The Traveling Salesman President in Cuba
March 25, 2016
The Traveling Salesman President in Cuba
by Nelson Valdes
On the afternoon of March 21, I watched on television President Barack Obama meet and speak with Cubans who are involved in some type of commercial enterprise. The Washington crowd calls them “emprendedores.” (“go-getters”) Most were young urbanites of a nascent new class. They are apparently the hope of the Foggy Bottom strategists; the makings of the Cuba Obama says he wants. The US media at times calls them “a new class” – meaning a new class of people favorable to capitalism. A few of them spoke to the US president or answered questions that he had, seemingly assuming that their needs or difficulties could be addressed by the man in the White House. But capitalist magic does not work like that.
One person, a bit older than the newbies, spoke on behalf of a cooperative of agricultural workers. This fellow knew what his agricultural cooperative was doing and what the workers needed. He was precise and to the point. Obama did not seem to understand or did not want to address what the Cubano was saying about the impact the US embargo/blockade was having on his cooperative. The encounter with the budding capitalists was what Obama went to Havana to hear and the second encounter was one he needed to ignore as it represented Cuba’s revolutionary answer to the first one.
At one point, the US president went off in a different direction and referred to Shark Tank, one of his favorite TV shows. Yep. It seems that Barack Obama, after all, likes a Cuban — you know — Mark Cuban, one of the rich capitalists who dispense advice and sometimes money on the show to contestants with Great Ideas for not very important products. Perhaps Obama thought that that show should be a daily habit for all those enterprising Cubans. (There is no Shark Tank to help out farmer cooperatives.) Perhaps a Cuban version of the show could be called “El Garrotero” — the loan shark.
The show could even be exported to Cuba in one of the weekly paquetes. Or, perhaps it is already part of the paquete. The Paquete Semanal (weekly packages) are widely exchanged hard drives of pirated popular culture products. It might be interesting to explain to Cubans that they are already enjoying a common form of entrepreneurial capitalism in the paquete, which, after all, is capitalists capitalizing on other capitalists.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/25/the-traveling-salesman-president-in-cuba/
Good Reads:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016149266