Cuba’s Quiet Wealth: Why It is Needed
September 30, 2015
Cuba’s Quiet Wealth: Why It is Needed
by Susan Babbitt
The Pope, speaking to Congress, quoted Thomas Merton, Trappist monk. It was to preface remarks on Cuba. He might have pushed the connection further. Merton said he lived enslaved by his own desires and fears. José Martí, Cuban independence leader, placed a similar insight at the centre of his revolution. It is about the nature of freedom, and science. Martí was concerned, for the sake of radical politics, with how to think.
Two hundred years ago, countering European ideas, an intense debate in Cuba addressed the issue. Armando Hart, who led Cuba’s literacy campaign, unmatched in the world, says no one who disregards the “Cuban philosophical polemic”, 1838-40, understands the Cuban Revolution.[1] This will surprise some. Cuba is much studied but not for its ideas, and certainly not for ideas about how to think creatively. It should be.
1.
Since the 1960s, the “creativity industry” in North America has urged us “outside the box”. Cuban philosopher, Féliz Varela, in 1817, before Martí and before Marx, cared about boxes. He took the question to be about the nature of thought, which depends upon universals.[2] He noticed that the vehicles for all thought, general categories, are social. We make use of them but we do not create them, at least not alone.
Science depends upon universals. So does individual reasoning, day by day. North American philosophers know this. But they ignore political implications. The “Cuban polemicists” did not. Cuba in the 1830s was threatened by four global institutions: Spain took Cuba to define its “national integrity”; slavery was a “necessary evil”; the US considered Cuba its manifest destiny; and England was gaining influence in the Caribbean. All four implied submission for Cuba.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/30/cubas-quiet-wealth-why-it-is-needed/
Good reads:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016133490