[Marxism] Bad Subjects and Cuba drug-trafficing

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

I suppose some of you might be familiar with an Internet publication
called Bad Subjects that has been around for years. It is put out by
postmodernist professors who like to pretend that they are revolutionaries.

I check up on it every once in a while to see what trends are
fashionable in academia. Recent issues have been devoted to "Privacy and
Voyeurism" and "Panic", themes which allow the cultural theory hot-air
balloons to reach maximum altitude.

When I saw that the last issue was titled "Marx and Theory", I expected
the worst. I was not to be disappointed. Bad Subjects editor Frederick
Luis Aldama has an article titled "Cuba Libre: Capitalism, Communism,
and the Worker". (http://eserver.org/bs/66/aldama_cuba.html)

To call it toxic would give decent substances such as arsenic and PCB's
a bad name.

Aldama has exactly the background one might expect for an idiotic
slander of the Cuban revolution. This University of Colorado professor
specializing in postcolonial literature (what else) has written articles
such as "Reracing the Black Athlete's Body in Dennis Rodman's Bad As I
Wanna Be" and "Homographic Translational Poetics: The Outlawed Subject's
Resistance and Dependence on the Heterosexist Codification of Nation and
Body", exactly the sort of preparation one needs to pontificate on Cuban
society.

There are so many howling falsehoods in Aldama's article that I wouldn't
know where to begin. There is one thing in particular that caught my
eye. Aldama writes:

"The U.S. economic embargo allows enough dollars to pass into a few
chosen pockets and to fatten Castro's bureaucratic cow -- $800 million a
year, officially, generated through a skyrocketing drug trade and a
booming tourist and sex industry. Spanish, Italian, German, Canadian,
and U.S. Americans arrive with wallets bulging to play fandango with
their exotic ethnic-object specimens, while cocaine stops over on its
way from Bolivia and Colombia to the U.S."

I try to keep track of slanders against the Cuban government, but this
business about "cocaine stops" was a new one on me. The last time I
heard such a thing was 20 years or so ago when some Cuban military
officers got involved in the drug trade. Of course, when they were put
on trial and executed, the liberals in the USA protested police state
measures. Damned if you do; damned if you don't.

But have such charges surfaced recently? With all of the hysteria about
FARC narco-guerrillas, you'd think that a single article in Lexis-Nexis
with the words "Cuba", "cocaine" and "Colombia" over the past two years
would turn something up. I could only find references such as "Lula may
challenge U.S. on trade, Cuba policy, drug-fighting efforts"; nothing
about Cuba being a way-station for drugs on their way to the USA from
Bolivia or Colombia. Maybe Aldama found such an article in Rupert
Murdoch's NY Post, famed for such headlines as "Headless Body Found In
Topless Bar". Unfortunately, the NY Post is not indexed in Lexis-Nexis.

I did find this. According to the 1/18/2004 Hartford Courant
(Connecticut), Cuba has come under intense scrutiny from the Homeland
Security Agency, to the extent that Marazul Tours spokesman Bob Guild
has complained that "Homeland Security and the Department of Foreign
Assets Control officers are interrogating -- or interviewing, depending
on your point of view -- everyone both on the way out and on return."

However, the snoops have turned up next to nothing. It is true that two
hundred eighty-three alcohol and tobacco violations were uncovered, but
as far as I know we are not involved in a war on rum or cigars. Homeland
Security spokeswoman Christiana Halsey told the Courant that forty-two
narcotics seizures were made. Uh-oh, looks like Aldama has something.
But Halsey said that neither heroin nor cocaine were involved, only
prescription drugs.

Bad Subjects? Well, there is BS going on here, but a different kind.

--

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