I’ve been going to Cuba since the pre-Castro era. My parents used to meet Ernest Hemingway for daiquiri cocktails at the famed La Floridita Bar, today, sadly an over-priced tourist trap. In my bookcase: “A Farewell to Arms,” inscribed “to Eric the painter from his friend Ernest Hemingway, Havana, 1952.”
Contrary to expectations, no big changes occurred after Raul Castro assumed leadership from the ailing Fidel. Yet I have observed many small but significant developments on my regular trips to Cuba. Things are changing.
Thanks to Raul’s recent reforms, small private enterprise is bubbling up everywhere. Aid and oil from Venezuela has been very important. People are more outspoken, less wary of the secret police and informers. One feels growing energy pulsating into Havana’s delightful old city. With its beautiful buildings, friendly, attractive people, and little music bars with their superb salsa bands, Havana is poised to resume its role of 50 years ago as the most fun – and perhaps wickedest city – in the world.
America’s Great Satan, Fidel Castro, is sidelined by age and illness, but Cubans still love their national papa figure. Brother Raul, now pushing 81, has gained respect for his leadership. But once the Castro era is over, what will happen?Cuba "changing"? If you say so, Eric.
Update: You never know what you'll turn up on the Internet. A photo of Eric Margolis speaking at a CASMO event back in '09, for instance. As a bonus, that's Zafar Bangash looking up lovingly at him. Dare we call it a bromance?
1 comment:
What I find most discouraging about leftists' penchant for whitewashing any and all crimes and failures of the Castro regime is that it illustrates a more universal intellectual foible, the triumph of "guerrilla theater" over facts, logic, and moral principles . . . consider the elevation of Moslem terrorist groups to heroic status. Apparently we, as a species, are prone to fall for attractively presented illusions even in the face of the most concrete reality.
If Fidel Castro had been short and stumpy instead of tall and lean (at that time) . . . heck, if he hadn't fortuitously grown a beard--which hid his already significant double chin (which made his geeky-looking round face even rounder and gave him a decidedly middle-aged appearance in his early thirties-- when he was up in the mountains, the history of Cuba might have played out otherwise. But the image of Castro's rebel forces, clad in green uniforms, and sporting long hair and beards that gave them a decidedly Medieval appearance, created a Robin Hood persona for their leader that has perdured to this day in the imagination of the Left.
As events developed, once the "narrative" of the "peasant guerrillas" (the mid-20th century equivalent of the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest) became established (largely through the efforts of liberal American journalists--like Herbert Matthews of the New York _Times_--and academics--like leftist sociologist C. Wright Mills), no amount of factual or moral argument would serve to convince the left-leaning intelligentsia and journalists of the West of the reality: Cuba is a naked Communist police state, with the twist that it exacerbates the natural inefficiency of a state-controlled economy with Hispanotropical incompetence. (Over the last couple of decades, as, following the collapse of the Soviet Union Jacksonville has grown a substantial Russian expatriate colony, I've had the opportunity to converse with a few such Russians who actually served as technical advisors to the Castro government in the sixties and seventies; they all aver that, even after having been exposed to the follies of Soviet Communism since infancy, they were shocked by the incompetence and inefficiency of Cuban Communist enterprises.)
Present Castroite Cuba has sunk to levels of repression, corruption, and moral degradation--Cuba has become one of the prime global destinations for "sexual tourism" of a kind (including pedophilia and pederasty)--that would have embarrassed even the most jaded of Batista's political gangster cronies. Yet, as Margolis' essay and the comments below the _Local_'s article on the tribulations of Mr. Modig both show, the affection for the failed Communist experiment in Cuba dies hard.
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