Second that

I`m surprised to see the Visible Justice comment still in place..especially the "link".
Checked it out last night...its still here?

The spam is gone.

Thanks for the heads up.

Geoff

talk to them

James, to call The Fog hagiography is to miss the point entirely, and to insult a filmmaker, Errol Morris, who has made a career of puncturing pretense. It's McNamara's apologia--what he learned from his mistakes. Watch it again.

Do you really believe madness is an obstacle to longevity in leadership? Think Caeucescu. Think Stalin. Think Kim Jong-Il . . . the list goes on. Cuba has more natural wealth than any country its size in the hemisphere, yet it's people are poor, and Castro has been in charge for 50 years. If you don't see any cause-and-effect here, if you think it's all the fault of the Americans, then you've parked your critical thinking somewhere out of reach.

As for Cubans and their life choices, I think it's paternalistic as hell to assume that those who fled to the US (including, by the way, members of Castro's immediate family) have somehow been bamboozled by the American "myth." Ask them. They've seen life on both sides. They see Castro as "tactically brilliant" only in the sense that he's managed to survive for so long, at great cost to Cubanos. And certainly not for his benevolent leadership.

talk to them

James, to call The Fog hagiography is to miss the point entirely, and to insult a filmmaker, Errol Morris, who has made a career of puncturing pretense. It's McNamara's apologia--what he learned from his mistakes. Watch it again.

Do you really believe madness is an obstacle to longevity in leadership? Think Caeucescu. Think Stalin. Think Kim Jong-Il . . . the list goes on. Cuba has more natural wealth than any country its size in the hemisphere, yet it's people are poor, and Castro has been in charge for 50 years. If you don't see any cause-and-effect here, if you think it's all the fault of the Americans, then you've parked your critical thinking somewhere out of reach.

As for Cubans and their life choices, I think it's paternalistic as hell to assume that those who fled to the US (including, by the way, members of Castro's immediate family) have somehow been bamboozled by the American "myth." Ask them. They've seen life on both sides. They see Castro as "tactically brilliant" only in the sense that he's managed to survive for so long, at great cost to Cubanos. And certainly not for his benevolent leadership.

blah, blah, blaaaaaaah

Nope, W got re-elected. But even he hasn't tried preemptive nuclear war... at least not yet. All American presidents have far more innocent blood on their hands than Castro. I can understand why Americans and right-wing ideologues like you want to demonize Castro to the point of fantasy, it makes you and your cherished leaders look good in comparison, but you're really only fooling yourself.

Clawman, what the hell about a total US embargo don't you understand? You could have all the resources in the world and still be dirt poor if you had no one, or only a highly restricted market to sell to. The Americans don't just harass Cuba on trade, they harass any corporation that does business in Cuba that also wants to do business in the US. Who do you think most people will choose?

I didn't say that. If you're going to resort to intentionally mis-paraphrasing what I wrote, I don't see what more we have to debate. It's a tactic only those with weak arguments use. Please try to respond at least honestly to my points.

I clearly said not just Cubans but practically everyone from third world countries believe in the American myth. I said that were the embargo lifted, and small business allowed to flourish not nearly as many Cubans would want to leave. I said nothing about Cuban-Americans.

I've talked to many, many Cubans. I know just how much some of them hate Castro. I also know just how much some of them love him. Your arguments aren't just simplistic, they are steeped in American propaganda, which is unfortunate. It makes me realize you went to Cuba with a set of preconceptions, and looked only for those things that confirmed them. To bad for you. Wallow in your ignorance. It's a very American thing to do.

blah . . .

James, try a little anger management. Wise men converse. Others rant.

btw Clawman

It may be a rant clawman - it also has the advantage of being right.

As for the intensity of the American embargo, pls consult the campaign they've mounted against Sherritt Gordon - a Canadian company - and one of the few businesses with the balls to actually fight back against American hegemony.

The fact that Cuba didn't just self-destruct after 1990 is a testimony to the determination, grit and dedication of the Cuban people - it certainly owes nothing to the good will, good wishes, or good sense of the American position.

As for Fidel, try reading some of his published work - I think you'll find it more intellectual than anything George Bush (father or son) ever penned.

Right

Take a closer look. While showing the "balls to actually fight back against American hegemony," companies like Sherritt actually enter a very cozy corporate relationship with Cuba's selfless rulers. As I learned when I did some reporting there in the 1990s, the companies pay the government the equivalent of the Cuban workers wages (at pay rates equivalent to those of workers in Canada) and the Cuban government pays the workers in local currency (at pay rates equivalent to those in Cuba) and skims the rest. Isn't capitalism wonderful?

Maybe we can dispense with all these good-guy, bad-guy dichotomies, and acknowledge that it's all a power/profit/hegemony game, for Sherritt, for Castro, for the Americans. And its the average Cubans who are the losers. You talk about determination, grit and dedication of the Cuban people. In my visits there I found a quiet anger and a very palpable fear.

Just one example: a doctorate-level woman who would qualify as a full professor in a Canadian university, is forced to give private English lessons to survive. And she emails me in coded language, because she's terrified that the security people are watching and reading. Paranoid? Maybe. But I can't presume that. She lives there. I don't. (And she doesn't read Fidel's published work. She knows it for what it is.)

Dispensation 1

Ah so you want to dispense with the dichotomies you started and promulgated now that the lunacy of American policy has been pointed out?

Nowhere did I suggest Castro, or the Cuban government are "good guys". They are nationalists who have done everything they can to preserve their power, which rightly or wrongly they see as vital to protecting the interests of the Cuban people. The only reason the Cuban government has a leg to stand on with that view has to do with the truly obscene belligerence of successive US Administrations, and because they do make substantial effort to redistribute wealth fairly in their society. But centrally planned economies are wrong headed and often riddled with corruption in my opinion, whether they are led by communist politburos or corporatist fascists.

As for the deal with Sherrit the Cuban government takes the tack it does, again rightly or wrongly, because they want to prevent a select group of Cubans being vastly materially better off than everyone else. That material advantage still does happen to a certain extent with well placed government officials and those involved in tourism, but even they don't have it as good materially (I'm talking consumer goods here) as a lower middle class household in Canada. Socially, however, they tend to have it far better than people here in Canada. The social intelligence average Cubans display often amazes me.
(continued)

Dispensation 2

(continued)
In my visits there I've experienced a rather wide range of emotion from Cubans, rarely have I had more fun in the company of others. They certainly are not drowning in fear and anger. Far more common is a kind of melancholy due to the fact that they feel stuck between the rock of US belligerence, and the hard line of their government. There is no doubt life is materially hard in Cuba. And there is far too much political repression, due directly to the American threat. I say that every time I talk about the place. But I place most of the blame on the US, because it is only because of their belligerence that the communists, and Castro in particular, has maintained such an iron fisted grip on power. If that belligerence evaporated, either the current Cuban government would change things positively, or Cubans would change their government.

Cubans culturally are just far too outgoing, argumentative, and resourceful to put up with what they currently have if they really believed there were better alternatives. They are fiercely nationalistic. Not a single Cuban I've talked to, no matter how much they disliked their government, believed the US government had their interests in mind. Not one. They all fear what the American government would do in Cuba more than their own. That's particularly true with the Bush Administration. Given the American track record in Latin America, I think they have an excellent point. But I also have no doubt that if the US government lifted the embargo, and engaged in positive negotiation, things would start to change immediately in Cuba. And really, it's in the best interests of the US that Cuba have a peaceful transition to being a more open society, to say nothing for Cubans themselves.

Still not willing to actually admit

Still not willing to admit that the real problem here - especially since 1989 - is the USA.

It seems pretty obvious to me that it is only the political lump of expats in Florida (and pure hidebound stubbornness) that have prevented the US government from engaging with the Cubans on the island in a way that would have benefited both parties.

How is it rational for the US to engage (and in fact become China's largest creditor) with a regime that is (arguably) far more brutal and intractable than Castro’s at the same time it demonizes and makes every possible effort to sabotage the Caribbean nation?

It can only be some kind of collective insanity and a naive desire to turn back the clock - no matter how you slice it.

And furthermore,

I think it's also only fair to not the following Associated Press report of November 7, 2007

UN praises Cuba's ability to feed people

By Will Weissert

Havana - A U.N. food expert hailed Cuba as a world model in feeding its population, some 18 years after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc ravaged the island's economy and sparked widespread hunger.

Jean Ziegler, who has been the United Nations' independent investigator on "the right to food" since 2000, spent 11 days in Cuba on a fact-finding mission, meeting with top officials and chatting up farmers, state managers and ordinary Cubans waiting in line for food allotted by ration cards.

"We haven't seen even one malnourished person" - a rare feat in much of poverty-stricken Latin America, Ziegler said Tuesday. "The right to being fed is the priority, without a doubt."

Cuba is one of 32 countries that include the "right to food" in their constitutions, and fewer still - including Brazil, Latin America's largest economy - meet pledges to provide food to all their citizens, he said.

Ziegler, who visited two prisons in Havana to ask inmates about their daily diets, did not address human rights concerns over the arbitrary imprisonment and alleged abuse of political prisoners and critics of the island's one-party government.

Despite a 46-year U.S. embargo against the communist-run island, Cuba has found ways to ensure its population does not go hungry, Ziegler said. "Cuba always invents an answer," he noted.

[emphasis mine]

errata

that's 'note' in the first sentence above, not 'not'...

on Cuba and tourism

First, Grant, thanks for a nice story of your Cuba surfing experience. I always love hearing positive stories about Canadians and Cubans.

Second, I cringe every time I see a non-Cuban like Claude pontificate in the National Pest about Cuban matters. I remember an article from a couple of years ago, also in the NP, in which the first-time visitor (but apparently sufficiently qualified to write a scathing article) told us about the "poor woman who collected the bones off of his plate in a downtown café, to feed her starving family." What this idiot didn't realize is that Cuba a couple of weeks earlier had banned the import of meat-based pet foods due to contamination fears, and Cuban workers in diplomats' homes were sent out to collect anything the pets would eat. Damned ignorance turned into Northern-media-"fact".

As for Claude's NP article... sigh... is there a limit to the lengths of these comments? It would take me all day to deal with the ethnocentric distortions. Let me simply address the issue of Tourism.

Although I've been working / researching Cuba for a decade and a half, spending time there at least once a year, and personally avoiding the tourist resorts, I have no problem with recommending Canadians make use of the hotels and beaches of Varadero, etc. Unlike every other example of mass tourism development in the Developing World, Cuba's foreign investment scheme was brilliantly implemented, giving the Cuban State a 51% stake in 99% of those ventures, which enabled the country to rapidly build up an infrastructure, while maintaining control of the operation and generating income that kept the state functioning. Profits from tourism support the extensive safety net of education, health, services, etc.

part 2

With the completion of these 15- and 20-year agreements, the infrastructure now reverts 100% to Cuban ownership (after the foreign investor has realized a health profit on that investment). Some of the hotel management deals have been renegotiated and foreign firms continue to lend expertise to Cuba in this vital sector. But the money generated keeps Cuban children fed, educated, healthy and with a secure future.

The "tourism apartheid" about which everyone rags on Cuba is ridiculously hypocritical. Locals being barred from hotels is nothing new in the tourism models of the world, as tourism operators seek to "protect" their guests from locals who are looking for contact with tourists for financial gain. This is an unfortunate reality that tourism has also brought to Cuba, and one which the authorities have struggled with.

Remember prostitition? In the early years of the 1990s economic crisis, prostitution, which had disappeared from Cuba for over 30 years since women now had other, dignified opportunities within the Revolution, suddenly made a comeback as the embargo compounded by the Soviet trade ties disappearing devastated the Cuban economy. What happened in the U.S. press?

"Fidel is selling Cuban women to prop up his regime!" they screamed.

It took a year or two of difficult discussions among the Cuban politicians, Federation of Cuban Women, and other mass organizations to come up with a response to prostitution that would not criminalize women (as we do in North America), but attempt to give them better education and employment possibilities.

So prostitutes were arrested and placed in these programs. What was the U.S. media response?

"Fidel is Repressing Cuban Women!"

So you see, nothing Cuba does is ever good enough - it is always held to a higher standard than any other nation on earth.

Those who go to Cuba without taking the time to learn about Cuban reality - and that includes the context in which everything happens - inevitably find exactly what they thought they'd find. "Repression", "Sadness", "No Hope". Heck, I can find that in any barrio in Canada.

My experiences with Cubans have been somewhat different. I've been fortunate, through my research and personal connections, to meet people who are not out there looking to meet tourists. These are people who go to work every day, who face the challenges of an embargoed (but rapidly growing) economy, and who know there are problems but are working to fix them, without jumping on the bandwagon of the so-called "dissidents" and their good pals at the U.S. interests' section.

www.nscuba.org

good comment

jovenclub,
thanks for your comments here, it is good to hear from a person who actually has taken the time to learn about things.
Where can a person get more "real" information about Cuba?
I am ready to ditch this country and looking for a society that cares for its citizens; so far Cuba sound like it?

Thanks jovenclub

Haven't seen you posting here before - but I'd be glad to see you back anytime.

Cheers.

alive: don't give up on this place quite yet my friend - there's work to do.

And since we're all talking about Fidel

Maybe we should recall that he's still around; and kicking - and writing for that matter.

Here's the latest:

http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/2008/ing/f220208i

Enjoy!

Good news about Cuba

Thanks amigos. I'll try to keep myself to a paragraph or two in the future... ;)

I found this site, and story, via my daily Google News search on Cuba. The island is the focus of my PhD research on Human Development (as per the UNDP's Human Development Index), and my past research on Cuban informatics (hence the "Joven Club" moniker, short for the Joven Club de Computación e Informática", the island-wide network of some 600 community-accessible centres for computer training, email, web design, etc. See http://www.jovenclub.cu).

As for good sources of info on Cuba.... the problem is, many of us who have access to it have no time to manage websites. Nelson Valdes' fabulous email list, Cuba-L, is one of the best, but it's fee-based. There are countless Cuba solidarity groups throughout North America and the world, too. But if you have the patience, you can glean a lot of info from the major news services, so long as you know how to sift out the stuff that originates in Washington.

Actually, it's more difficult than that, because journalists today, particularly those in the U.S., have grown up with the knowledge that Fidel is 'evil incarnate' - they begin their reporting from that basis, and never, ever, challenge their own conceptions. It's hard to be accurate when what you think you know is th e result of decades of Washington / Miami propaganda.

While you're sitting on the beach, waiting for the waves to build, take along a couple of books. Both Peter Roman's "Cuba's Experience with Representative Democracy" and Isaac Saney's "Cuba: A Revolution in Motion" are well worth checking out. Roman's deals specifically with popular participation in government, and Saney provides a very good introduction to Cuba, including topics not covered by many other authors, including Cuba's legal system.

Any of you Mac users can pop over to Canada's Mac community forum (www.ehmac.ca) and search for my (many) threads and debates (user: cubamark).

Cheers, guys. I'm off to check out the rest of this site.

Couldn't resist one last post on this subject

The rumours of the demise of La Revolución Cubana are nothing new. Perhaps some readers might remember this OpEd piece from that well-known American authority Elliot Abrams - written in 1989:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE7DE163BF936A35754C0A96F948260&scp=2&sq=+%22Castro+Looks+to+the+Future+%97+Nervously%22&st=nyt

Like Mark Twain, I suspect Fidel and the Cuban 'experiment' may be able to say that ... "(t)he rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated" for some time to come...