The time has come today

[social_critic]

I was talking to a friend a few minutes ago, wondering if the unrest in North Africa would ignite revolts in other countries. We discussed Cuba, where a dictatorship has been in power for over 50 years, and whether the security services there have enough to overcome the people, given the lack of internet connectivity in Cuba, and the way they are monitored by chivatos (police informants) and other means.

My friend felt the Cubans will not revolt now, and I tend to agree. They are a beaten people. I meet many Cubans who manage to get out, or who visit Venezuela, and I get the sense they have been trained to be passive and to fear authority. In a sense, they are brainwashed to believe in the absolute power of the state, and their inability to force change on their oppressors.

However, I do hope their time has come, or will come soon.

Maybe one of them, somewhere in Cuba, will stand up and say something like:

"The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object."

[Peace Patriot]

1. Egypt has one of the worst rich/poor ratios in the world, Cuba one of the best. Big difference.

That is one of the most important stabilizing factors in a country and a society--everyone getting a fair shake, everyone having opportunity to improve themselves, everyone being able to participate in society, feel useful, make a contribution, have a home, put food on the table, have medical care. This is also a democratic signature--that everyone is ABLE to participate because everyone has the basics of life.

Could your perception of Cubans be colored by the fact that your views--at least expressed here at DU--are very rightwing?

You say, of the Cubans you met:

"They are a beaten people. I meet many Cubans who manage to get out, or who visit Venezuela, and I get the sense they have been trained to be passive and to fear authority. In a sense, they are brainwashed to believe in the absolute power of the state, and their inability to force change on their oppressors."

Maybe the Cubans you met simply disagreed with your views, and did not want to get in an argument with you?

There are leftists at DU who have been to Cuba and have reported on their experiences. None of them has described anything like you describe--"a beaten people," and so forth. Their Cuban friends and acquaintances are upbeat, they like their government and they consider it democratic.

My view is that it is not accurate to describe Cuba as having had "a dictatorship in power for over 50 years." Cuba has evolved. It never resembled the Stalinist dictatorship in Russia nor the Mao dictatorship in China. It's always been very different and much more benign, and over the last several decades, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has come to resemble European and Scandinavian social democracies and England when it was still socialist. England has a monarch, but still it became very egalitarian and socialist for a time. Fidel Castro has come to resemble the English monarch, in some respects--that is, a person who represents the unity of the country but certainly doesn't behave like a tyrant, rather a figurehead. Stalin was a true dictator and tyrant--he killed millions, he sent millions to gulags, he did hoirrible paranoid murderous purges of his closest associates. Castro has never been a mad paranoiac, nor inflicted the harm that Stalin did, and in so far as he may have been dictatorial/authoritarian or simply a strong leader, depending on how you look at it, he became far less so in the latter decades of the Cuban Revolution.

In any case, we are more likely to have a rebellion here, like Egypt's, than this happening in Cuba. I just read that the rich/poor ratio in the U.S. is worse than Egypt's. That's when rebellions happen--when things become so unfair and impossible for ordinary people, when they can't find jobs, when they lose their homes, when their hopes for the future are dashed, when they can't make a living, when they can't get medical care, when schools systems and other public services deteriorate, because the corrupt rich elites are looting everything and taking all the wealth. This is not the case in Cuba. But it is the case here.

Another factor is whether or not the people perceive that their government and the "powers that be" care about the fate of ordinary people. People will endure great hardship--as they did, for instance, in the Great Depression here--if they know that their government cares and is doing everything it can to alleviate poverty--that the government is working for the people. Cuba went through hardship when the Soviet Union fell, but they did not rebel over those hardships. They pulled together. That is not a sign of a "dictatorship." It is a sign that they felt confidence in their government and in each other.

[social_critic]

2. Nevertheless, the people in Cuba are not free

I am Cuban, and I ran away, and I do realize you'll never understand how we feel. People value their freedom more than the equality you cherish so much. In the end, that regime will end, hopefully without violence. But I assure you, it will end.

[Peace Patriot]

3. Freedom and equality are related. If the few hoard all the wealth, violence is inevitable.

The few hoarding all the wealth is the most unstable of societies, and the least democratic, and the most likely to suffer insurrections.

The few can't hoard all the wealth without violent enforcement of their will. This is what people get sick of --being poor, being unable to make a living, feed their families, enjoy life and participate in society, because some few are siphoning off all the wealth and creating monstrous "prison-industrial complexes" and war machines and "security states" with which to oppress their own serfs, peons, slave labor and 'cannon fodder' and, in the case of the U.S. elite, with which to oppress others as well.

This imbalance destroys the freedom of most people. In modern society, you CAN'T be free without being able to make a decent modern living. Homeless people are not free. Starving people are not free. The elderly who lose their pensions are not free. The jobless, or those who are losing their homes to bankster ponzie schemes, or those burdened with credit card debt due to usurious practices, or parents with three, four jobs who have to work all the time, with no break, just to feed their children, because of shit wages and no good jobs, are not free. Down-sized and outsourced workers, whose labor rights have been sabotaged, are not free. They are slaves to somebody else's multi-million dollar "bonus," and to billion dollar bankster bailouts, and to multi-billion dollar war profiteering.

Society has to WORK TOGETHER to create and share the common wealth or society inevitably collapses. That is the BASIS of freedom.

Freedom is not an abstraction. And it is not possessing an arsenal of weapons protecting you and yours. And it is not being able to buy a mansion or a BMW--or being very rich and lording it over everyone else. Freedom is an collective, communal agreement that every human being is EQUAL, and valuable, and part of a whole in which their well-being, their lives, their basic needs, their human and civil rights, their livelihoods, their participation in decisions, their voice, their viewpoint, are held as important by everyone--as part of the collective decision-making of the society.

When that breaks down, vast numbers of people LOSE their freedom. And that is, very unfortunately, very tragically, happening to the U.S.--once the bastion of the democratic sovereignty by which we have given each other freedom, but now the bastion of the oppressive rich, lording it over us and the world.

In these senses, Cuba is currently more democratic than the U.S. Everyone is valued. No one goes without food, a home, medical care, a free university education. And Cuba has done this now, for several decades, without subsidy from Soviet Russia, and despite a cruel U.S. embargo. That is admirable. And that needs to be valued and studied.

You call Cuba a "dictatorship" but it really isn't, not in the normal meaning of that word. The U.S. is much more of a "dictatorship" than Cuba is, though our "dictators" are the CEO's of multinational corporations, banksters and war profiteers--a group "dictatorship." They are making themselves enormously wealthy at the expense of everyone else. The Castro brothers have never done this. They have shared Cuba's up's and down's with their people. They may have been violent in throwing the horrible Batistas and their cronies out of the country, and authoritarian in dealing with the rich and the greedy and the CIA's bloody-handed operatives, but they have not gone to any kind of extreme of communist or fascist dictatorship. They and the Cuban people have created a VIABLE country with a good social contract.

I might not be comfortable there because I am used to only the rich having free speech. I'd have to learn to be patient and listen to everybody. ;-) I also value a healthy marketplace (fair trade, non-monopolistic, providing a rich variety of products and cultural interchange), and, traditionally, communism has disdained "the marketplace." Thus, Soviet Russia became a very dull place. I was one of the first American visitors to Russia in the early '70s. The lack of a viable marketplace was very striking. I, who was used to forty-seven varieties of toothpaste, et al, and the availability of any product my heart desired and my income could afford, could not have borne the dullness in Russia, where everybody wore the same dress, and the store shelves were virtually empty.

As to economic systems, we need BALANCE--room for innovation and entrepreneurship, and the great variety, fun and cultural richness of "the marketplace" combined with social responsibility and regulation, to insure everyone's FREEDOM. Sick people with no medical care are NOT free. People who can't make a living are NOT free. We must take collective responsibility for everyone's ability to make a living and thus to be able to participate in our political/social system. If we don't do that, our system--the U.S. democratic capitalist system, now become undemocratic and predatory capitalist--will fall.

I am in no way approving of violence. i can understand it when it happens in a country like Cuba ruled by heinous dictators like the Batistas. In cases like that, I can only hope and pray that the violence is limited and short-term. And I can admire the courage that it takes to do physical battle. But I value every human life, and I could not take a human life for any cause. But this is something of a theoretical ethical stance. I don't know for sure what I would do, if I was pushed hard. I have never had to face it directly. The closest I've come to oppressive violence was Seattle '02 and one big anti-war demonstration in the '60s, where terrible (but not lethal) brutality of the police was inflicted on others. My response--besides being appalled--was to figure we need to get better organized. I am a Gandhian. I believe that we can change the world peacefully--by personal and collective non-violent resistance.

And I have been overjoyed that most Latin Americans have chosen this way--that the leftist revolutions occurring in Latin America have been peaceful and democratic. Latin Americans have persisted in non-violence except where the U.S., in recent times, has grossly interfered (Colombia) but in most cases of recent U.S. interference (Venezuela '02, Bolivia '08, Honduras '09), non-violence has held, and this despite the awful violence of the rightwing in the past. So much horror was inflicted on people in Latin America by rightwing dictators that it wouldn't have surprised me if the people had woken up one day and slit the throats of their oppressors. But they didn't do this. They were patient. They worked steadily and courageously toward democracy. A totally amazing and wonderful development. And you know what? Cuba, despite its early violent revolutionary period, which ended quickly, has been no small part of the inspiration for this peaceful change. They're into providing doctors and literacy teachers now, not armed resistance. This is what i mean when I say that Cuba has evolved. They are a better country now, then at the beginning. The sadness and tragedy for me is that my own country has DE-volved. We--or rather our leaders--are reverting to the pre-"New Deal" era of vast social imbalance, and that is very bad, indeed.

[Judi Lynn]

4. I appreciate the reference to freedom as NOT being the state from which people hunker down

amid their "possessions" and prepare for violent protection of their wealth against the impoverished masses. Those people are not free in any sense, living day by day imagining the rest of the world wants to steal their "stuff."

Heavily armed Americans work themselves into a lather with the fanciful thought others are pining for the chance to take their material goods from them. They fester away year after year, developing deeper suspicions of others, and working on their senses of alienation.

Some freedom. An entire political party has used this delusional view of freedom as its foundation.

As for the Cuban revolution, it's more than clear it has been respected throughout the Americas, especially when you consider the amazing procession of Latin American dignitaries to Havana to visit with the recuperating former President during his long convalescence. Very impressive, and it spoke volumes.

[Peace Patriot]

5. Yup, I knew some very rich people once and they lived in a security fortress.

I didn't envy them. I pitied them. They were NOT free. They had too much to protect, and this isolated them from the rest of humanity.

People who think that getting rich buys you freedom are fools. Freedom comes from EQUALITY--from everyone feeling that they have a stake in society, from everyone caring about everyone else, from fairness, from a sense of hope, from decency as to peoples' basic needs and from education and other forward-looking projects. Perfect equality is never achieved and can never happen. But as a goal it is ESSENTIAL to social cohesion, and thus to individual freedom. The social contract creates freedom. No one--and I mean no one--can create their own freedom alone. Not even hunter-gatherers can do that. They require close tribal cooperative effort to live as they do. And it is the rare lone hunter-gatherer who doesn't need society for SOMETHING. Those few rare characters around the world who might be trying to go it entirely alone, with absolutely none of the products or services of society, may have "freedom" within a very limited context, but they more than likely fail, for lack of company, and have short lives, due to illness, accident or isolation stress. And the moment they go buy bullets and a rifle for hunting, or to a hospital for a broken leg, or supplement their provisions with store bought food, or buy an article of clothing made in China or El Salvador, or trade for any of these items, they are making a social contract with others that gives them the freedom to do what they're doing.

Freedom is created by other people agreeing to your freedom, and by cooperative provision of the wherewithal to exercise freedom in society. It is a social act, made up of individual decisions and agreements with others. It doesn't mean that you are exactly equal, in every respect. But it does mean you are existentially equal--equal in opportunity, equal in dignity, equal under the law, equally human.

Some poor janitor in a Cuban hospital is obviously not equal to a doctor or a nurse or to Fidel Castro. But he KNOWS that his work is recognized as important by everybody else, that his society and government value him, and that his children can become doctors if they are capable of it; they don't have to struggle for that right, or go into a quarter of a million dollars of debt, and, if they succeed in school, they will then be able to CONTRIBUTE higher skills to society without having to cheat their patients or society to pay off their debts or go down the road of a luxury life because that is a "professional requirement" of a doctor's success. Medicine is for healing not for profiteering. Further, that janitor knows that his child will not be excluded from medical school because rich doctors restrict entry in order to up the price of their services. And he knows that when he gets old, or if he gets sick, he will be taken care of. He is valuable as a human being.

Why should he join some revolution to overturn this system? He is part of the social contract. And it's simply not true that the "Castro brothers" have staved off a counter-revolution by Stalinist or Maoist methods, lo these fifty years. They are simply not blood-drenched dictators, nor even particularly authoritarian or ego-centric. They have gone the other way. That is what is apparent. They and Cuba have evolved. And things have gone well enough for most Cubans--despite several periods of hardship--that they have not only not rebelled, they are content, even happy, with their lives and their government. They feel part of things.

This is the element of social cohesion that was missing in Tunisia and Egypt, and that is dangerously missing here in the U.S.--that people feel part of things. A job, income, a home, dignity, educational opportunities, the benefits of the "commons" (schools, parks, roads, hospitals, Social Security, et al), fair treatment by the law and a voice as citizens of their communities and country. Being part of things. When the rich suck up all the wealth and start living in security fortresses, they have given up big portions of THEIR freedom, in favor of their greed, and they have denied freedom to everyone else. That is what is happening in the U.S. These are signs of a sick society--and one that is much more likely to fail than Cuba's.

[Billy Burnett]

6. Like the wealthy live in Haiti. They need armed security 24/7.

[CJvR]

7. So do the poor...

...but they can't afford it.

[Billy Burnett]

8. The poor need democracy in Haiti.

But the most popular political party (Famni Lavalas) in Haiti has been banned by Hil's provisional electoral commission.

[social_critic]

19. Everybody needs democracy in Haiti

What is it with you guys and the middle class? You don't think the middle class needs democracy?

[social_critic]

9. You fail to understand again

The imposition of dictatorship using as an excuse the imposition of equality leads to failure - and it's morally wrong. A lot of what you write flows over me like water over a duck, because I don't necessarily disagree with what you say, it's just that you take a very extreme position. I guess you don't do nuances.

Instability does develop when wealth is amassed in the hands of a very few - but this isn't necessarily what I want nor what's achievable. And we do know that a thriving middle class is a key element in the development of a stable democracy.

So how can I support ideas whose advocates start our by stating openly they hate the middle class (I heard Rafael Ramirez say it in front of me, so it's not made up, and no I'm not going to give you a link, you'll have to look it up). And what happens when we see what Pol Pot, Lenin, and the others have done to the middle class in the past? We learn a simple lesson: the communism you advocate leads to dictatorship, abuses of human rights, and sometimes some of the most horrific crimes the world has ever seen. Therefore, i will continue to be the duck, and you can keep on pouring water.

I do want to add, for what it's worth, Raul Castro just gave a speech cutting wide holes into this marxist dogma you like to advocate. Raul calls himself a communist, then turns around and undermines the very communism he says he wants to defend. And this is why I think the time for Communist Party rule in Cuba is nearly over. They have lost any right whatsover to cling to power - their ideas have been shown to be non sense, they have destroyed the economy, they have abused the people for 50 years. The time has come.

[Peace Patriot]

10. "Pol Pot, Lenin"? "the communism you advocate"?

I don't advocate communism. (Did you even read what I said about the Soviet Union?) And I condemn and am horrified by atrocities wherever they occur--whether by the Nazis, or the U.S., or Pol Pot--or Lenin, or Stalin--or, currently, by the Colombian military and its rightwing death squads, and the rightwing death squads in Honduras, and by the U.S. in several countries, or by any of the horrendous, bloody, torturing, murderous rightwing dictatorships that have ravaged Latin America with U.S. support over the previous decades.

Somebody's a "political prisoner" in Cuba? Well, we have "enemy combatants" (no Geneva Convention rights) in off-shore prisons who have had no trial, many of whom have been tortured. We have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent people, to steal their oil or their pipeline route. How can that compare, as to human rights, with a few "political prisoners" (if they are political prisoners) in Cuba? Who has a "dictatorship" inflicting massive death and cruelty?

To compare Cuba to Pol Pot is just off the charts. It is ludicrous. Cuban communism DIDN'T GO THAT WAY. It did NOT "lead there."

And I'm beginning to understand why the Cubans you met in Venezuela wouldn't argue with you (and, thus, you perceived them as "a beaten people"). You start off merely disagreeing, then you end up with extremely unfair and untrue accusations and implications.

I'm somehow approve Pol Pot atrocities because I see some good in Cuba? I'm "advocating communism"--though I stated explicitly that I'm for a BALANCED economy with a healthy (fair trade) marketplace?

Do you see how unfair this is? Do you see why I don't trust your opinions and your information?

I don't think you have a clear idea of history or how societies work. You have some kneejerk ideas about Cuba, Venezuela and related issues, and, when someone doesn't agree with you, you can't hear what they actually say.

[social_critic]

14. Well, you defend Chavez, Chavez says he's a communist....

Therefore you seem to advocate communism. I can compare Cuba to Cambodia (meaning I compare Castro to Pol Pot), in the sense that both were keen on destroying society as it existed, and attacked the middle class. Pol Pot stands by himself as a paragon of communist excess, but the others aren't exactly lambs.

I have a very very clear idea of how history and societies work. I lived in Cuba, I live in Venezuela, and I have been around. I can't tell you where because your friends here may decide to pay me a visit, and I'm very keen on keeping healthy until I can get out of this goddam city.

What to you is theory, to me its practice. I'm like a piano, practiced upon by communists, right wing dictators, Batista henchmen, oligarchs, boligarchs, human rights abusers, KKK members, you name it. And I have seen things the likes of which you can't imagine. So this piano isn't about to shut its mouth.

Feel free not to trust my opinions and information. Cognitive dissonance exists, and it's something I have to deal with all the time. But I assure you, there's no way you can imagine one tenth of what I know, feel, see, smell, or hear. Unlike you, I get up in the morning, smell Caracas, and have to worry about how to survive in it another day.

[bemildred]

11. It is worth remembering that

"dictatorship, abuses of human rights, and sometimes some of the most horrific crimes" were not inventions of "the left". They are very old, and started out very much as inventions of "the right". It seem fairer and more honest to me to attribute them to our failures as human beings rather than to this or that political ideology.

The fact that revolution may not lead to some abstract utopia is no reason to give up and stick with the vicious distopia that one happens to have at the time, whatever political stripe it may be. However it does seem to me that we would be better off to give up on ideologies all together and focus on where we are and what we are doing to each other NOW, you must employ proper means or you will never achieve proper ends.

[social_critic]

16. Who cares if they didn't invent it?

I dish it out in all directions. Some of you like to protect leftist human rights abusers as if they were the Virgin Mary. Shame.

[bemildred]

17. If you don't wanna talk about which ideology it comes from, then stop blaming "the left"

or communism, or the people on this board that you disagree with. You do not dish it out in all directions, you are full of blame for others and think yourself righteous.

[social_critic]

18. I am righteous

I may be small, but I got a sharp tongue. I don't blame the left. I write to criticize certain "leftist" governments because they happen to be run by human right abusers and thugs. I focus on them here because this is DU, and those who put out propaganda to defend these "leftist" human right abusers are here, posting like crazy. When I want to criticize the right, I go to right wing sites. I got the world record for being thrown out at Red States.

Do you want me to stop criticizing "the left"? First you stop defending petty dictators, tyrants, and thieves.

[bemildred]

20. Well then we agree that it's what particular persons do, Communism is fine if done right?

I don't care what you do in your free time, but you ought to at least have the integrity to admit that the disagreement is precisely over whether those political figures are in fact "petty dictators, tyrants, and thieves", or "heroes" and "world historical figures" and so on; that is it is a difference of opinion, and petty name calling will not resolve it.

[social_critic]

21. They are tyrants and thieves

I'm not "petty name calling". I never insult my opponents herein. I do reserve the right to toss the kitchen sink at public figures. Your heroes happen to be public figures, they're fair game. And when they happen to be tyrants and thieves, then what can we do, but to describe them as such?

[bemildred]

22. LOL. Keep it up. Shazam!!! nt

[EFerrari]

12. LOL. It's too bad I don't still book comedians. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

13. I should think so!

http://blog.seattlepi.com.nyud.net:8090/movielady/library/professor_irwin_corey.jpg

[social_critic]

15. Laugh

Laugh, laugh. I can't.