History as Taught in Cuba - the Soviets vs. the Bourgeoisie and Nazis

History as Taught in Cuba: the Soviets vs. the Bourgeoisie and Nazis
October 13, 2014
Erasmo Calzadilla

HAVANA TIMES — During the summer break, I found a Contemporary History
notebook in the trash. It had belonged to a kid in the tenth grade. In a
previous post, I wrote about how the history lessons in the notebook
approached the first years of the Bolshevik revolution. We can walk away
with a fairly clear sense of its ideological position just by looking at
the fact Lenin is mentioned fourteen times while the soviets not even
once. Many students come out of Cuban high-schools believing the
"Soviet" is merely a term referring to the inhabitants of a particular
place.

In this post, I will yap a bit more about this student's history
notebook, analyzing how it addresses the rise of fascism and the Second
World War. I will then devote a few lines to the course textbook.

The basic, doctrinaire aim of the course is to convince students that
the capitalist systems of European powers and Soviet socialism were two
radically different, antagonistic and irreconcilable systems. The first
represented ambition and egotism as completely as the second embodied
the hope of a new world free of evil and the exploitation of man by man.
The other main ideological maneuver in this part of the course consists
in placing fascism and Nazism (those racist, war-mongering criminals)
within the capitalist family, a family that is not devoid of internal
conflicts but whose members ultimately protect one another.

It doesn't matter that the Axis Powers practiced a kind of
totalitarianism very similar to that of the Soviet Union, or that Hitler
should have attacked the Jews as champions of capitalist ideas
(according to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), that he called for
volkgemeinschaft ("people's community"), a struggle against the "slavery
of rent" and the dismantling of the bourgeois democratic system, or that
he went after capitalists and communists with the same degree of cruelty.

It doesn't matter that social scientists cannot agree as to how to
classify these systems. Those who designed the Contemporary History
course taught in the tenth grade have a very simple answer: "fascism was
the response of the bourgeoisie to socialism, the most inhumane and
reactionary expression of the capitalist system."

It would have been more accurate and revolutionary to point out that,
during the Second World War, developed states bent on expansion were the
ones that clashed. As such, all of these states, including the Soviet
Union, belonged to the family of the enemies of true socialism, the one
that seeks to socialize the means of production and guarantee control
over society by the workers and people. Asking Cuba's Communist Party to
go that far in its presentation of world history would of course be too
much.

The second big scam has to do with the non-aggression and mutual aid
treaty signed by the Soviets and its "irreconcilable enemies."

The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact is only mentioned once, in passing and, of
course, without one reference to the secret clause having to do with the
post-war slicing up of Poland and other European territories. Let us
recall that, around 1939, when the said document was signed, Nazism was
already outwardly criminal, racist and viscerally anti-socialist (in the
non-perverted sense of the term).

In their advance across the territories they occupied militarily thanks
to the agreement, the Soviets didn't behave a whole lot better than the
Nazis did. The Katyn massacre is a case in point. What does the history
notebook say about this? What are teachers at Cuban schools telling
their students this day and age?

Read it yourselves: "following Lenin's death, Stalin proclaimed a common
struggle against fascism," "the fascist hordes lunged towards Poland,"
"on June 22, 1941, fascist Germany attacked the Soviet Union, violating
the non-aggression pact [the only time this pact is mentioned] and
without a previous declaration of war."

The Textbook

The textbook prepared for the Contemporary History course does
explicitly refer to the non-aggression pact, but justifies it as a
survival strategy: "the Soviet Union had no other choice," "it was a way
of avoiding fighting on two fronts," "this way, it prevented the
imperialist powers from creating a single, anti-Soviet front," etc. The
prestigious Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm catches the lie in those
claims in his History of the 20th Century.

The textbook also mentions the additional secret clause, but describes
it as a violation of Leninist principles perpetrated by Stalin and
Molotov behind the Communist Party's back. The maneuver, aimed at a very
naïve audience, consists in sacrificing Stalin (who is already fairly
discredited, at any rate) with a view to saving the immaculate purity of
the Party and its legendary leader.

Conclusion

The Ideological Department of the Cuban Communist Party's Central
Committee directly controls school subjects with any political content.

The tenth-grade History syllabus is aimed at convincing students about
how good, dignified and legitimate Soviet socialism was. This way, it
prepares the terrain for justifying the passionate romance we had with
them and the fact we copied their communist-like totalitarian system.

If, to accomplish this, one has to twist history a "bit", there will
always be ministers of education, PhDs in pedagogy, education experts
and even teachers willing to lie or look the other way when others do
so. Are there no intellectuals and educators with enough respect for
themselves and their profession to rebel against this? It doesn't look
that way. The "natural selection" process and generational
indoctrination have managed to exterminate that race.

The Cuban State takes the care of children very seriously. Its admirable
accomplishments in this sensitive sphere have been acknowledged by
UNICEF. It's a shame that it works just as diligently to indoctrinate
them, something which, as far as I known, has never been acknowledged by
UNICEF.

Source: History as Taught in Cuba: the Soviets vs. the Bourgeoisie and
Nazis - Havana Times.org - http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=106696