I read the news today, oh boy!

[Ruby]

^^^Uh oh. Actually, MH, that editorial is not factual, and I’m about to set the cat among the pigeons – climbing up on my soapbox again … forgive me; I am not inclined to engage in these discussions too much, but I’ve been giving this whole issue some thought. So … at the risk of becoming persona non grata …

Fidel Castro was no saint, that’s for sure – he was a revolutionary, and revolutionaries are militant, brutal and hard-headed, as are many other leaders – they just don’t wear fatigues. I think that there will always be a bias from the point of view of whoever is writing an article – I do not believe that there is any such thing as neutral in these stories and it certainly appears that no-one seeks out facts to substantiate that which they do not wish to see. We all, the world over, see/read filtered information and anyone who bothers to look can usually find dichotomies. So a ‘report’ from Ry Cooder and his experience of Cuba, for instance, just isn’t going to be the same as one from a state endorsed publication.

Heaven forbid Castro’s socialist ideology might actually have worked, at least to a degree (notice the pun) - the socialist/communist ideal looks good in theory, but not always in practice, and in Cuba’s case, it took a long time to get up to speed, which it did, against continuous odds. He regulated a whole lot of things that we’d be miffed about because it would be violating our personal freedoms, but, for example, (and this IS fact as far as I can tell) there are virtually no homeless in Cuba (check your own house USA, you’re not doing so well on that score) and I’ll bet the majority of the population is not in hock up to their eyeballs either. It appears that 85% of Cubans own their own homes and guess what? Their mortgage repayments may not exceed 10% of their combined income – now that makes a whole lot of sense to me. They have a literacy rate of 99.8%, a high school graduation rate of around the same percentage, and a life expectancy that exceeds that of the USA. Cuba has the second highest doctor to patient ratio in the world (after Italy) and apparently provides more medical personnel to developing countries than all the G8 members combined. It is blatantly untrue that healthcare is selective – that much I do have on good authority from a leading professor in the field of urban ecology. Their infant mortality rate is also comparable to the top tier countries, and here’s a thing … “Gun crime is virtually non-existent and murder rates are below those of most Latin American countries” – granted, that last part isn’t saying a whole lot, but you get the gist!

I’d need to verify the following statement, but this is what I have read – “In response to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster, Castro offered to send a "brigade" of 1,500 doctors to the U.S. to provide humanitarian aid, but was never accepted.” We had a whole fleet of Cuban doctors working here at one point because the ANC, and Nelson Mandela in particular, always had a cosy relationship with Castro … in fact he was accorded very high honours by Madiba himself and had it not been for the withdrawal of support by the western powers for a Castro-modelled twenty point plan to solve the healthcare issues that dog this country, we might have been a whole lot better off (we also might not have – it’s difficult to say, and it’s a moot point); instead we got rapped over the knuckles for consorting with the Cuban enemy, punished economically, and that was pretty much that. So – the USA supported the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa and hailed the struggle’s leading proponent as a hero, but couldn’t reconcile the fact that Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro were very good friends and remained strong allies.

I think that for Castro to have steadfastly defied the USA and their trade embargos for so long, and then to have survived the withdrawal of support from the Soviet Union as well is quite remarkable. Yes the country was impoverished by those trade restrictions, which probably made Castro dig his heels in even further, and yes, he aligned with a communist regime who then dropped him, and yes, he was an out and out revolutionary and atrocities were committed which are never excusable – but show me a superpower/regime/empire/so-called civilisation that hasn’t subjugated and bullied their way into attaining their end. Let’s not even go into the missile crisis which was a many layered chess match of diplomatic note! Again – differing accounts but the outcome was quite phenomenal; that the USA had to promise to leave little ol’ Cuba alone unless they engaged in direct provocation, which they did not. There is, and always will be fallout in a struggle for independence and for the right to autonomy. It’s ongoing … I don’t need to tell anyone where to look ….

There are some aspects of Cuban life that are quite fascinating, IMHO. The cars, for one, which will probably, and sadly, be slowly phased out along with the advent of imports. Great ingenuity was put to work in keeping those 1950’s and 60’s classics up and running, especially since parts would not have been available, at all. The vehicles are, of necessity, a terrible mishmash, and no doubt also have a gigantic carbon footprint, but I can’t help liking the notion of automobiles that can be cobbled together with wire and string, as opposed to an arm and a leg! What this really symbolizes though (to me, at least), is how much society at large has, in the last while, become completely and totally geared toward disposability – the mind-set we’ve all bought into – the need to constantly ‘upgrade’ and throw away and replace everything, and I mean literally everything.

So … Cuba sits in a time warp and we would freak out if we’d had to live there because as I mentioned before, we are used to, and expect, personal freedoms and we are also right at home in a materialistic society – it’s what we know. How much freedom is enough? How much is actually only perceived, as opposed to being real? What is freedom in any case? Does knowing you have a roof over your head and that all your basic monthly provisions are supplied mean freedom? Are we not all slaves to a system? (If not ‘slaves to the rhythm’??! Lol!) All the above said, I’m not naïve enough to believe that Cuba is a utopian paradise, but I do think critical thinking is to be encouraged.

While the thought of a dictatorship is abhorrent to our minds, the methodology employed by Castro worked – it’s just not a model to which most of the western world subscribes. Is it possible that he really did have the interests of the people at heart? He had, and still has, a huge amount of support in his country despite select media reporting to the contrary, and it certainly seems unlikely he was in it all for personal gain. I’m sure those trade embargos fattened someone’s pocket though – they always do.

Anyway – I cannot claim first-hand experience of the place, so am admittedly not in the least qualified to comment which you would never think considering this diatribe!

And I have no particular reason to love Castro either – his military forces were deployed to fight on the Angolan border, a conflict which severely impacted a whole generation of South African men who had no option but to comply and fight a pointless and bloody war, whether they liked it or not, but again - that’s complicated, and it’s another story, from yet another perspective ... if it hadn’t been him, it would have been someone else I expect. I just wanted to point out that there ARE many different perspectives – and that IMHO, it’s never cut and dried.

Right … I’ll run for cover now :behindsofa:, but before I do, a little light music! …

[video=youtube;INkLVwtIr_I]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INkLVwtIr_I[/video]