RE: [Marxism] Rangel and Flake: Time for America to Be Relevant in Cuba

["Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Walter Lippmann writes, re. the Rangel-Flake press release on Cuba,
"Respectful and positive."

You know, I'm as much for playing footsie with the liberals and wannabe
recolonizers of Cuba as the next guy, but we should be clear that these
sorts of statements are 100% horseshit and largely a product of absolute
cluelessness on the part of dim bulbs like Rangel and other Congressional
flakes 

Contrary to what all the liberals claim, it is not the ultrarightist gusano
mafia that is responsible for U.S. policy towards Cuba, the mafia is the
PRODUCT of the policy (and an element of it), not the other way around. And
sure, it has collateral electoral impacts but, again, it is the ruling class
policy that drives the electoral impact, not the other way around.

U.S. policy towards Cuba is fundamentally rational from an imperialist point
of view. It is different from the policy adopted towards the Stalinist
regimes in recognition that Cuba's political character is fundamentally
different from the old USSR or China. Cuba is a living, breathing, ongoing
revolution, a structured *movement* of working people acting consciously and
strategically in opposition to the United States and everything it stands
for: capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, ecocide and Anglo-European
colonial settler-ism.

Whether adjustments to the policy or a different policy will better serve
imperialism is, of course, a very legitimate ruling class debate, but in
reality one we can't really impact because our coincidences with the
arguments of the ruling class critics of the current policy are by and large
accidents: some of the code phrases they use to mask their true intentions
happen to coincide with some things some of us might say, but that is all.
There is no real agreement, no meeting of minds, not even in part, only
purely verbal coincidences.

Those who fight the hostile U.S. policy against Cuba should ground their
arguments, not in that a different policy will better serve imperialist
interests, but in that the ultimate interests of working and oppressed
peoples do not lie in supporting imperialist designs and attacks on other
countries.

It is, in essence, not an immediately obvious or convincing argument to most
working people in the United States today, quite simply because being
"American" or just being in "America" carries with it tremendous privileges
bought with the proceeds of the looting of the Third World. 

The arguments are, really, in essence, that the world cannot afford the life
style of the United States, not just of the 1% or the 5%, but of the 50% and
in reality even of the 100%. For the entire society is structured as a giant
machine to massively squander resources as quickly as they can be produced
so that even more can be squandered the following day; and the human beings
in it are compelled, or as close to as the black arts of marketing and
ideology can contrive, to become gluttonous binge consuming and purging
machines, so that no sooner have we disgorged what was just ingested we feel
driven to consume more, more and even more.

America, Americans and Americanism are best understood, I think, as a
cancerous tumor, not just on human society, but on this planet's biosphere,
and the world must be cured of it or it will not survive. Some will say, ah,
what you describe is not a problem caused by a country but by a social
system, capitalism. Agreed. But socio-economic formations do not float in
the ether, they are just abstractions that generalize from the here and now.
On the planet of Altair VI, it may be some other country that is the black
hole that swallows the resources, hopes and dreams of a sentient species.
But on this planet, that black hole is America.

Thus even as we smile and say pleasant-sounding inanities to take advantage
of some opening provided by the likes of Rangel and Flake, we should
remember what the goal is, which is to extirpate capitalism to the north of
Cuba just as thoroughly as was done in Cuba itself. Rangel and Flake have no
fear of Cuba for they see their system as natural, inevitable and it is all
a question of just letting nature take its course on the island. But that is
precisely why imperialism tends to pass over people like them when it comes
to setting policy.

Joaquín



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