step to contain the crisis. Its counterespionage agency busted an economist for being too downbeat.
“All I did was say what everyone knows,” says Dmitrijs Smirnovs, a 32-year-old university lecturer detained by Latvia’s Security Police. The force is responsible for hunting down spies, terrorists and other threats to this Baltic nation of 2.3 million people and 26 banks.
Now free after two days of questioning, Mr. Smirnovs hasn’t been charged. But he is still under investigation for bad-mouthing the stability of Latvia’s banks and the national currency, the lat. Investigators suspect him of spreading “untruthful information.” They’ve ordered him not to leave the country and seized his computer.
Finance is a highly touchy subject in Latvia, one that the state tries, with unusual zeal, to shield from loose tongues. It is a criminal offense here to spread “untrue data or information” about the country’s financial system. Undermining it is outlawed as subversion.
So, when the global financial system began to buckle this autumn, Latvia’s Security Police mobilized to combat destabilizing chatter about banks and exchange rates. Agents directed their attention to Inter-(p. A19)net chat rooms, newspaper articles, cellphone text messages and even rock concerts. A popular musician was taken in for questioning after he cracked a joke about unstable Latvian banks at a performance.
Just one problem: Much of the speculative buzz now turns out to ring true.
. . .
In Latvia’s Soviet past, officials routinely blamed their problems on saboteurs or other scapegoats. “This is part of our political culture,” says Sergei Kruks, a media-studies lecturer. “If the state doesn’t have a solution, it has to find someone to blame.”
For the full story, see:
ANDREW HIGGINS. “How to Combat a Banking Crisis: First, Round Up the Pessimists; Latvian Agents Detain a Gloomy Economist; ‘It Is a Form of Deterrence’.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., DECEMBER 1, 2008): A1 & A19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
Rosenberg Spying Shows “United States Had (and Has) Real Enemies”
“DOOMED. In 1952, sympathizers gathered near the prison where the convicted spies awaited execution.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
(p. 6) You could choose to ignore, or somehow explain away, the Hitler-Stalin pact, or be wedded to the original Port Huron Statement instead of the “compromised second draft,” but if you seriously considered yourself fiercely loyal to the far left, you believed that the Rosenbergs were not guilty of espionage. At least you said you did.
For more than 50 years, defending Julius and Ethel Rosenberg was an article of faith for most committed American leftists. That the couple was framed — by officials intent on stoking anti-Soviet fervor and embarrassed by counterespionage lapses that allowed Russian moles to infiltrate the government — was at the core of a worldview of Communism, the Korean War and the ensuing cold war, and an enduring cultural divide stoked by McCarthyism.
Now, that unshakeable faith has been rattled seismically. Not for the first time, of course; in the 1990s, secret Soviet cables released by Washington affirmed the spy ring’s existence. But this time, the bedrock under that worldview seemed to transmogrify into clay.
The rattler was Morton Sobell, 91, the case’s only living defendant. He admitted in an interview that he and Julius Rosenberg had indeed spied for the Soviet Union. His admission prompted the Rosenbergs’ sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol — self-described magnets for global anguish over their parents’ execution in 1953 — to publicly accept, for the first time, that their father committed espionage. Ronald Radosh, co-author of “The Rosenberg File,” a comprehensive account of the trial, declared that “a pillar of the left-wing culture of grievance has been finally shattered.”
“The Rosenbergs were Soviet spies,” he said in an op-ed article in The Los Angeles Times, and “it is time the ranks of the left acknowledge that the United States had (and has) real enemies and that finding and prosecuting them is not evidence of repression.”
For the full commentary, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “Ideas & Trends; A Spy Confesses, and Still Some Weep for the Rosenbergs.” The New York Times, Week in Review Section (Sun., September 21, 2008): 6.
“The Truth is More Important Than Our Political Position”
“Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s sons, Robert, 6, left, and Michael, 10, looking at a 1953 newspaper. They still believe their parents did not deserve to die.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
(p. A22) They were the most famous orphans of the cold war, only 6 and 10 years old in 1953 when their parents were executed at Sing Sing for delivering atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. Then they were whisked from an unwanted limelight to urban anonymity and eventually to suburban obscurity.
Adopting their foster parents’ surname, they staked their own claim to radical campus politics in the 1960s. Then in 1973, they emerged to reclaim their identities as the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, determined to vindicate their parents.
Now, confronted with the surprising confession last week of Morton Sobell, Julius Rosenberg’s City College classmate and co-defendant, the brothers have admitted to a painful conclusion: that their father was a spy.
“I don’t have any reason to doubt Morty,” Michael Meeropol said after several conversations with Mr. Sobell over the weekend.
Their conclusions, in separate interviews, amount to a milestone in America’s culture wars and the culmination of the brothers’ own emotional and intellectual odyssey.
It began in July 1950, when F.B.I. agents arrested Julius Rosenberg in the family’s Lower East Side apartment, thrusting the boys onto a global stage as bit players in their parents’ appeals, in the government’s efforts to extract their parents’ cooperation, and in Soviet propaganda campaigns to cast the Rosenbergs as martyrs.
Their journey became public again nearly a generation later when the brothers proclaimed that their parents were framed to feed cold war hysteria and compensate for America’s counterespionage lapses. Amid the Watergate-era revelations of criminal conspiracies and cover-ups, they began a legal battle to release all the government records in the case.
While they were vested in a single outcome, they insisted all along that they would follow the facts, wherever they led.
“We believed they were innocent and we tried to prove them innocent,” Michael Meeropol said on Sunday. “But I remember saying to myself in late 1975, maybe a little later, that whatever happens, it doesn’t change me. We really meant it, that the truth is more important than our political position.”
For the full story, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “Rosenbergs’ Sons Sadly Accept That Father Was a Spy.” The New York Times (Weds., September 17, 2008): A22.
(Note: the online title is the slightly different “Rosenbergs’ Sons Accept Conclusion That Father Was a Spy.”)
“Michael, left, and Robert Meeropol rehearsing in 2003 for a commemoration of the execution in 1953 of their parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.
Sobell Admits He and Julius Rosenberg Really Were Spies for the Soviets
“Morton Sobell, 91, at his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.” Source for caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
The left has long chastised the right, for having wrongly persecuted the Rosenbergs. Score one for the right:
(p. A1) In 1951, Morton Sobell was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. He served more than 18 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, traveled to Cuba and Vietnam after his release in 1969 and became an advocate for progressive causes.
Through it all, he maintained his innocence.
But on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, 91, dramatically reversed himself, shedding new light on a case that still fans smoldering political passions. In an interview, he admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy.
And he implicated his fellow defendant Julius Rosenberg, in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb.
In the interview with The New York Times, Mr. Sobell, who lives in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, was asked whether, as an electrical engineer, he turned over military secrets to the Soviets during World War II when they were considered allies of the United States and were bearing the brunt of Nazi brutality. Was he, in fact, a spy?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that,” he replied. “I never thought of it as that in those terms.”
Mr. Sobell also concurred in what has become a consensus among historians: that Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed with her husband, was aware of Julius’s espionage, but did not actively participate. “She knew what he was doing,” he said, “but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.”
For the full story, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “57 Years Later, Figure in Rosenberg Case Says He Spied for Soviets.” The New York Times (Fri., September 12, 2008): A1 & A14.
(Note: all of the part quoted above, appeared on p. A1.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the slightly different title “For First Time, Figure in Rosenberg Case Admits Spying for Soviets.”)
Boris Yeltsin’s “Laissez-Faire Populism”
Source of book image: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.
(p. E1) Yeltsin’s grievance against the Communists began before he was born, in an all-too-common history of family heartbreak that Mr. Colton pieces together with a good deal of original reporting. The Yeltsins were dispossessed for the bourgeois crime of having built a farm, mill and blacksmithing business. Yeltsin’s grandfather died a broken man. His father was charged with the catch-all crime of “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” for grousing at his job on a construction site, and sent to a forced-labor camp for three years.
When Yeltsin joined the Communist Party, it was not out of devotion to the professed ideals but because a party card was a requirement for promotion to chief engineer in the construction industry. And when he moved into the hierarchy, he was already a man who chafed at party orthodoxy. No radical, he “nibbled at the edges of what was admissible,” Mr. Colton writes, pushing for market prices in the local farm bazaars, encouraging entrepreneurial initiative in the workplace, complaining that the top-down system smothered self-reliance.
For the full review, see:
BILL KELLER. “Books of The Times; The Making of Yeltsin, His Boldness and Flaws.” The New York Times (Weds., May 7, 2008): E1.
(p. 222) For Yeltsin’s contemporaries, deliverance from Marxist scripture and Soviet srtuctures took many forms. For him, it was an ease with the market and recoil against the overbearing state. Mikhail Fridman, who became one of Russia’s first billionaires as a banker and oilman, makes the point well:
Yeltsin as an individual who had inner freedom . . . instinctively moved toward the market as the end. That is because . . . as my namesake Milton Friedman says, “Capitalism is freedom.” . . . [Yeltsin thought] it was necessary to give people freedom and they would make out well. How exactly to do that he did not know. [But he did know] that it was necessary to free people from control: We were squeezing them dry. He thought that if we let them go they could move heaven and earth. . . . This is the level on which he thought about it. . . . He took a dim view of all these [Soviet] controls. [He felt that] the controllers had long since believed in nothing.
. . .
(p. 525) Stewart, working as a photojournalist, taped Yeltsin’s remarks on August 24, 1990, in Dolinsk. She calls them “laissez-faire populism.”
Source:
Colton, Timothy J. Yeltsin: A Life. New York: Basic Books, 2008.
(Note: ellipses and bracked words in Fridman (sic) quote were made by Colton; other ellipses were added by me.)
(Note: the quote from p. 525 is from endnote number 38.)
“We Will Stay a Laissez-Faire Economy”
“Andrus Ansip, leader of Estonia, an ex-Soviet Republic.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.
An earlier entry suggested that Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip’s support for Steve Forbes’ flat tax, had helped Estonia achieve a high rate of growth.
Apparently there is some sentiment in Estonia to stay the course:
(p. B6) TALLINN, Estonia — For nearly two decades, Estonia embraced capitalism with such gusto that it seemed to be channeling the laissez-faire philosophy of Milton Friedman. From its policies meant to attract foreign investors to its flat tax and freewheeling business culture, it stood out as the former Soviet republic most adept at turning post-Communist chaos into a thriving market economy.
Now Estonians, and some of their Baltic neighbors, are slogging through their first serious economic downturn since liberation from the Soviet grip in the early 1990s.
. . .
Whatever happens, government officials say there will be no betrayal of Friedman’s philosophy. “We will stay a laissez-faire economy,” said Juhan Parts, Estonia’s minister of the economy.
. . .
“I’m an optimist,” said Marje Josing, director of the Estonian Institute for Economic Research. “Fifteen years ago things looked bad, but they managed. A little real-life pressure won’t hurt.”
Indeed, so far the downturn has done little to discourage Estonia’s ambitious entrepreneurs. If anything, it has made them look more avidly elsewhere for growth.
“Estonia may be a small country,” Tarmo Prikk, chief executive of Thulema, an office furniture maker, said with a laugh. “But my ego is bigger.”
For the full story, see:
CARTER DOUGHERTY. “Estonia’s Let-It-Be Economy Is Rattled by Worldwide Distress.” The New York Times (Fri., October 10, 2008): B6.
(Note: ellipses added.)