WORLD

An old way to modernize

BAKU, AZERBAIJAN — They call this ‘The City of
Winds”. A very apt nickname, it became clear, as the
airliner began its descent to Bina airport, and headed
straight into a 100 km/hr gale. Maneuvering a couple of
hundred metres above a seething Caspian Sea, the plane
rocked and lurched so violently that a safe landing
seemed hard to imagine. The pilot, however, steadied
the big Tupolev-154 and even managed to set it down
gently on the runway: a routine arrival in Baku, I was
told.

Baku is an ancient crossroads of cultures. Assyrians,
Persians, Greeks, Romans, Tartars, Turks and Russians
have all swept through here. Marco Polo once did busi-
ness in its old Caravanserai. In the last century, British
and French oil barons built mansions on the slopes over-
looking the Caspian.

Today Baku is the capital city and heart of modern
Soviet Azerbaijan. A land of barely seven million
people, it seems in almost continuous transition. Con-
stantly hanging over it is the crucial question of how a
small people can survive in this cruel world, preserve
what is unique in their national heritage, and yet also
integrate themselves productively into a much larger
economic, political and social community.

Due to the powerful and ceaseless winds that sweep in
from the Caspian, few trees grow around Baku. Instead,
a forest of oil dereks has sprung up, covering the Apshe-
ron Peninsula and stretching along man-made cause-
ways far out to sea. Baku is the focus of the Soviet
petroleum industry, and its main production centre.

Oil has given this city something of a boom-town
complexion. (It has been twinned, appropriately
enough, with Houston, Texas). There is a visible pros-
perity in the streets and in the shops which is not so
evident in Soviet cities to the north.

Azerbaijan has also been blessed with a mild, and in
one area sub-tropical, climate. The two-and-a-half hour
flight from Moscow is a journey from winter to spring
(and in my case, unfortunately, back again). Because of

this its agriculture is unusually abundant. Baku food- ~

stores display a proliferation of fruits, vegetables and
flowers that are seldom seen in Moscow — and then only
in the private markets where they are sold, at outrageous
prices, by Azerbaijani farmers.

These differences are not merely regional, as Cana-
dians understand the term, but national. Azerbaijan is
one of the 15 Constituent Republics of the USSR, and
after nearly 70 years of socialist development there is
much in its character and appearance that could be called
Soviet. Yet it is also a highly unique entity, and at every
turn one brushes up against features that are the product
of a specific history shared by a people who have their
own language, culture and religious traditions.

Speaking personally, a great deal about Soviet Azer-
baijan reminds me forcefully of sections of Turkey and
Northern Iran, where I travelled extensively in the
1970s. This is no coincidence: Azerbaijan is historically
and culturally contiguous with these areas. Its language

From Moscow

Fred Weir

is closely related to Turkish. For much of its past, it was
under Persian domination and everywhere one sees the
characteristic domed mosque of Shi’ia, inherited from
this association. Today some 15 million ethnic Azer-
baijanis live across the border in Iran. A significant
number live in Turkey. Barely six million inhabit the
Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan.

These things are very much on the minds of modern
Soviet Azerbaijanis. They are keenly aware of the histor-
ical currents that have placed them ina sharply divergent
world from that of their compatriots to the south.

Time and again people I have met in Baku speak to me
of their profound anguish at the fratricidal war raging
between Iraq and Iran, almost close enough for them to
hear the guns.

‘Every morning I wake up thankful that I am not
Iranian, living’ in Khomeini’s version of the 15th cen-
tury,” award-winning artist Elbek Rzakuliev told me
one evening over dinner. ‘‘Fifteen million of our fellow
Azerbaijanis are living over there, deprived of their cul-
ture, their language, and forced to die on the battlefronts,
of a senseless war.”

I recall seeing in Iran things that Soviet Azerbaijanis
have not known for generations: legions of beggar chil-
dren, cripples and unwanted women literally living in the
streets of Teheran; Teeming slums where people drew
their water from an open gutter; endless numbers of
diseased, injured and toothless people, who went about
their lives seemingly taking it for granted that they would
never see a doctor or dentist; numerous street-scribes
who made a good living by reading and writing letters
and documents for the masses of illiterates; the majority
of women, whose only view of the world came through a
narrow slit in the chador; and the open brutality and
pervasive personality cult of the Shah’s regime which,
by many accounts, has since become something indes-
cribably worse.

The work of such native Azerbaijani artists as
Rzakuliev and Togrul Narimanbekov shows an exciting
blend of ancient theme and innovative, modern tech-
nique. The massive restoration works that are in prog-
ress around the centre of old Baku, and the many ar-
chological excavations signify an historical awareness
and concern for heritage which are essential elements of
any healthy national consciousness.

The Soviet side of Azerbaijani development has
brought it all of i. >enefits of belonging to a huge,
modern, multi-nationai entity: technology, markets,
broad-based development, a window on the world.
Azerbaijan, which before the revolution had only oil and

multitude of factories and oil refineries would have 0!
whelmed it. o

agriculture, today derives 60 per cent ofits gross nati0 S
product from industry. m

Its problems are also mainly those of the mo dt Ww
USSR. Like most Soviet cities, Baku has a severe h@
ing shortage. New construction is impressive — P
speeding up — but officials admit that it falls far shom),
the need. Large areas of decrepit and run-down hous
around Baku testify to this. .E

The aggressive new openness, which is becofl,.
general throughout the Soviet media, has also begu y
reveal some disturbing elements of Azerbaijani rea! ;,
such as widespread official corruption, drug addictil ¢,
and environmental abuses.

In one way, Baku has been lucky to have always D
‘*The City of Winds’. Had it not been for this, thef a,
rising from its multitude of factories and oil refin@)]j
might long since have overwhelmed it. eis

All of these problems are being wrestled with, 2},
Samed-zade, head of the economics department 0!
Azerbaijan Communist Party told me. At the same Hh,
they are trying to implement the spectrum of new @c,
nomic, political and social reforms — the restructulg,
— in their own specific conditions, he said. th

In particular, said Samed-Zade, Azerbaijan exP?t}
far too much ofits oil in an unrefined state. In an effort
correct this, significant funds are now going into pet
chemical research, he said, and in coming years a W?
new complex of industries will be erected to process
into everything from space-age plastics, to mé di
drugs, to foodstuffs. ‘is

There is yet another ancient tradition of Baku whitlg
today being transformed into a hopeful symbol of
future.

In the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, Sa®@\
Zade told me, Azerbaijan has little interest in acq
its own nuclear power plant. So, an experimental st@
has been constructed to see whether Baku’s fat
winds might be harnessed to electric generators.

“It turns out,”’ he said, ‘‘that the early inhabitant
Baku understood this perfectly well, and they °
windmills everywhere to catch this energy. Like
valuable traditions, this one was forgotten in our rus
modernization. But now we hope that Baku may one
become — again — the ‘City of Windmills’’’. q ;

ae

)

-- Lesson of the Bay of Pigs

Castro jumping off tank at Bay of Pigs —
April, 1961.

8 e PACIFIC TRIBUNE, APRIL 8, 1987

By ISABEL ALVAREZ

HAVANA, (AIN) — Reports of San-
dinista victories against U.S. armed and
trained contra gangs in Nicaragua bring
to mind another fiasco which took place
26 years ago at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. This
also poses a question: Is Washington
politically stupid or simply short of
memory?

Cuba was attacked by a brigade of over
1,000 mercenaries and Cuban counter-
revolutionaries scarcely two years after
the 1959 triumph of the people’s revo-
lution. The earlier contras were also
armed and trained by the United States
government. It was a direct aggression,
utilizing U.S. naval and air support, di-
rected against a small nation struggling to
break free of imperialist domination.

Thousands of Cubans had donned the
uniform of the People’s Militia and pre-
pared for an attack which was expected
daily. The entire world understood the
U.S. was planning an aggression.

Washington’s hostility toward Cuba
mounted; the powerful ‘‘democratic’”’
nation slapped a brutal economic block-

ade (including medicines) on the Island, a
blockade which still exists to this day.

At the same time the CIA unleashed its
destabilization program against the revo-
lution, including sabotage and hit-and-
run operations. Washington earmarked
$250-million for bandits operating in the
Escambray mountains in south-central
Cuba who terrorized and murdered
peasants, teachers and other backers of
the new people’s power.

And what were the steps being taken
by the Cuban Revolution which moved
our northern neighbor to such acts?

It took the land from the feudal /ati-
fundistas and distributed it to the peas-
ants. It brought the criminals from the
former Batista regime to justice. It
guaranteed full employment, health care
and education to a people who had never
known such things. It nationalized trans-
nationals which had plundered Cuba for
decades. It outlawed prostitution and
gambling.

The Yankee gendarmes replied by
pressing regional governments to break
relations with Cuba trying to strangle the

country economically and diplomat
ly. But solidarity, especially from
socialist community, was quick
arriving.

Washington’s only option to crush
revolution was direct aggression.
signs pointed to this. State security
were already in place.

On April 15, 1961, U.S. B-26 bom
struck three Cuban airports. In an
ous CIA operation, the aircraft ¢
Cuban markings. It was the first ste?
ward the invasion.

The following day at the mass fu
for the victims of the bombings,
Castro spoke for the first time abou!
socialist nature of the Revolution
called the process ‘*. . . of the humble
the humble, for the humble.” ;

At dawn on April 17 the merce
landed at the Bay of Pigs on CU
southern coast. After 72 hours of
fighting they were decisively beatet,
the myth of imperialism’s invincl™
smashed.

As Fidel said later, ‘* Following
victory, all the peoples of Latin Ae
became a little more free.”’ 7