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Judi Lynn

(160,527 posts)
Mon Nov 21, 2016, 02:52 AM Nov 2016

What Trumps Win Means: a View From Cuba


What Trump’s Win Means: a View From Cuba
November 18, 2016
by Manuel E. Yepe


Havana.

At the onset of the 2016 presidential elections, the elites of the Democratic and Republican parties did not think the issue would be anything but business as usual. The next president of the nation would inevitably have the surname of one of the families who had ruled before: Bush or Clinton; and life in the superpower would continue to be neoliberal capitalist, without changes, as in the last three decades.

But it did not work out that way. It has been consistently shown that, despite the fact that all other elements of power remained the same, the population of the country did not want more of the same. They wanted something new and different in the nation that presumes itself to be a model of democracy for the planet.

Since the previous stage of the process, it became clear that “the oven was not ready for baking” when, within each of the traditional parties, differences were highlighted by unexpected dissent. That made it clear that the phenomenon was not a matter of cosmetic adjustments but of deep surgery. According to the US political qualification patterns, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were identified respectively as “the right of the Right” and “the left of the Left”. They had the support of the Republican and Democrat majorities.

Bernie Sanders’ campaign fell victim to the Democratic party machinery. Insensitive to the expressed tendency, it insisted on the figure of Hillary Clinton who later lost in a fight where she represented the discontented past. The alternative was the billionaire, populist and demagogue Donald Trump. He lacked the determined support of the Republican establishment. Together with many of the main figures of that machine against him, he was elected despite his proven status as racist, sexist, abusive and systematic target of media mockery.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/18/what-trumps-win-means-a-view-from-cuba/
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