To the Editor:
The only common thread I can discern in the attitudes of the Europeans described by Mark Falcoff in “Why Europeans Support the Sandinistas” [August] is a rather spiteful anti-U.S. animus. Anything that will annoy the United States has got to be the right thing, never mind the longterm consequences.
I have just one question for Mr. Falcoff. In his comments on France he uses the phrase, “a ‘libertarian Left’ . . . socialism.” This puzzles me; is it perhaps a sort of oxymoron? It sounds attractive, but I would like to know just what it means.
Charles H. Chandler
Malden, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
Mark Falcoff points out in his article that Sweden’s Undersecretary of the Foreign Office, Pierre Schiori, “has taken Nicaragua under his wing.”
On the other hand, Schiori deserves credit for having persuaded Fidel Castro to allow the dissident poet Angel Cuadra to leave Cuba in 1985. Cuadra had spent fifteen years in prison and had been adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. He had also been named an honorary member of Sweden’s PEN Club.
Upon his release from prison in 1982, Cuadra was repeatedly denied an exit visa. Finally, Schiori went to Cuba and asked Castro to give the poet permission to leave the country. A few months later, Cuadra was able to take a plane to Europe. He went to Sweden and thanked Schiori personally for his help.
Roger Reed
Lausanne, Switzerland
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Mark Falcoff writes:
Charles H. Chandler is not wrong about the underlying thread which holds together European attitudes about Central America, or, rather, U.S. policy and interests there. What this says about the prospects for the survival of the North Atlantic alliance must be left to the evaluation of others more versed in European affairs than I.
While I am not personally sympathetic to socialism, I recognize that there are some socialists who value intellectual and political liberty so highly that they would rather compromise their stated goals of economic equality to preserve it. It was in this context that I used the term “libertarian.” Unfortunately, there are not enough socialists like this nowadays, but the term itself is not an oxymoron. It describes many of the social-democratic leaders of Western Europe in the postwar period. The difference is that these people believed their values indivisible—applicable everywhere in the world—whereas their successors subscribe to a sort of double standard, or as Marx himself might put it, an international division of labor. Within this framework, it is the task of the West to develop in freedom, the Third World to actualize the dark side of the socialist dream. Thus the Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Salvadoran peoples must fall into Communism to compensate Western European socialists for having to exchange their revolutionary dreams for bourgeois comforts at home.
I am glad to learn from Roger Reed of Pierre Schiori’s role in the case of Angel Cuadra. Up till now I knew only of his refusal to aid Mrs. Armando Valladares when she sought Western European support for her husband—also a longterm political prisoner in Cuba. As Valladares relates in his book, Against All Hope, Schiori on that occasion lectured Mrs. Valladares on the virtues of what some would call “quiet diplomacy”—refusing to condemn the Cuban regime on the grounds that “that would be giving the Americans a publicity weapon.” Of course, compassion in individual cases, however laudable, does not alter the record with regard to Pierre Schiori’s evident commitment to the creation of systems in Latin America in which human-rights violations are permanent, massive, and systematic.
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