Castro’s Cuba: made in America

Fidel Castro was a by-product of the Cold War, his regime more the creation of external pressures than of any internal ideology.


Away in the mountains of Italy last week, the one big item of news that crossed borders and language barriers was the resignation of the ailing Fidel Castro as the president of Cuba. The end of the world’s most famous communist dictator seems to give nostalgic commentators of every stripe a welcome opportunity to dust off the politics of the past and re-run the left v right battles of days when the world seemed to them a simpler place.

Rest of Article Here

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"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Schopenhauer

When the US originally took Cuba we executed a certain Platt Amendment to their constitution - which is very similar to a current Ahtisaari Plan by the UN. It solidified the US' rights to naval bases in Cuba, while limiting their independence. They were not allowed to exercise direction except domestic affairs and the US was given the power to intervene in domestic and foreign affairs of the state. This all was due to economic investment of American businesses, but we seem to have forgotten the guerillas fighting the Spanish burned most of those American businesses - so why was the US in Cuba...(anything sound somewhat familiar to Kosovo)? To control access to the Panama Canal which we had plans to build some years in the future.

And we wonder why the government and people of Cuba were pushed away from the US after the Great Depression.

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"We've been blowin up, we're the issue, we're ammunition" Switchfoot

The author of the article makes some good points but he misses the boat on a lot also. The part where he says The only reason I know people would like to visit Cuba before "Fidel Goes" is because they would like to go to a place that isn't entrenched in pro-western corporate franchises. A place with no McDonalds, no Starbucks, no Wal-marts, no Taco Bell...etc times 500.

He also seems to assume that the left adore Castro which is not true. Most people on the left recognise Castro as no saint. He was just never as bad as the american media puts him out to be.

Actually, there are quite a few European cars in Cuba. They aren't hypocrites like we are, so they trade with them. So you see a bunch of 1950's American cars with a bunch of new Mercedes, Toyota's, VW's, etc.

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I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.

True, even though I am a lefty (contrary to what many on this board likely believe) I don't idolize Castro at all and I don't want a Cuban model to play out all over the world, not even remotely close to that.

What I would like is to see the country swing back some significant amount to the left (towards freedom and social liberty and towards the rights of consumers and individual citizens against an ever more expansive right wing corporate government)

After over twenty years of going ever further to the right it is time for the pendulum to swing bach for a while.

But no matter how often or how passionately I try to tell the "pure capitalism is God" zealots they steadfastly refuse to believe that anyone that advocates for absolutely any amount of socialism could possibly be content with anything less than Stalins bloody nightmare.

What I do long for is a chance to visit (legally) a fairly pleasant place that is relatively unpolluted by corporate commercialism. That is Cuba, for now, but as soon as corporate America gets a hold on it it will be trashed (and all in the name of progress.)

Everywhere I have been here in the states, in Europe, Mexico, and or Canada it really is beginning to look pretty much all the same. It makes me want to puke to go to England and see a KFC or a McDonalds there. Isn't it enough that they pollute every other corner of America with their mind numbing sameness without pushing out to recreate their plastic nightmare all over the world.

Almost every country seems determined to become just as plastic as America.

I think even some of the most conservative people I have met lament about the exact same thing as I do. Many of them long for the good old days when not everything was the same where you could go to a new town and not even once suffer a trip bumming deja vous moment as you pass a McDonalds or a Walmart.

And there sits Cuba a pristine wonderland of undeveloped beach front property. Many is the corporation just licking their chops to get in there and pave over every tree in sight and tear down all the old buildings to make room for plastic progress. Picture a high priced neon nightmare like Miami covering the entire island.


That even more than the political aspect of it is what I lament about the passing of Castro.


I have seen the future of Cuba. It's not war, it's not bloodshed, it's day glow plastic.

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It must be troubling to those for whom authority is the only truth when confronted by those for whom truth is the only authority.