Reason Magazine - Staff

Extreme Prejudice

info@reason.com (Mack Tanner) — Sat, 01 Jul 1995 00:00:00 EDT

"Who could possibly have done such an evil, cruel act?"

It's a question that we all asked ourselves as we watched the TV images of a demolished building filled suddenly with the dead, the dying, and the terrorized.

For a day, reporters and terrorism experts told us the bombers were almost certainly Muslim terrorists from the Middle East. Then the FBI captured a suspect who turned out to be one of our own--not just an American, but one who had served in our military and fought in one of our wars. Shocked that an American could do such a thing, reporters went looking for a bigger story.

The FBI wasn't about to throw the case by talking details. But the news media needed scary people to show to a public ravenous for answers. So the media told us that the FBI's primary suspect, Timothy McVeigh, and his two alleged co-conspirators, Terry and James Nichols, had some kind of association with something called the Michigan Militia. Then they gave us hours of TV coverage on what they repeatedly described as an extreme right-wing, anti-government, armed-and-dangerous group of paranoid Americans.

Never mind that leaders of two different militia groups in Michigan insisted that the suspects were not members of any militia group, and that indeed, they had been ejected from a meeting because of their extreme and violent talk. The media told us with lots of film clips of Americans training in the woods that the militia movement represents a threat to American society every bit as serious as Middle Eastern terrorists.

Reporters had seemingly reliable sources to back their conclusions. Last October, the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center's Klanwatch had issued separate reports warning of the "danger posed by the growing white supremacist involvement in newly formed citizen militias." Both groups had urged Attorney General Janet Reno "to alert all federal law enforcement authorities to the growing danger posed by the unauthorized militias," several of which had allegedly been infiltrated by white racists and anti-Semites.

The national media responded to the two reports with alarm-bell-ringing accounts of the troubling militia movement. These groups, according to press accounts, were preparing for armed clashes with their own government. And even when reporters didn't accuse the militias of violent racism, they described them as "a right-wing counter-culture" of "fearsomely aggressive adherents" engaged in the "politics of paranoia," to quote a Los Angeles Times account. Television exposés ran film clips of men and women dressed in combat fatigue uniforms, carrying military style semi-automatic weapons as they trained for combat.

I had learned about the militia movement several months before the Oklahoma tragedy while cruising the Internet newsgroup talk.politics.guns. The messages posted there by computer literates explaining and defending the militia movement didn't read like the ravings of white racist paranoids looking for an excuse to go to war with the government. They described the militia movement as a reasonable extension of the philosophy of armed self-defense. If one keeps weapons to protect one's family against the criminal intruder, doesn't it also make sense to prepare for the possibility that the government may turn criminally violent? There are plenty of 20th-century precedents for fearing that might happen in our country, as it has in others.

Of course, such arguments sound rational only to someone who believes that the Second Amendment confirms an individual's unalienable right to own and bear firearms--to someone who believes that an armed citizenry, like a free press, is an important bulwark of liberty. These arguments assume that the Framers of the Constitution intended that armed citizens would serve as the ultimate check on government power. Militia supporters argue that arms are most valuable as deterrents, whether to prowlers or out-of-control government agents.

Hoping to understand the militia movement, I sent a few of my own messages over the Internet. Working from the initial e-mail contacts, I interviewed citizen militia leaders, members, and people friendly to the militia movement in Texas, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Montana, Wisconsin, California, Washington, and my own home state, Idaho. What I learned about the movement suggests that its motivations, members, attitudes, and tactics have been grossly mischaracterized by culturally ignorant reporters more concerned with telling sensational stories than with explaining the more-complicated truth.

To understand what the militia movement is talking about, one needs to understand a bit of federal law. While most of us never think about it--or even know about it--every American male spends 28 years as a member of a militia, whether he wants to belong or not. United States Code, Title 10, Section 311, describes the militia of the United States as consisting of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and under 45 years of age. If we are not members of the National Guard, then we are, by law, members of the unorganized militia who can be called to service at any time by the appropriate legal authority.

Any two or more American men can therefore claim to be an association of members of the unorganized militia, just as they might be an association of voters, taxpayers, parents, or citizens. So it's important to make a few distinctions among different kinds of groups of armed citizens who have grievances against the government. These are the critical distinctions that neither reporters nor experts from the ADL and Klanwatch nor representatives of the Clinton administration have been careful to make. Such armed groups and associations in the United States include:

* The criminal racists, tax protesters, radical environmentalists, and political groups committed to violent revolution. These are people with narrowly focused agendas who will deliberately break the law in pursuit of their agendas. Examples include the Ku Klux Klan, the Posse Comitatus, the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, the Freemen, and some environmental and animal rights groups. Such criminal groups count their members in the tens and sometimes the hundreds, but they seldom grow much bigger. Federal and state police agencies have been remarkably successful in catching and prosecuting these criminals.

* Peaceful survivalists, racial separatists, and religious cult groups. These include Mormon polygamists, the Universal Church Triumphant, Bo Gritz, the Branch Davidians, and similar survivalist groups. Some of them may evade taxes, stockpile illegal arms, home school in violation of state laws, or commit other violations of state and local law, but these people seldom threaten harm to outsiders or commit crimes against their neighbors. They frequently live in enclosed communities, and are often armed and prepared to repel attacks against their sanctuaries. Federal law enforcement agencies mistakenly assumed that the Branch Davidians fit within the criminal category described above, and in doing so, made the Davidians' paranoid nightmares come true.

* The loners and the Walter Mittys. These are angry individuals who personalize their war with government. They tend to be very secretive and demonstrate limited social and employment skills. Occasionally, one of them will try to make his fantasies of glory a reality. When they do, they can cause a lot of havoc and get lots of media attention. Examples include Francisco Duran, who recently shot up the White House; the attackers on abortion clinics; Lee Harvey Oswald; and most mass murderers. Police agencies usually catch these criminals, but like serial killers, they can be much harder to identify than members of criminal political groups. (After 17 years, law enforcement agencies still haven't identified the "Unabomber," who celebrated Oklahoma City by mailing another of his creations.)

* The armed, but legitimate, political activists. This is a new phenomenon, at least in this century. These are socially successful people who respect and obey the law, but who are organizing and arming themselves because they fear they may be attacked by agencies of their own government. It was this new phenomenon, the citizen militias, that drew my interest. Just who are these people?

One thing we definitely are not are haters of government or haters of law enforcement," Bob Clarke, a member of the Michigan Militia told me a few days after the Oklahoma tragedy. "I have a driver's license, license plates, and I pay my taxes." Like many militia members, Clarke is a devout Christian who educates his children at home. He sees his participation in the militia movement as a continuing part of the Christian life. His reaction to the Oklahoma bombing is no different from any other American's: "Let's get them, find out who did it. Whoever did it is despicable. Any human being has to be appalled."

Clarke, who owns a computer service company, is a fairly typical militia member in both his background and motivations. Contrary to what some left-leaning analysts have claimed, militia members aren't drawn primarily from the ranks of the unemployed and economically disenfranchised. Like Clarke, they are solidly middle class. And, like Clarke, they are driven not by hatred--of blacks, Jews, or even the government--but by fear. They worry that the federal government does not respect the liberties guaranteed in the Constitution and may eventually pose a direct threat to them, their families, and their neighbors.

Although they have a host of popular grievances with the federal government--from land-use policies to gun control to just about everything the Department of Education does--militia members are clearly worried most about armed federal attacks. Most of the groups were organized sometime after the events at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, where, in 1992, U.S. Marshals and FBI agents killed Randy Weaver's son and wife, and the deadly 1993 standoff between the feds and Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas.

"First the feds put that Reverend Moon character in jail for tax evasion," Clarke told me in February when I asked why he thinks the federal government is dangerous. "I thought that was a great idea. Then they went after that guy from India with all those limousines in Oregon, which was OK with me too. But I started getting worried when I learned about what happened to Randy Weaver. When the FBI killed all those people in Waco, I asked myself who they were going to come for next, the Baptists?"

"Everybody is afraid of the government," the training officer for a local Michigan unit told me in February. A military veteran and one of several sources who asked that they not be quoted by name, he continued, "Our members see how the press is attacking those who dare to object to what the government is doing. First they demonize you, then they kill you like they did in Waco."

But, he said, "It's not just Waco and Ruby Ridge. We worry about RICO prosecutions, new restrictions on Fourth Amendment rights, tax seizures, property takings, you name it. But I think the assault weapon ban was more important in getting people interested in the militia movement than anything else. If they take our weapons away, then we have no way to fight to keep all our other rights."

Like ACLU lawyers who rely on the courts or intellectuals and journalists who rely on the press, militia members have a theory of how best to protect American liberties. They believe that maintaining freedom depends, ultimately, on the deterrent of an armed populace.

Nonetheless, says the training officer, "We don't wear our camo all of the time. We are not looking for an armed confrontation if we can avoid it. Every week, we pick a political issue based on what the media is reporting, and we crank out a letter on that issue which each member sends to his congressman or senator." Militia members are fond of saying that Americans' freedom rests on five boxes: the soapbox, the ballot box, the jury box, the witness box, and the cartridge box.

But, as Idaho leader Samuel Sherwood told a March 2 meeting of militia commanders, most militia members believe that "now is the time for ink, not powder." In perhaps the most outrageous example of irresponsible coverage of the militia movement, a local reporter wrote--and The Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt repeated--that Sherwood told his audience to look legislators in the face today because "you may have to be shooting them in the face" tomorrow. In fact, he said just the opposite. In the closing minutes of the meeting, Sherwood made an impassioned plea for using political action rather than violence in correcting the wrongs that the members of the United States Militia Association see in government. He suggested that if his listeners wanted to grab a gun to shoot their legislators, they should first go look them in the face and recognize that legislators are also American citizens who are fathers, mothers, husbands, and wives. The audience not only understood that he was arguing against violence, they applauded his remarks. Unlike Journal columnist Hunt, I was actually at the meeting.

Sherwood, who leads the U.S. Militia Association from his home in Blackfoot, Idaho, argues that militia groups should not muster and train as military units except in the 17 states which legalize such activity under the supervision of civilian authority. In Idaho, where law and the state constitution make no provisions for the mustering of the unorganized militia, Sherwood's units meet as political action groups lobbying to allow such mustering.

Sherwood envisions the militia movement developing into a well-trained, self-financed, volunteer force ready to respond to the command of civilian officials in the event of a natural disaster, riot, or armed attack. Like most militia activists, Sherwood favors self-reliance and prefers local to national government. Instead of calling for federal troops (or National Guard units under federal command), he argues that governors, sheriffs, or local county commissioners would be better served if they could call up a volunteer militia unit equipped with personally owned weapons. Ultimately, Sherwood would like to see the United States organize its national defense on the Swiss model, with an armed and trained populace rather than a standing army (except for a few specialized forces to handle, for instance, nuclear weapons). Although units of the U.S. Militia Association do not muster and train in military tactics, at least not in Idaho, every person joining the association agrees to buy a legal semi-automatic assault weapon if he or she doesn't already own one, lots of ammunition, and the field equipment and supplies necessary to respond to a call to arms.

At Sherwood's invitation, I attended the March 2 meeting of commanders of U.S. Militia Association units located in and near Boise. Eighty people showed up at the Boise City and County building, about 30 of them wearing the military-green, mufti-style uniform of the U.S. Militia Association. A number brought their wives and a few, their children. The members ranged from teenagers to an old rancher in his late 70s, who slowly walked on badly bowed legs with the help of a wooden cane.

Idaho Deputy Governor Butch Otter talked for a few moments about how the new Republican government in Idaho was pushing hard to reduce federal interference in state affairs. Unimpressed, the militia members engaged Otter in a vigorous, sometimes angry, 90-minute debate. They did not believe the new state administration was moving fast enough to change federal land-use policies, environmental limitations on the logging industry and private land use, federal regulations on business, and so on. Sounding much like a meeting of Ross Perot's United We Stand America, the militia members stood up to shout out their anger over NAFTA and GATT, Forest Service fire-fighting policies, the "insane" enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, the public education system, the idea that U.N. treaties could override the Constitution, high taxes, and their fears of being singled out by federal law-enforcement agents.

"All they have to do is find certain kinds of chemicals on my land, and they can take everything I own by claiming I'm about to start making illegal drugs," said a man in his mid-60s.

They were angry and strident, but these people did not sound like dangerous radicals threatening to destroy the system. I met computer programmers, owners of small businesses, professionals, writers and artists, salaried employees, and lots of retired military officers, all well established in America's middle class. "Our members are the people who have paid the price of big government but who don't get the benefits," says a leader in Michigan.

One can reasonably ask why these people don't stick to more traditional political action instead of spending so much money buying weapons and ammunition and so much time and effort preparing to fight. Part of the explanation lies in the distinction between local authorities and the federal government.

While the people joining militias hold what have long been minority views on the national level, many of them live where they are in a political majority. They help elect sheriffs, county commissioners, state legislators, and congressional representatives who share their political ideals. But their elected representatives are outvoted in state capitals, and even more often, in Washington, D.C. National leaders elected by voter majorities in faraway places impose on them laws and regulations that destroy jobs and property values while raising taxes. And, even worse, they pass laws the militia members believe unconstitutional--a category in which they include not only gun-control laws but most regulations and subsidies. This alienation is also the source of their antipathy for international organizations. People who object to politicians from New York City and Southern California telling them how to live in Montana or Michigan go ballistic at the suggestion of a new world order in which officials from China, India, and Canada will make the rules.

And when they hear politicians like Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) make rash remarks about confiscating all "assault weapons," they imagine the federal government, perhaps using foreign troops, launching an attack on them. "The day federal martial law is declared is the day the militia will deploy as an armed, fighting force ready to repel invaders, be they the federal government or foreign troops," says the Michigan-unit training officer. If that ever happens, he expects to be fighting side by side with state and local leaders he helped to elect.

Most of the time, however, the militia members aren't exactly preparing for war, though their meetings often have a survivalist air. The Michigan-unit training officer explains that his unit meets twice a week. They have an advertised meeting on Fridays where different speakers discuss and interpret events in the news. Around 100 people come out on a regular basis.

On Tuesdays, they hold an unadvertised meeting for active members and friends. "It's a core group of about 20 people," says the officer. At this meeting, members learn emergency medical treatment (taught by members of the local fire department), map reading, radio communication skills, family care, water purification, and food preparation using items that can be stored for long periods of time. Recently, he says, 40 members earned American Heart Association certification in CPR. They also go on occasional weekend training camps where they practice such field skills as camouflage, unit maneuvers, weapons safety, compass navigation, and target practice.

"We really are a bunch of Boy Scouts," he admitted when I suggested that's what it sounded like.

Like all good Boy Scouts, he insists that they obey the law. "We are not looking for confrontation. That's the last thing we want." He paused for a moment, then added, "We will fight if they push us."

It's that suggestion of armed defense that troubles critics. Sane, civilized Americans aren't supposed to mention the possibility that their government could turn violent--and certainly aren't supposed to suggest that they might take up arms against it in self-defense.

When Richard Cohen, writing about the militia movement in The Washington Post, states that "they are armed to stay armed, a tautology that apparently is the sum and substance of their ideology," he demonstrates his ignorance of the political and social culture of those who join the militias. People don't join a militia because they love guns, but because they believe that guns are necessary tools if they are to keep all the other freedoms they enjoy.

Cohen suggests that the Second Amendment "is an 18th century anachronism, incompatible with 20th and 21st century America." But militia members are looking at a 20th-century example in which a democracy devolved in less than a decade into a tyranny that first outlawed private ownership of firearms, then marched 6 million law-abiding people, beginning with its own citizens, to their death. Contrary to the portrait of them as raving anti-Semites, militia members are haunted by the same example that frightens their detractors at the Anti-Defamation League.

"My dad was on the lead tank that knocked down the gate at Dachau," says the Michigan-unit training officer. "I know what tyranny can do." (His father, he says, was an official war photographer with the 163rd Signal Corps in the 7th Army.) Militia members believe fervently in the reality of the Holocaust, they are determined that it never happen again--and they identify with the Jews.

This doesn't mean that they don't buy various conspiracy theories; many militia members do (though generally not ones with racist or anti-Semitic overtones). But the movement as a whole lacks a racist edge. In my many long conversations with activists around the country, I talked with one person--a lawyer in South Carolina--who made statements that smacked of racism. Members are often at pains to point out that their meetings include minorities. "We've got three blacks and one Muslim in our group, and we live in a part of Michigan where few minorities live," says the training officer.

James Johnson, the elected communications officer for the Unorganized Militia of Ohio, is a black utility worker who lives in inner-city Columbus. He sees federal government abuses in places like Ruby Ridge and Waco as a new phenomenon only to the extent that the targets were white. Like many militia members, he and his wife Helen are fundamentalist Christians who home school their children and see their militia work as an extension of their religious life. From their home, they put out a newsletter for militia members titled E Pluribus Unum.

Johnson describes himself "as one of a growing number of blacks who are beginning to understand that we must solve our problems on an individual and community level, not by relying on government." He believes that the right to keep and bear arms is especially important to minority groups. "I've had considerable success in recruiting other blacks into militia organizations," he says.

Since most militia units are made up of friends who have known each other for years, the movement's loose structure serves to isolate and exclude both overt racists and advocates of violence. "If anyone starts talking nonsense that smacks of sedition or illegal attacks on the government, we kick them out," Bob Clarke told me last February. This is exactly what appears to have happened with Timothy McVeigh and the Nichols brothers. Militia units in Michigan wanted nothing to do with them.

Other militia units are open to the public and don't exclude anyone. But they can discourage racist talk. Says Sheryl Tuttle, a movement supporter who lives in southern Idaho, "I remember once when somebody did make a racist remark in one of our meetings. Someone else got up immediately to call him on it. He never came back to another meeting."

Tuttle and her husband Bill are typical militia supporters. In their mid-40s, they've raised one child and are now grandparents. Sheryl is active in her church's work with children and has served as an informal foster mother for several kids. She left a career in nursing several years ago to work with Bill designing and producing welded metal art pieces, which they sell at craft shows. When she started traveling between shows with sizable sums of money, Sheryl bought a semi-automatic pistol and started carrying it. Twice since then, she and Bill have scared off potential criminals by displaying (but not pointing) their weapons. In one case the threat was a prowler at their home, in the other a tailgater on a steep, deserted mountain road.

Bill, a voracious reader partial to conspiracy theories of history, is a military veteran and the son of a professional Army officer. The Tuttles got interested in the militia movement as a result of their growing involvement in politics and their frustration with government regulations that directly affect their lives and businesses. "Every time we go to a preschool board meeting" at the church, says Sheryl, "we've got another regulation we are supposed to obey. Now they want us to put an elevator in the church where we hold the school."

"Our government was founded on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and they have thrown our Constitution out," Bill said, explaining why he joined the U.S. Militia Association.

"Now we have to spend time and energy defending ourselves, instead of doing something more constructive," Sheryl told me when I asked her about the media blitz demonizing the militia movement. "It's going to scare a lot of people, and it scares me, but am I going to back off? No!"

The Tuttles and most other militia supporters are people who have grown up with guns, served in the military, and use guns as tools for hunting, small predator control, and self-protection. Guns don't frighten them, and they don't understand people who are frightened by guns. Having a gun in the house for self-defense is like buying fire insurance; it's something they believe they must have but hope they never have to use. They also know that when one is armed and dangerous, others, even government bureaucrats, tend to leave a person alone. They bear arms for personal defense, not because they expect to engage in shoot-outs, but because they believe that the display of a firearm will discourage criminal attack.

As one Internet posting put it: "The point of being armed is not to defeat an opposing army. It is...to prevent the agents of the government from dispersing the militia without killing them....An armed militia that acts with constraint can symbolically suggest that the Constitution is being abused. They do not need to ever level a weapon--they merely need to have it on hand to prevent the government from running roughshod over them."

After talking for hours with these people, watching more hours of their videotapes, and reading through reams of their literature and megabytes of electronic debate, my own conclusion is that the militia movement is a cry for attention, recognition, and respect, not a call for bloody revolution. Militia activists argue for the right of self-defense, not for the right to initiate violence or to break the law.

Some in the militia movement believe that a fight is inevitable, even though they insist they will not fire first. Others, probably the majority, hope that by being well-armed and sounding a loud warning, they will ensure that no one will ever dare try to lock them up if they refuse to give up their arms and their freedoms. They organize and arm themselves because they are frightened by what the government may do to them. But once they are armed and organized, they lose their fear, and they can turn their attention to peaceful efforts to roll back government.

"The last election does give us hope," Bob Clarke told me last February. "We are taking a wait-and-see attitude, but we are shifting our focus to political action. We're writing letters, sending faxes, and calling congressmen and assemblymen." Idaho's Samuel Sherwood explained, "Once people have armed and organized themselves, they have three choices: Take aggressive military action with horrendous results. Move to political action. Or decay and fall apart." Clearly, Sherwood prefers the political option.

John Wallner, an ex-Marine tank crewman who heads the San Diego Militia (half of whose 100 members are Jewish), is fighting for freedom in the courts. His organization has filed suit against the federal government challenging the ban on assault weapons. He considers his group first and foremost a public service group. Their most recent project was a fund raiser for the homeless of San Diego.

When I suggested they sounded like armed and dangerous Rotarians, he laughed and agreed with the characterization.

"So why bother with the militia bit?" I asked.

"The best way to keep the right to bear arms is for law-abiding citizens who are serving their community to openly exercise the right," he answered. He wants the right to bear arms because he believes once he loses that right, he will soon lose all the rest.

Unlike many in the movement, Wallner doesn't buy the conspiracy theories. "We should not attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity," he says.

Many militia activists, however, are not just scared of the government. They are looking for explanations for why their government has gotten so far off the constitutional track. They find easy answers in theories about a cabal of Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations conspirators who are manipulating events to create a New World Order in which the United Nations will rule while the American Constitution is treated as a historical curiosity.

People like Mark Koernke, the shortwave broadcaster who calls himself Mark from Michigan, travel the country speaking in public meetings. They distribute videos and publications claiming to prove that the conspirators have already secretly brought U.N. troops into the United States to impose the New World Order, and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has prepared concentration camps where a new super secret national police force, the Multi-Jurisdictional Task Force (MJTF), will imprison those who dare to resist. Such conspiracy theories are also spread by word of mouth, reading lists, computer bulletin boards, faxes, and private shortwave radio broadcasts.

But militia activists aren't scared because they believe conspiracy theories. They believe conspiracy theories because they're scared. The fear came first; then they went looking for explanations. And all good conspiracy theories must have some basis in truth. These explain why taxes keep rising, why government regulations grow at warp speed, and why American politicians talk about a new world order while demanding that Americans be disarmed. The people describing the supposed conspiracies are offering explanations for what militia supporters see happening--the continual erosion of constitutional rights, from property rights to the right to bear arms to the rights of the accused.

Stories of U.N. troops sneaking into the United States and black helicopters scouting the countryside can be easily debunked, and publications popular with militia members, such as the John Birch Society's The New American, have already done so. But debunking the conspiracy theories does not solve the basic problem. Government still grows bigger, more expensive, and more intrusive. When politicians and media wonks refuse to recognize the legitimacy of complaints about big government, those who believe in conspiracies will not bother to listen to those trying to convince them their theories are wrong.

The most effective way to reduce militia members' paranoia would be to hold full, public hearings on Waco--the incident that galvanized many activists. "We didn't see any need to get seriously involved until we watched the Waco tragedy on live TV," a member of the U.S. Militia Association who lives in Boise, and is the mom side of a mom-and-pop business, told me. "We have been actively involved in the militia movement ever since."

Having watched it on live TV, she considers herself an eyewitness who has drawn an obvious conclusion that if the FBI didn't deliberately murder the Branch Davidians, agents did act with criminal negligence. The only way to convince her otherwise would be either for Congress to hold open hearings or to charge and try in court the federal officers who may have committed negligent acts that led to the death of innocent children. Nevertheless, this young militia mother--and every other of my contacts--was just as horrified by the Oklahoma bombing as she was by Waco.

Why would civil rights groups and the news media portray citizens like this young mother, Bill and Sheryl Tuttle, or James and Helen Johnson as dangerous threats who ought to be closely watched?

In his recent book Crying Wolf: Hate Crime Hoaxes in America, sociologist Laird Wilcox explains that as society increasingly condemns and deters hate crimes, organizations that depend on a fear of hate crime to feed their contribution coffers must constantly seek new threats. While the deceit may not be deliberate, the search for scare stories can lead to exaggerations and uncritical reporting of what may be hoaxes, unproven allegations, or simply bad information.

But the reason some people are savaging the citizen-militia movement may be even more perverse. Many supporters of an all-powerful central government have a political faith, not a political philosophy. They lack the intellectual tools necessary to challenge and debate alternative political theories. Incapable of understanding the reasons for the voters' revolt in the last election, and convinced of the truth of their own faith, they assume that those who have contrary political beliefs must be evil people.

Obviously, in this world view, those who hold guns while espousing an alternative set of political beliefs must be the most evil people of all. By suggesting that such people inspired the Oklahoma bomb blast, those with blind faith in big government expect to discredit and destroy not just the threat they see in the militia members, but also the much more real threat represented by the last election, the Contract with America, and the growing demand by millions of voters for less government, lower taxes, more effective law enforcement, and more choice for the individual.

Marvin Stern of the Anti-Defamation League insisted when I talked to him that the ADL does make a distinction between those who join militias with legitimate political complaints and those trying to use the militias to push a racist agenda. But the ADL report begins by describing the militia movement as "bands of armed right-wing militants." The author then quotes several militia leaders on gun control, the possibility of future anti-government violence, and their conservative attitudes on education, abortion, and the environment. Having established that these people all hold political views most liberals think are extreme and dangerous, the report announces that "some of them--even in leadership roles--[are] persons with histories of racial and religious bigotry and political extremism." The report's author leaves it up to the reader to decide who are the real racists and who are just dangerous, right-wing political extremists.

Stern initially told me that Idaho was one of the states where racists were most influential in the militia movement. Reminding him that I live in Idaho, I asked for more specific details. Did he include Samuel Sherwood, the only militia leader with any significant following in Idaho, in that accusation? While not Jewish, Sherwood once lived as a legal resident in Israel on a kibbutz.

Obviously not willing to debate an issue with someone who knew the territory, Stern backed down, claiming he had erred in naming Idaho. Instead, he said, John and David Trochmann, who founded the Militia of Montana, were the racists. He did not cite any specific racist incidents, nor did he quote anything written or spoken by the Trochmanns that sounded racist or anti-Semitic, nor did he mention any additional evidence other than the already printed accusations of guilt by association.

A devout Christian, John Trochmann is a strong advocate of New World Order conspiracy theories. But he adamantly denied that he is a member of any racist organization. He readily admitted that he and his family twice visited the Aryan Nation compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, several years ago, but insisted that they had gone there as part of a home-school learning project. "I am not on their mailing list, I have never signed any of their statements, and I certainly never joined the organization," he told me in loud, angry tones.

While I have no way of knowing what John Trochmann truly believes, I could find no overtly racist or anti-Semitic statements in the publications or the videotapes distributed by the Militia of Montana. And militantly racist groups rarely hide their agendas, which are, after all, how they attract members.

The level of scholarship in the Klanwatch report is perhaps best demonstrated by the statement, "The foot soldiers in these groups are just the type of people that Klan and neo-Nazi leaders have recruited in recent years." For students of logic, this could be translated into the syllogism: "All Klansmen and neo-Nazis are white, own guns, and don't like the federal government. Therefore all whites who own guns and don't like the federal government should be feared as Klansmen or neo-Nazis."

Using innuendo, guilt by association, and stereotypes to tar people as racist, anti-Semitic, and potentially violent could be considered as much a hate act as the burning of crosses. Such indiscriminate accusations pin targets on people like the Tuttles by identifying them as objects to be attacked with impunity. This, in turn, creates the distrust that can result in disastrous confrontations between law enforcement officers and legally armed citizens. That's what happened at Waco. Another such disaster could have happened in Roundup, Montana in early March. That it didn't suggests that the militias are more peaceful and rational than their critics make out.

Gun-toting radicals busted in Montana," read the Spokane Spokesman-Review banner headline. Seven men had been arrested in Roundup on suspicion that they intended to kidnap and hang a judge or other public officials. The newspaper added that local officials were treating the case as though the suspects were high-risk terrorists. One of the men arrested was John Trochmann. The news story referred to the two civil rights watchdog reports and repeated their description of Trochmann and other officers of the Militia of Montana as men who had "long been involved in the white supremacist movement" and who promoted armed resistance to federal and state authorities.

Within 48 hours after the arrests, the leaders and most of the members of the citizen-militia groups knew about the arrests and wondered if they marked the beginning of a long-rumored roundup of militia leaders by federal law enforcement agencies. But it was the county sheriff, not the BATF or the FBI, who made the arrests in Roundup, a town about 500 miles away from Trochmann's home base in Noxon.

Trochmann, who actively monitors a number of anti-government groups, had gone as an observer with a group of Freemen to file papers at the Musselshell County Court House. The Freemen are tax resisters who oppose all government regulation of individual behavior, even the requirement that one carry a driver's license. After the court rejected the papers on legal grounds, a vocal but nonviolent altercation developed outside the courtroom. Sheriff's deputies arrested the five men and charged them with a basketful of felonies, including criminal endangerment, intimidation, and criminal syndicalism. Trochmann wasn't directly involved in the altercation but had been waiting outside in a parked car with one other person. Nevertheless, the sheriff arrested them both as part of the suspected conspiracy.

If the whole militia movement, or just the Militia of Montana, had been looking for an excuse to go to war, this would have been the opportunity. But no one mobilized and marched on Roundup. Instead, John Trochmann's nephew, Randy, made a public plea on a Spokane TV station and on the Internet, asking that all militia members stay home and send money to help pay for legal fees.

Simply put, the local law overreacted when a bunch of well-armed strangers rode into town. On March 29, Montana officials dropped all charges against five of the seven people, including John Trochmann, and the felony charges against the other two men. Eventually the Musselshell County authorities must prove to a jury that the two men still facing charges did commit misdemeanor weapon violations. They may also have to prove in civil court that there was reasonable cause for the arrest of the five already released.

That's the way that charges of crimes and government abuses are supposed to be settled in this country. The people I talked with would rather do it that way.

The events that followed the arrest of Timothy McVeigh suggest that the members of citizen-militia associations may have been fearful of the wrong institution. Their most dangerous enemy may not be the federal government but the national news media.

"When the FBI authorities were quoted, they were all very circumspect," says Bob Clarke. "The press very gladly lumped everybody together as a right-wing extremist, racist type of a cult. It's all the same to them. The media hasn't done a very good job of understanding this whole militia thing. There is a lot of misinformation coming off the airwaves."

There is indeed. After days of watching the media coverage on every one of the three major TV networks and reading through reams of news reports and critical editorial comment, I had neither heard nor read a single shred of court-admissible evidence that suggested that any unit of the militia movement was engaged in any conspiracy to overthrow the government or to commit any other crime in support of their political agenda.

Innuendo and scare quotes, largely taken out of context, dominated the reports. Even the advocates of conspiracy theories, such as Mark Koernke, never call for the overthrow of government in their material. While TV news people can play quotes out of context, anyone who watches hours of his militia videos knows that when a battle-ready Mark Koernke talks about defending one's sector, he's talking about a reaction force resisting an invasion, not the beginning of the revolution.

And some reports seemed deliberately misleading. ABC, for instance, showed a headline from The Resister, a publication of the self-proclaimed Special Forces Underground that is read by some militia members. It read: "Would You Shoot Fellow Americans?" ABC didn't tell viewers that the article is an exposé of a survey distributed by a Marine to his troops--not a call to arms.

One may not like the militia movement's political agenda, one may find its members' conspiracy theories troubling, and one may be offended by the idea that middle-class men and women are training with deadly weapons because of a fear that the government may someday attack them. But journalists have a responsibility to be accurate and careful, not merely entertaining and provocative. It is a responsibility they have too often shirked in reports on the militias.

As the Oklahoma bombing investigation proceeds, it is possible that the FBI may find evidence that a militia member or a citizen-militia association was involved in some way. If such evidence is discovered, the people I've met in the militia movement will be the first to cheer as the culprits are led away to jail. But until such evidence is presented in court, the national media have done a great injustice to a group of American citizens who spend their spare time practicing to fight a defensive war rather than playing paintball and who wear camouflage and combat boots rather than jogging shorts and running shoes while they get their outdoor exercise.

If those in the militia movement thought they had good reason to fear government before, they are now even more convinced that powerful forces are planning to take away their freedoms. New conspiracy theories are already spreading via the Internet, the fax machines, and the shortwave radio stations. These theories describe the Oklahoma tragedy as one more piece of the conspiracy, perhaps deliberately planned and executed by federal agents to destroy the patriot movement and regain the power lost in the last election.

"It's going to help the whole movement nationwide, to one degree or another," Samuel Sherwood answered when I asked what the impact of the anti-militia publicity would be. "For those who were wondering whether there was a conspiracy, this is going to certainly confirm that there is a conspiracy of some sort or another." He then added, "Bill Clinton is using this in the same way Hitler used the Reichstag fire. Only we're different people. The Germans weren't armed. We are."

"The bomb in Oklahoma blew up America," says the Michigan-unit training officer. "Every person in this country who turned on the TV and saw the broken bodies of tiny children being carried out of the building is a casualty. They will carry the wound the rest of their lives, just like I will....Bill Clinton is standing in the blood of those children when he attempts to use this tragedy for his own political advantage."

Viva La Evolution!

info@reason.com (Mack Tanner) info@reason.com (Larry Grupp) — Mon, 01 Aug 1994 00:00:00 EDT

The Special Period

"Bring them to my house." She spoke in Spanish, her voice almost a shout. "Let them see my hungry children. Let them see the real Cuba." The angry, distraught woman appeared suddenly out of the crowd to confront the Cuban government guide shepherding a busload of Canadian tourists through the streets of Havana. In her mid-30s and wearing a worn, dirty cotton print dress, she was thin, but she didn't seem to be starving.

"Get out of here!" the guide told her. "Before you get in trouble!" He was embarrassed but not angry. He spoke in a quiet, sympathetic tone, sounding like he really was worried that a police officer might arrest the poor woman for committing one of the more serious street crimes in Havana today--doing anything that threatens the tourist industry. The woman, fear replacing the anger on her face, turned and walked away through a scattered crowd of Cuban pedestrians at a speed just slower than a trot.

"What was that all about?" a Canadian tourist asked the guide.

"Nothing," he said. "She is just a crazy woman. She should be in a hospital." As the tour guide brushed off the incident, he looked at Mack Tanner, the only foreigner in the group who spoke Spanish. Both men knew that the woman didn't have anything to give her children to eat that day. She wasn't crazy; she had been driven into anger by desperation and frustration--two emotions in great abundance in Cuba these days.

The people of Cuba are hungry, but they are not starving, at least not yet. They are doing without a lot of things--soap, shampoo, toilet paper, toothpaste, pencils, shoes, headache pills, vitamins, and even the single piece of meat per week for which they have ration coupons. The shortages interact and compound each other. Because of the frequent electricity blackouts, food in cold- storage plants and home refrigerators spoils. Even if a factory has raw materials, workers don't show up because the buses aren't running.

The Cuban economy has gone bankrupt, and every citizen in the country knows it. Fidel Castro has admitted it and has even given the bankruptcy a name, La Estapa Especial--the Special Period. His propaganda machine spins out explanations for why it has happened and promises of how the Cuban government is going to solve the problem. His treasury is so empty of foreign exchange that Fidel can't buy enough fuel and fertilizer to run his sugar industry, medicines for his much-touted health-care services, or shoes or uniforms for the children in his free educational system. Factories sit idle for lack of electric power, fuel for engines, spare parts, and raw materials.

The public transportation system runs at a snail's pace when it runs at all. People crowd bus stops in such numbers that special, unarmed marshals wearing yellow uniforms keep order and direct the loading of waiting passengers into whatever government vehicle comes along with empty space. Workers can spend as long as six hours a day traveling back and forth to their government jobs. Clerks in government stores sit in front of empty shelves. When a grocery store does get a delivery of food--most of the time a single item such as carrots or cabbages--a mob of customers instantly gathers outside. Many still stand there waiting when the shelves are once again empty.

While Castro and his government blame this economic disaster on the withdrawal of Soviet aid, the continuing American trade embargo, and the low world price of sugar, the plain fact is that the Castro government has failed because communism always fails. Rather than trying to prevent Americans from visiting Cuba, we ought to encourage as many as possible to go see what happens when a communist system absorbs a free-enterprise economy. Castro took over one of the most vibrant, developed economies in Latin America in 1959. He destroyed the capital formation mechanism and the market incentives of the economy, and the Cuban people have been eating their seed corn ever since. Soviet charity kept them going for a while but only delayed the inevitable. Now Cuba ranks with Haiti as the poorest of the poor in the Americas.

With the collapse of the Cuban economy and the possibility of real starvation in the near future, Castro and those around him have been forced to turn to the only thing that might save their economy: free enterprise. New laws make it legal for Cubans to hold and spend American dollars; rural families can once again sell the surplus they produce; and city dwellers can legally engage in single-owner private business enterprises. The Cuban political leaders have made a major investment in the tourist industry in an attempt to earn enough foreign exchange to keep the economy going. Cuban diplomats are scouring Europe, Canada, and Latin America, looking for capitalists willing to risk money in joint ventures in Cuban mining, petroleum, and manufacturing interests.

Vision of Failure

Interested in what happens when a communist society lets loose a bit of free enterprise and curious about what role, if any, the U.S. embargo has played in pushing Castro up against the wall, we decided to travel to Cuba. The U.S. embargo against Cuba, which has been in place since 1962, doesn't prohibit U.S. citizens from traveling there, but it does forbid Americans to spend any money on travel to Cuba. The penalties for breaking the law are severe: up to 10 years in prison and fines up to $250,000. The law allows exceptions for Americans traveling to visit their families, legitimate scholarly researchers, U.S. government officials, and news-gathering journalists.

Based on public statements by Cuban government officials about how eager they were to tell the story of the new Cuba, we expected getting visas as journalists would be easy. On September 30, 1993, we sent a fax to the Cuban Interest Section in the Swiss Embassy in Washington requesting visas. On November 10, we received a fax asking for more information about the publication we wrote for. We provided the information and mailed some back issues of REASON. We never heard another word about our visa applications.

We learned that a Wall Street Journal writer had waited more than four months for a visa, finally received one, then had it revoked a few days later after he made a speech in which he said something someone in the Cuban government didn't like. The unholy alliance between the U.S. Treasury Department, which enforces the embargo, and the Castro government officials who control visas for journalists ensures that most Americans who visit Cuba are inclined to ignore evidence of socialist failures and accept propaganda blaming outside factors such as the U.S. embargo.

After verifying that we wouldn't be breaking U.S. law if we went to Cuba without telling Cuban immigration officers we were journalists, we joined a tour group of Canadian citizens. During our seven days in Cuba, we rode through several hundred miles of countryside and drove through the suburbs of Havana as well as the oil fields and the tourist resorts of Matanzas province.

Nowhere was the socialist failure more obvious than in the rural areas. Cuba has a rich agricultural base of fertile land, water resources, and a long growing season capable of producing up to three crops a year on the same land. The country could feed its population, without having to take sugar-cane land out of cultivation, if it had the market incentives that drive successful agricultural production.

Everywhere we drove through the countryside, we saw large numbers of people working the fields of collective farms with hoes or harvesting by hand. In some parts of the country, children go to school for half the day and work in the fields for half the day. But no matter how many people are sent to the fields, production continues to decline. Modern agriculture stands on three legs: high-yield seed varieties, chemicals, and mechanization. Human labor can take the place of machines, but it does nothing to alleviate shortages of high-yield seed and chemicals.

Larry Grupp, now a trained agricultural specialist, spent the summer of 1958 in Cuba, and he remembers seeing only one pair of oxen plowing a field. A Cuban friend pointed out the spectacle, noting that there were still a few farmers mired in poverty. On our recent trip we saw fewer tractors pulling plows than we saw teams of oxen. And every ox team we saw was tied to the plow by the horns. One of the more important inventions of the Middle Ages was the shoulder yoke, which doubles or even triples the amount of work a team of oxen can do in a day. Any carpenter can make an ox shoulder yoke in no more than an hour's time. Mack Tanner's wife, who is from Thailand, can make one out of bamboo, rope, and a couple of pieces of leather. Yet the bureaucrats who manage the collective farms of Cuba apparently are unfamiliar with such modern technology.

Speaking Freely

We met only one defender of communism during our visit, a taxi driver whom a hotel desk clerk called for us. Eduardo Gadea told us he grew up in New Jersey but went to Cuba in 1958 to fight for the revolution and has lived there ever since. He was driving a government-owned taxi, an air-conditioned 1983 Mercedes. It was the last day we spent in Cuba, and we suspect he was a government ringer sent to check us out because someone on the hotel staff suspected we might not really be tourists.

Castro's 35-year anti-American propaganda campaign has not translated into anti-American sentiment on the streets and rural roads of Cuba. During our trip we talked to dozens of different people, sometimes in conversations that lasted for several hours. Not once did we hear an anti-American statement. The Cubans proved to be the most friendly, easy to meet people we've encountered in years of traveling in dozens of different countries. Many of those we met talked so frankly that we have had to disguise their identities as well as the specific circumstances of our conversations.

The Cuban system of neighborhood snitches is still in place, and a Cuban can lose his job, forfeit his ration cards, and even go to jail if the wrong person hears someone say the wrong thing. "We're not watched all the time or spied on like Radio Martí claims," Antonio Salazar, a university graduate and high-school science teacher, told us. "We can do anything we want, as long as we don't break the law." He paused, thought a minute, then added, his voice suddenly sad, "One thing we can't do: We can't say how we feel out loud. That's what I miss most, being able to say how I feel out loud."

On our visit we saw no mobilized troops anywhere. There were no military or police checkpoints on the highways and no military personnel carrying weapons in public except for those guarding the entrances to military bases. The only tanks or armored personnel carriers we saw were parked deep in military compounds. Uniformed police were no more obvious than they are in most countries in the world, and less obvious than in some. By contrast, in the summer of 1958 even a 17-year-old like Larry Grupp could see the unrest and the coming revolution. Batista's troops were everywhere, and the roads were punctuated with military checkpoints where soldiers waved automatic weapons as they searched vehicles for contraband.

Everywhere we went, we could see, feel, and hear the frustration and desperation of people trying to survive while an economy collapses. "Things were hard, but we could get by until about two years ago," said Antonio, the science teacher. "The rationing was tight--each person only got five pounds of rice a month and one piece of meat a week--but we could find the rice and the meat if we had the ration coupons and the pesos. Now I've got pesos and coupons, but I can't find food in any store. I can buy food on the black market, but a crate of 30 eggs costs 200 pesos. I make 230 pesos a month."

"So what's the solution?" one of us asked.

"The government is finally letting the farmers legally sell their surplus," he answered. "Now that they can make money, they'll grow more food. The prices will eventually have to come down." Antonio was born after the revolution. Dedicated communist professors taught him economics, but he understands how the free market works. "Let's hope they let the reforms last this time," he added, his voice worried. "There are a lot of people around Fidel who still believe socialism has all the answers. Before, the government opened the door a crack for the farmers, then slammed it shut again."

In the late '70s, a deteriorating economy forced Castro to legalize private farm production and small business enterprises. The result was a significant increase in food and consumer goods. But when a few people started making real money, Castro, who believes all profits are immoral, announced in 1984 a policy of "rectification," which again prohibited all private economic activity.

Castro must realize that releasing the free-enterprise genie threatens the long-term survival of socialism. He apparently thinks he can command the genie, but the government's past behavior indicates that he will move quickly when he suspects he's losing control. Many people in Havana recently started raising chickens on balconies and pigs in backyard pens for personal consumption or quick sale on the black market. In early March, the authorities in Havana rounded up 26,000 pigs inside the city limits, claiming they were doing so for public-health reasons. Every such crackdown can only increase frustration and further loosen Castro's grip on the soul of the nation.

Collapsing Communism

"We can't let happen here what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe," Pedro Infante told us. Pedro dropped out of the university to follow his first love, music. Now he sings with a band in a luxury hotel on Verdadero Beach built with Spanish joint-venture money. "We have to take it a step at a time," he said. "We can't give up what we have gained with our revolution. We don't want crime like you have in America, and we don't want civil war like what is happening in East Europe." Pedro was parroting the standard government propaganda as explained on the Radio Progreso and Radio Rebelde broadcasts that we listened to every morning while in Cuba.

The electronic communication age has forced more honesty on government propaganda in Cuba. The big lie works only if people hear nothing else. Cuban government technicians may jam Radio Martí from Miami, but they can't block out the whole AM and FM dial. Commercial Florida stations broadcast in Spanish and English without interference, and even Rush Limbaugh and G. Gordon Liddy come through loud and clear on the northern Cuban coast.

A surprising number of Cubans can watch either CNN or the Spanish-language equivalent. Hundreds of small dish antennas, about three feet in diameter, decorate the roofs of houses and apartments located within a few blocks of the tourist hotels. Manufactured by backroom technicians and sold for around $100, the antennas catch and amplify the electromagnetic radiation that leaks from hotel satellite dishes and their connecting cables. Anyone who buys one gets to watch the same international channels the tourists watch in their hotel rooms.

So the Cuban government can't deny what has happened to socialist countries around the world. Cuban news commentators instead paint a dire picture of the political, economic, and social problems of the ex-socialist countries.

While some foreign observers of the Cuban scene were predicting a year ago that Castro would soon be on his way out, we saw no evidence that it is about to happen. Hungry, desperate people who are struggling to survive don't make revolutions. Rather than plotting to change the government, the people we met were spending their energy trying to solve immediate personal and family problems. Besides, the communists have so totally failed to fulfill their promises that the Cuban people have lost all faith in any kind of government and in revolution as well.

Nor will the U.S. embargo change this picture. The State Department takes the position that the American embargo must be enforced until basic human rights are restored in Cuba, there are free elections, and Cuba compensates U.S. citizens for the properties seized more than 30 years ago. The assumption of the policy is that somehow the embargo will force those things to happen. Yet there's little reason to believe the embargo has ever had or is likely to have any significant impact on the internal politics of Cuba, other than by providing a scapegoat to blame for the country's economic misery.

Ending the embargo would have little immediate impact on the Cuban economy. Since the United States is the only country in the world that refuses to sell products to Cuba or that forbids its citizens to travel to or invest in Cuba, there is nothing that Castro can't buy in the international market, provided he has the foreign exchange to pay for it. U.S. trade and tourism might accelerate the government's accumulation of foreign exchange, but it would also put more dollars in private hands, as the tourist trade is already doing. That might be the most seditious development we could encourage in Cuba. People spending their own money for things they want don't make good socialists.

Just about every Cuban we talked to wanted to know why the United States insists on continuing the embargo and what the Americans hope to gain. They were more puzzled than angry. No one we met was prepared to risk his or her life trying to achieve reform and free elections so the Americans will end the embargo. And it seems that the U.S. demand for free elections is inconsistent with the demand that Cuba compensate the owners of expropriated properties. The Cubans we talked with would not vote for politicians who would divert scarce foreign exchange to pay off debts for something that happened before most Cubans were born.

"We are not going to allow a bunch of Cuban expatriate millionaires in Miami to tell us how to run our country," Pedro Infante told us. "How dare they threaten foreign investors with the future confiscation of their investments. If they think they can come back to Cuba after all these years and take over again, they are crazy." The Cubans we met who had relatives living in the United States were less inclined to criticize "millionaire Cuban expatriates," but they were no more willing than Pedro to follow political guidance from the Cuban-American expatriate community, especially if such guidance put their lives at risk.

While a lot of Cubans, probably the great majority, don't like the government, it seemed to us that a viable opposition is not likely to develop, even if things get worse than they already are. Nevertheless, frustration is so widespread that things could suddenly explode in a spontaneous outburst of frustration and anger such as the unrest in the Philippines when Marcos fell, in Tiananmen Square in China, or in Romania. Castro must recognize that danger. His recent reluctance to appear in public and the decision to cancel this year's May Day celebration suggest he fears that any crowd of people in Cuba could suddenly go on a wild, anti-government rampage like the one that brought down Ceausescu.

Castro isn't just keeping a low profile; he's almost invisible. Listening to Cuban radio stations or watching a Cuban television channel every chance we got, we never heard his voice or saw a video clip or photo of him. To our surprise, there were no pictures of Fidel in the classrooms of the school we visited. We saw only one picture of Fidel in the hundreds of homes, shops, and offices we walked by in our strolls through the streets. One sees more pictures of the independence hero, José Martí, than of Castro. Several different sources confirmed this was not how it used to be. One source suggested that the pictures of Castro had been discreetly removed because so many of them were being defaced.

Castro's public absence produces a continuing rash of rumors that he is either sick, injured, or no longer around. On the day we left, we heard a rumor from two different sources that Fidel had suffered a stroke a few days previously. In fact, he was not only well, he personally hosted a reception for a group of Cuban exiles who had been invited back to Cuba for a conference on immigration.

Come Back to Cuba

As tourists, we could go just about any place we wanted, take pictures of anything we saw except military personnel, and talk to anyone who would talk to us. In Cuba, the tourist can do no wrong. More than 600,000 tourists visited Cuba last year, and tourism may already be bringing in more foreign exchange than the sugar industry. Cuba is attracting customers by making sure the tourist gets first claim on every commodity and service. While meat is a rarity for the average Cuban, tourists get all they can eat. Telephone calls from hotels get priority, so it's surprisingly easy for a tourist to call overseas.

The only kind of money tourists can use in Cuba is the U.S. dollar. Travelers from the rest of the world must exchange their own currencies for dollars to buy things in hotel shops, fancy bars, nightclubs, and restaurants, or to rent a car or hire a taxi. This is a case in which the good money chases out the bad. While the Cuban peso is still exchanged at an official rate of one to one, the black-market rate was running at 100 to one the week we were in Cuba. Since Cubans are now allowed to legally own and use dollars, any Cuban selling any good or service to a tourist demands payment in dollars. Cubans can use dollars to buy scarce items on the black market and in government stores ordinarily reserved for tourists or VIPs.

Everyone wants a job in the tourist industry, where you can earn tips in dollars. College graduates wait tables, mix drinks, and clean rooms. English professors and high-school teachers serve as desk clerks and tour guides. A year ago, Carlos Encinas, a graduate of the University of Havana with a degree in chemistry, was working in a government biochemical laboratory that raised sterile (disease-free) rats for sale to research facilities in other countries. Now he works in the kitchen of a resort hotel as a cook's helper. While that entry-level job doesn't give him much chance to earn tips, it puts him inside the hotel compound with some direct access to tourists and a chance to move into a job that will give him more opportunity for tips.

Mario Díaz worked for 20 years as a heavy-equipment operator at a sugar factory. Now he works as a gardener in a Havana hotel. When we talked to him, he was using a machete to trim a grass lawn. One of his four children is asthmatic. "Our Cuban doctors are very good," he said. "But they have no medicine to give my daughter. Sometimes I can do something for a guest. Whatever tips I make, I give to a friend who works in the hotel infirmary. She sells me the medicine for my daughter."

Marta Garza, a hotel maid, had a similar story. "I took my father to the hospital last week," she told us. "The doctor told us he had to take an antibiotic drug, but that the hospital didn't have it in store. The doctor wrote out the name of the medicine, and I had to go buy it on the black market. Because I work in the tourist trade, I had the dollars to buy it. Otherwise, my father would have died."

In addition to jobs in the hospitality industry, the influx of tourists has created opportunities for entrepreneurs. Juan Barquín quit his job as a computer programmer to become one of the new, legally registered entrepreneurs. He sells his paintings and sculptures out of a small shop near the old Cathedral of Havana. The work is of professional quality, which is why Juan got his license even though college graduates are supposedly prohibited from working as entrepreneurs. On Saturday, the plaza in front of the cathedral is filled with artistic entrepreneurs selling their souvenirs from small stands. As we stood and watched, we spotted a government official moving from stall to stall, making sure that each vendor had a license to do business.

While the best business is selling to tourists for dollars, other small-scale entrepreneurs are trying to meet the local demand for consumer goods. These entrepreneurs, who deal in pesos, sell their homemade wares from small tables and stands that are often set up in front of government stores with empty shelves. Except for farmers selling from the roadside in rural areas, there are no food products for sale on the legal private market. Most of the merchants were selling small plastic products like cups, pieces of costume jewelry, cooking pans, simple toys, combs, and small art objects.

One of the vendors was refilling disposable butane lighters. We watched as he took the top off a lighter, checked the flint, then squirted a shot of butane into the tank before putting it all carefully back together. He kept his supply of butane in what had once been an aerosol can of insecticide.

The Black Market

The Castro government brings tourists in with cheap packages, then fleeces them when they want something extra. A lunch of roast chicken and black beans with rice at La Bodegita cost us $40 for two; a daiquiri at La Floridita was $3.00. A box of the better Cuban cigars can cost $70 or more in a government store. An evening at the Tropicana Night Club cost $70 without the drinks. A taxi ride from our hotel into the city, a distance of about 20 miles, cost $30 each way. Car rentals start at $70 a day.

A thriving black market offers the tourist some of those things at bargain rates. A tourist can't walk more than a block along a street in Havana without meeting at least one black-market merchant offering to sell cigars, rare coins, a private taxi, a meal in a private home, or a date with whichever sex one might prefer. Pedro Aguero works as a porter in a tobacco factory, but we met him in the middle of the afternoon on a Havana street, where he quoted a price on a box of Monte Cristos that was less than half what we would have paid in a tourist store.

From what we could see and hear, most of the consumer items sold on the black market have been stolen or diverted from government distribution channels or from one of the non-government charities supported by U.S. voluntary agencies that are permitted to make shipments under the embargo. Even so, the black market offers a much wider variety of goods than the newly legal entrepreneurs do, including such hard-to-find items as medicine, bicycles, and gasoline.

Still, there is no guarantee that anything will be available on the black market, even if you have dollars. We needed a car for a day, and we found the owner of a well-kept 1953 Chevy that would be worth a small fortune at an antique car auction in the United States. He agreed to take us where we wanted for half the price it would cost us to rent a car. The deal fell through when he couldn't find any gas for sale even though he had both coupons to buy legal gas and dollars to buy black-market gas.

Walking back to our hotel one afternoon, we encountered another thriving part of the black market. We were joined by six schoolchildren, who followed along, talking and singing English-language songs they had learned in school to entertain us. Just before we reached the hotel, two young women walked up to our group and identified themselves as the mother of one little girl and the aunt of three of the other kids. They were hoping we might invite the two of them into the hotel for a romantic evening--in exchange for dollars, of course.

The Cubans call them jineteras, a play on the Spanish word for jockey. Any male tourist who strolls outside his hotel will meet several of them, even if that's not what he's looking for. They work only for dollars, but they will happily accept tips of surplus aspirin, shampoo, old T-shirts, or anything else a tourist is willing to leave behind.

The aunt, Hortensia, an outgoing brunette, obviously had some experience in her new profession. Dalia, a reserved blond, acted nervous and embarrassed. Unlike Hortensia, she didn't joke about the possibilities that might develop if we invited them to accompany us back to the hotel. When asked, Dalia shyly admitted that she is married. Her husband works in a chicken slaughterhouse, making 150 pesos a month, plus one small package of chicken scraps and chicken fat. If Dalia met a tourist who liked her, she could make more in one night than her husband makes in six months. We spotted both the women later in the evening as they sat with a group of Spanish tourists, drinking Cuba libres by the pool. Dalia looked at one of us and blushed for a moment before turning away.

Breaking Away

Any Cuban holding American money is permitted to shop in government dollar stores that serve both the tourist industry and the diplomatic trade. In the hotels, the dollar stores are small shops that carry suntan lotion, film, medicine, soap, and rum drinks. Bigger dollar stores outside the hotels sell cookies, candy, imported cigarettes, and other consumer goods.

Opening these stores to ordinary Cubans is part of the government's attempt to collect as many dollars as possible. Tourist dollars may circulate through several hands, but most eventually end up in the government bank to pay for more government-sponsored imports. Although we saw no signs of a black-market trade in smuggled goods, as more dollars flow into private hands, a smuggling industry may develop to serve an expanding demand for the consumer goods--jeans, cosmetics, musical recordings--that a socialist government will not buy with scarce foreign currency.

In May, recognizing the potential threat that a black market poses to his efforts to collect all foreign earnings, Castro announced a new law providing for the confiscation of goods acquired by illicit means. He did not explain how he expects to enforce such a law. Castro may think he's going to continue to use the dollars he earns from tourism to buy supplies and equipment for the military, the bureaucracy, and state-run industries, but the people with dollars in their hands will make other choices if offered the opportunity. In this connection, the embargo does Castro a favor. It puts the U.S. Coast Guard on his side in preventing the development of a smuggling trade in consumer goods between Florida and the Cuban coast.

If the Cuban people survive this Special Period, if they eventually succeed in turning away from a discredited 19th-century economic philosophy that has failed every time it's been tried,
it won't happen because of a violent change in the Cuban government. It won't happen because of the American embargo nor anything else American diplomats might try. It will happen because people like Antonio Salazar, Pedro Infante, Marta Garza, Carlos Encinas, Juan Barquín, and even the friendly jineteras stop waiting for the government to provide them with every necessity and instead do whatever has to be done to make their own lives better.

The Cuban people need a democratic government, but they also need a viable economy. Every one of the people we talked to in Cuba would pick more economic freedom over more political freedom. They will risk jail by dealing in the black market but not by playing politics. And there is strong evidence that free, democratic government can thrive only in a prosperous economy. That's how it happened in ancient Greece, in England, in colonial America, in modern Europe, and in Japan; that's how it's happening in places like Thailand, Korea, Taiwan, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Poland, and the former Czechoslovakia.

The meanest thing we could do to Castro would be to unleash an invasion of American tourists on his island. The dirtiest trick we could pull would be to close our eyes to the smugglers who will sneak U.S. consumer goods into Cuba to trade for the dollars the tourists leave behind. The embargo inhibits the kind of people-to-people exchange that might encourage more free enterprise in Cuba, and it gives Castro an excuse for the failure of socialism. Furthermore, it sets precisely the wrong example for people struggling under the burdens of socialism. In a free society, the government doesn't tell people where they can go or how they can spend their money.

If the embargo has any impact on the Cuban economy, it accelerates the flow of refugees rather than altering the country's internal politics. In Cuba, the politically discontented don't risk their lives to make war on the government. They risk their lives in small boats on 90 miles of open water.

During our trip to Cuba, Emilio Baeza, a hotel assistant manager, learned that his sister-in-law, her husband, and their three small children had arrived safely in Miami after six days in an open boat. "I can understand why he did it," Emilio told us, obviously relieved that his wife's relatives were still alive. "I don't criticize him for taking his family on that boat, but I couldn't risk the lives of my children like he did. Better we stay here. Things have to get better."