Why Fidel? Why not Lula instead?

Friends are asking why I follow Fidel Castro's blog so faithfully and why people like Oliver Stone are giving the likes of Hugo Chavez any benefit of doubt. Why not Lula da Silva instead, the remarkable President of Brazil?

That is a legitimate question, more subtle than we think.

Is my harping on Fidel naïve or ignorant of reality under that controversial regime?

I certainly hope not. For those who might not know, I speak Spanish fluently and the perspective of Cuba in this blog is based on pretty close interest since 1962.

I am not oblivious to the fact that a significant minority, perhaps even a majority of Cubans are keen for domestic change. The same old faces and political leadership can seem pretty dreary to us after as little as eight or ten years, let alone after 51 years, which is the case in Cuba.

What I still find fascinating in the midst of this disquiet, however, is how insightful old people can become when they no longer need to embellish the truth for tactical effect. They begin to tell it as it is. That is what I am hearing from friends in Cuba who are old enough to remember life before the revolution, some who have supported the revolution, grown fed up with it at times, but still see powerful and truthful elements in its rationale.

Now even Fidel has begun to comment more philosophically on foreign policy at least. Few of us ever expected him to soften because he has been so stridently defensive about his domestic record over the years, but he is surprising us recently with some pretty pithy cracks about his own political naïveté, especially as a proxy during the Cold War.

I think his speech to the National Assembly on August 7th should be taken in that context, as one more in a sequence of recent blogs he's written that differ substantively from anything prior.

The speech was framed as a direct plea to President Obama to deviate from standard military dogma on nuclear confrontation, especially when married to the Bush-Cheney approach to pre-emptive intervention. Fidel pleaded with Obama to explore alternative scenarios that include more third-world and southern hemispheric perspectives.

What seems sincere in Castro these days is his placing such pleas in a context of environmental and historical concern typical of someone who is now looking beyond the immediate, someone considering longer term human and planetary considerations. He is indeed sounding more like an old warrior digging deeper into even his own motives and earlier justifications for the preemptiove use of force.

In a somewhat ironic twist, I think he has been influenced as much by the likes of Lula da Silva and other modern southern leaders as he might have once inspired them.

A whole new generation of leaders has emerged in the southern hemisphere and in parts of Asia that the industrial empire and media have yet to understand and that emerging alternate information channels such as Al Jazeera English and Internet social media are now by-passing.

Yes, Obama recognizes the inherent danger of so many nuclear weapons and he has made efforts to reduce that arsenal. But his most ardent supporters are concerned by the apparent impact on him of the remorseless daily briefings from a Defence establishment permeated by precedent, wealthy vested interests and, most of all, deep secrecy camouflaged from civilian oversight.

Hence the drama over the recent WikiLeaks documents.

The reason WikiLeaks so easily fought off ferocious accusations of betrayal and troop endangerment last week is the sinister and cynical disregard for the truth to which the world grew accustomed during the Nixon and Cheney dynasties in foreign policy. Truth be known, the deception has been pervasive in all imperial regimes and we goof badly by dismissing such allegations as mere neo-con ranting or off-beat whacko conspiracy theory. A case could be made that only Eisenhower and Carter were honest American brokers in the last century

Careful semantic, syntactic and logical analysis of the utterances of our current crop of leaders and their legions of lobbyist sponsors would expose an immense subconscious maze of pre-supposition and deception to which we, the consumers of that propaganda seem oblivious.

That stupor is the cause of my increasignly strident diatribe against our press and commercial massmedia. If this blog has any dominant obsession, it is that our paid language professionals are failing utterly in their duty to expose the underlying presumptions and breaches of logic in the public and democratic dialogue.

The challenge for me in this blog, now that I've identified that as a scope and theme even when I no longer have such an easy target as Lou Dobbs to pick on, is to gradually morph from merely saying the media are perverting democratic dialogue to explicitely demonstrating how they do it.

That is what I aspire to over the next two to three years, drawing examples from local, national and international reportage.

In the interim, placing the contemporary speeches of Fidel Castro side-by-side with those of other world leaders is not a bad place to start given the themes Fidel has decided to highlight in his 'legacy' years.

Tiger Moving to Havana?

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Imagine a sand box.

Make it a good sized one. About three meters on each side, with walls about 30 cms (one foot) deep. Fill the box with clean, dry sand.

Now, gather a dozen soup bowls, fill them with small pebbles or gravel, and sink them upright into the sand so that the lip of each bowl is about a centimeter below the surface. Get a large watering can and carefully fill each of the bowls with water. Lastly, cover each one with sand to hide it below the surface.

Begin calling the bowls 'aquifers' because you are about to earn a quick PhD in fresh water management policy.

Here's the deal.

Your kids want to germinate some seeds in the areas of the sand box where there are no bowls. You tell them they are allowed to push a single straw through the sand into each bowl and suck out as much water as they want to use on their seeds, but you will only allow one cup of relacement water from the kitchen tap to be added to each bowl, per week, and they must start calling that new water 'precipitation'.

Your final exam consists of a single question.

How much water can the kids suck out of each bowl per week during July and August if the plants are to keep growing in the blazing sun until Labour Day?

Pretty obvious, eh?

No more than a cup, the replacement quota, and likely less because each bowl will lose some water soaking to the surface sand above it. That is probably where we should have put the seeds in the first place.

The lesson to be learned is that you can never remove more water from any one bowl than can be replenished from the weekly re-supply. Break this rule and the entire sand box will run dry in a matter of days.

That is what has been done to the Kalahari desert and to much of the South Western USA.

Now Cuba has decided to ask foreign developers to build golf courses?

Raul, good grief!

Fifty years of heroic sacrifice and defiance by a long suffering people now betrayed on the eve of global ecological catastrophe ... and deprived of vindication.

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Obama's First Pitch

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American baseball has begun another pampered journey towards its self-styled world series this fall. It will be hard enough doing so against the fanfare of a genuine world event like this summer's 2010 World Cup of Football (soccer), but it must gall honest American sportsmen even more that the real championship of baseball finished in the wee hours a week ago Monday, in Cuba!

In the tenth inning of the seventh game, Havana beat Santa Clara in a nail-biter. It was a terrific series, played against the backdrop of fundamental cowardice in sponsored American media who dared not cover it for fear their fans might learn the truth: that the best Cuban teams would clean the clocks of what American and Canadian fans pay through the nose for: a second class product.

That's the real secret behind the spiteful Helms-Burton embargo. The best teams in Cuba would win North America's so-called 'World Series' hands down. A Cuban second string already thumped the Baltimore Orioles 12 - 6 at Camden Yahds in 1999 and MLB hasn't had the guts to risk another such comeuppance since.

The latest evidence came in a March 31st article on the eve of this year's magnificent Cuban final, when McClatchy-Tribune News reporter Kevin Baxter, drawing on files from the Associated Press (AP), didn't even mention the series! All he could blather about was how many Cuban players 'defect' during international tournaments.

He was quick to vaunt the $30.25 million Cincinnati paid for pitcher Aroldis Chapman this January even though Chapman was no star in Cuba and had posted losing averages in two of his four seasons in the Cuban league. Same thing goes for most of the other so-called defectors.

And therein lies the lie.

North-American sport media only ever mention the defectors. Where is the coverage of the 95% of first string players that remain in Cuba and, more importantly by far, where is the coverage of Cuba's teams, not just a few individuals?

The truth is that stories about individual players leaving Cuba for the US are spun to look like migrations towards a superior brand of baseball. They are not. They are the understandable attempts of a few journeymen players in the Cuban league trying to escape dead end careers and poverty. No mention is made of the fact that superior players remain in Cuba, that the defectors would far prefer to live and play in Cuba themselves given a reasonable economy, and that the only reason for their poverty is the vindictive and hateful spite of Helms-Burton.

President Obama, you have a tough decision to make. Lift the embargo and the elite of Cuban baseball will opt to stay at home, play at home, and repeatedly win any genuine world series in which you dare let them play.
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Reflections on Cuba

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Fulcrum of the Americas. Conscience of the Caribbean. Oracle to the mighty. Salve for the downtrodden. Foil for fools. Mote in Helms-Burton’s eye.

Fidel's Cuba.

At the very peak of the Yankee debate over health insurance, I got sick ... in Cuba. Not just any Cuba, mind you, but rural Cuba. Poor Cuba. Reportedly downtrodden, oppressed, repressed, obsessed and Marxist-Leninized Cuba. Cracks in the walls, peeling paint, light bulbs in only every fourth fixture, typical, tropical, third-world hospital Cuba. Right?

Bullshit!

What an unmitigated pack of lies we are being fed about that island.

The North American public square, our commons, our most basic democratic vocabulary has been so hijacked by the purveyors of vested interest and pre-suppositional lies, we no longer accurately perceive ‘other’. Choking on venemous Helms-Burton narratives about Fidel for fifty years, we can no longer taste Cuba herself. Now eighty-four years old, Castro has spent the same fifty years studying us as we have studying him, yet we dare not admit the bugger might have some useful insights to offer.

Was it Marshall McLuhan who defined unilingual English-speaking North America’s approach to ‘other’ as: “Quick! Let me help you before you drown,” said the monkey to the fish, putting him safely up a tree.

What is this primordial soup in which we are so obliviously immersed?

Lies, upon lies ... upon more lies

Twenty-two minutes of every North American broadcast hour is devoted to advertising. Eighty-six percent of that comes from only two corporate alliances: the chemo-pharma-petro-food block (GM-Splenda-Cialis) and the banking-insurance-investment cartel. The remaining thirty-eight minutes of every hour reinforce that brainwashing with an endless recitation of partisan ‘talking points’ scripted with floods of cash from those same two lobbies.

Are you listening English-speaking America? We are being lied to about Cuba!

The embargo has little to do with the USA preventing goods from crossing the Florida straights. That's the Helms-Burton embargo. The Cuban embargo is run by Cubans, designed to shelter their airwaves from most of our seditious vitriol.

How bad is it? When Fareed Zakaria recently asked Paul Volker what worried him most about this era after his long and distinguished life, Volker replied, “Governance.”

Even the usually attentive Zakaria misunderstood at first. “Government?”, he asked. “No,” Volker replied, “Governance.” Our democracy is broken. We are a failing state.

Volker is not alone. Other prominent public figures see it too, but they use polite words like "gridlock” to describe it. None dares speak the truth, bluntly. The lies are corrupting the very essence of democratic choice.

Eisenhower saw it coming in 1950. He called it the military-industrial complex. Today its a Pharma-Financial complex. Our electoral system has been hijacked. Our elections are fixed because we vote based on those lies.

What's the difference between Zimbabwe and us? In Zimbabwe a corrupt tyrant falsifies the results after the vote. In twenty-first century North America disembodied concentrations of obscene wealth manipulate our thinking beforehand.

Obama knew it. And he blew it. He wasted a year droning drearily on about something called "health care reform". What a crock. The ‘public option’ was about health insurance folks. Nothing to do with the health care. It was supposed to be just one more insurance plan option among many. Choose the one you want. Pick freely. The best and the cheapest should have emerged as honest, realistic, with sustainable premiums established in an open market place.

Instead, the USA have been hoodwinked by colluding insurance moghuls in cahoots with the banks and investment lobbies. The same ones that are gouging patients with illegible disclaimers, limits on coverage, and astronomical premiums long divorced from actuarial tables and legitimate risk assessment. They are all liars. We are the pushovers. And the reason we lap it all up is our elected representatives and mass media rebroadcast the lies ad nauseam.

Our partisan politics are the laughing stock of the rest of the world right now. We have settled for half the service at twice the price (and rising), while voting to continue obscene rewards for those who most successfully divert our savings and taxes into immense capital repositories under narrowly held corporate control.

What's the alternative?

I got sick in Cuba. Really sick, off the beaten track in a tiny rural village. Nothing to do with Cuba. A chronic, pre-existing, aging male's plumbing condition flared up. I got myself to the tiny local clinic. One doctor, two nurses. The doctor called the specialist at the nearest regional hospital. Too busy this afternoon. How about 10:00 AM tomorrow. Saturday. My local doctor’s day off.

Someone picked me up anyway, passed by the doctor’s house to pick her up (her day off remember). In to the hospital. Ultrasound, X-ray, urine lab, rectal prostate exam, and a comprehensive discussion in plain language using the ultrasound and x-rays as props. I was given a legible copy of the specialist's case notes and handed a targeted prescription. Out the door.

Time spent? One hour and fifty seven minutes.

Cost for the ultrasound, X-ray, urine lab, rectal exam, specialist consultation and prescription? $250. The local doctor’s fee? $15 and only because I was a foreigner.

Equivalent cost for a Cuban citizen? They've already paid through income tax deducted at source. Fully covered by the national health care plan. No incidental charges. Typical wait time for a Cuban citizen at this hospital? About an hour more than mine because, as a guest, they insisted I skip to the head of the four or five people in line at each station.

The people in line had one compensatory demand, however. They wanted to see pictures of my wife. Pictures of my kids. Pictures of the low lying mid-winter arctic sun. They wanted to gasp at the incomprehensible –37C temperature the morning I left home. And, forget privacy, they felt reassured in our common humanity by eavesdropping on the details of my ailments and cure as I chatted with the specialist winthin ear-shot. They wrapped it up with a few questions about my impressions of "la doctora Beatrice" and "mi primo Pascal". My doctor and the specialist respectively.

Seems they are all cousins, or nieces, or aunts, and … well, welcome to Cuba. Or is it Nunavut. Places where life and community are still on a human scale.

I had the decency to wait until I got back to the relative seclusion of my lodgings before getting misty-eyed in amazement, gratitude, relief and, admit it, outright affection for these people.

Were my experience and speedy service unusual? Perhaps, but only compared to other tourists. Not to Cubans. Since I speak Spanish well enough to dispense with an interpreter, I was treated like just one more relative. I suspect that with a language barrier, or had I been stuck in metropolitain Havana, that might have added a few hours to the process.

Who pays?

I didn’t bother claiming the travel insurance. Didn’t bill the Nunavut Health Care Plan either. $250 bucks for all that? Prescription included!

How do they do it?

The Helms-Burton version of Cuban economics spews hate and systematic violence at Cuba for having nationalised the plutocratic power base and thereafter resorted to a two-tiered currency.

Foreigners pay for local services directly to Revenue Cuba in new pesos, which are roughly on a par with the dollar.

Cuban employees receive their salaries in old pesos, worth a lot less. The difference goes directly to the national treasury and pays for superb health care and unlimited education. The rest of the planet calls these “source deductions”. They include deductions for federal income tax, provincial or state income tax, unemployment insurance, health care, pension plan, old age security, union dues, all deducted from our pay cheque ‘at source’, i.e. by our employer, and forwarded to our elected representatives. In Canada this also covers municipalities plowing snow off the highways and runways so the fire trucks, ambulance, and garbage trucks can get through.

Helms-Burton calls this socialism, tyranny, communism, confiscation, castroism, big government and lack of market freedom.

In Cuba, Castro calls it ‘revolution’, an enforced period of transition from Batista-Helms enabled plutocratic exploitation and selfishiency to one of fierce national pride in superb shared services, near complete freedom from debilitating disease, near zero polution and crime, and near 100% literacy. All this is capped by a phenomenal generosity overseas towards millions of less fortunate communities despite the crippling economic impact of Helmsian hate mongering and bullying.

Intimidation, Bullying and Executions

The subtext to all this, we are told, is that Fidel Castro is a ruthless, cruel, violent, egomaniacal communist who has slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent entrepreneurs and free thinkers for little more than their aspiring to personal wealth or voicing a dissident opinion.

No matter how laudable the outcomes of universal health care and education, the uncompromising means Castro has used to achieve them are never to be forgiven, forgotten, or tolerated. To hear Helms-Burton octogenerians and legions of other Batista legates sitting in Miami tell the story, the Cuban people live in a perpetual state of gnawing anxiety, fear of reprisal, and muzzled resentment. Miami-based expatriate oligarchs drool with unconcealed anticipation, craving a triumphant welcome from their repressed entrepreneurial and consumerist cousins the moment Castro has the decency to rot into his ovedue grave.

Again, what bullshit!

These morons are clinically delusional. Their cliché-infested minds are so clogged with their own incessant incantations, they actually believe modern Cuba is still as mired in 1959 as their automobiles. The Miami diaspora are oblivious to the transformation, pride, and fiercely independent streak that is sweeping Latin America, growing ever more respectful of Cuba's phenomenal accomplishments. The Bolivarian dream of shrugging off nordic and euro-centric views of the globe in favour of a shared pan-american, self-determining alternative is summed up in the new Latin-American mantra heard from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego: "Our North is South!"

Cubans are not just aware of this movement, they well might emerge as one of its foremost exponents once the blockade is lifted. Convenient consumer goods, appliances and communications technology from northern markets will be welcomed, of course, but I think the Helms-Burton crowd are in for a shock when they discover that Fidel is no longer the lone driver, a rogue demagogue keeping Cuba under his thumb. Entire generations have come and gone under the revolution and the Castro legacy includes a far more resilient, capable, thoughtful, competent, independent, and politically sophisticated transition team than the insatiable nordic giant realizes.

Conclusion

I predict that the Castro era will wind down just as the United States of America's governmental gridlock hits a wall of paralysis. The most explosive irritant will be a sudden and catastrophic shortage of electricity and clean drinking water.

Meanwhile, far from rushing towards indiscriminate consumerism with a reckless assault on their own limited resources, Cubans, while benefiting from broader international trade, will largely hold firm to their present course of husbanded resources, organic farming, and more sustainable social consensus that is a bit less selfish, a bit more respectful of small and distributed communities, and, above all, still committed to shared sponsorship of services that look after the weak as well as the strong.

Any observer of 21st century affairs who cannot suspend his or her conditioned aversion to the earlier elements of the Castrist legacy long enough to examine the analysis the contemporary 'Comandante' continues to offer from the perspective of his octogenerian perch, is a damned fool.

I dare anyone to read the available on-line Spanish or English translations of the near weekly "Reflexiones de Fidel". You cannot do that for six months and not be impressed at the pertinence of the man's observations and dialectic.

The Helms-Burton cabal are incapable of such nuance. So is CNN. With the possible exception of Fareed Zakaria and his remarkable access to genuine thinkers in the northern hemisphere, the rest of our mainstream media are systematically poisoning the information infrastructure on which democratic decisions and survival depend.

We haven't much time to turn this around. If we succeed it will be deemed, in retrospect, to have been ... dare I say it ... a revolution!

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