By Brian Carnell

Thursday, April 27, 2000

Overlawyered.Com's Walter Olsen recently pointed to a bizarre account from The Legal Intelligencer of a junket a group of labor lawyers took to Cuba earlier in the year. The lawyers' description of the wonders of |Fidel Castro|'s Cuba is classic fellow traveling nonsense that should be immediately transparent to anyone familiar with the long history of Western dupes impressed by one |Communist| paradise or another.

Lawyer Joshua P. Rubinsky told The Legal Intelligencer, "There is a sense of respect for other human beings there. . . . A respect you don't see [in the United States] in terms of labor relations." This is, of course, the same Cuba that Amnesty International and other human rights groups accuse of using the power of the state to fire anyone who publicly disagrees with Castro. If that's "respect," American workers should be glad they don't have to endure that.

Rubinksy told The Legal Intelligencer that, "It was made very clear we were permitted to ask hard and difficult questions. We had an opportunity to spend hours talking to people from all walks of life. We got to see reality."

Rubinsky might have been given such an opportunity, but apparently he did notmake any use of it as he goes on to describe the glories of the Cuban legal system -- the same legal system that Castro has used to send dissidents to long prison terms for proclaiming counter-revolutionary ideas.

Finally, the lawyers were apparently impressed by the fact that unions in Cuba have some direct involvement in the management of industry which, presumably, they would like the United States to emulate. But consider the differing fortunes of the United States and Cuba. If any nation should have prospered after the fall of the Soviet Union it should have been Cuba -- decades of massive Soviet subsidies should have given Cuba a head start on economic development so the island nation could be self-sufficient. The reality, of course, is far different. Cuba used to be the nation Leftists offered as proof that socialism worked (high literacy, low infant morality), but as soon as things started going sour Leftists switched and now Cuba is the nation that the United States ruined with its embargo (despite the fact that most of the world simply ignores the embargo).

Cuba is, in fact, a great example of statist socialism -- it is by no means the worst place in the world to live, but it's not saying much to assert that living in Cuba is probably better than living in Nigeria or North Korea. Presumably the labor lawyers will be visiting those countries next to wax about their judicial procedures or colorful botanical gardens.

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