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

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Should Cuba, and those who favor normalization of relations between
Cuba and the United States wait until after capitalism falls of its
own contradictions? Or should we struggle to end the blockade now,
even prior to the socialist revolution in the United States? Given
the accomplishments made so far in building a revolutionary move-
ment in the U.S., I don't think the Cubans are holding their breath
until "comes the revolution". Cubans want the blockade to end NOW.

Many people say that the blockade should end, but some people appear
worried that Cuba might not be able to survive the end of the blockade.
Jeff Flake has said elsewhere, that the best way to get rid of Castro
is to put a million teenagers on the beaches of Cuba. Well, in this
commentary, posted in today's Washington Post, Rangel and Flake take
a respectful posture, a better one from a political point of view.

If the Cubans say they are ready to negotiate any outstanding issues
between their country and the United States, should we believe them or
think that their position is just a stance, they're just striking a
pose, they don't REALLY want to negotiate, and that the "smarter"
policy-makers are really CORRECT when they say that Cuba really does
NOT want the blockade to end?

Many people who personally and politically are in favor of the Cuban
Revolution seem to have some doubts as to whether it could, in fact,
survive the end of the blockade. It's obvious to me that some Cubans
are ready for it to end, and others are not. Some institutions on
the island are ready for it to end, and others are not. Among the
relatively small number of individuals and groups who hold a pro-
Cuba political position, very few really focus on Cuba, and none do
much to encourage their members to learn about, much less to learn
FROM what the Cuban Revolution has to demonstrate, and to teach.

Some people seem to think Cuba's better poor, but pure, a position
particularly compelling for those who do not LIVE in Cuba where the
difficulties of daily life are all too palpable.

No, Cuba isn't a model in institutional terms, but yes, it is very
much a model in the sense of what it has to teach people in the US
and other "advanced" capitalist countries about the importance of
nationalism, of patriotism, and of reaching deeply into our very
own domestic traditions to create an alternative to the one which
dominates today: of consumerism, greed, individualism and violence.

How can we fight effectively if we act as if the battle is already
lost? My objection to the perfectionism which is argued for so much
around here is that it seems to me it reflects having given up on
the possibility of turning the political situation in the United 
States around. Political life, social life, intellectual life in
the United States is full of terrible problems, but unless we try
to turn the situation around, and function on the basis that it's
possible to do so, how can we keep on and think we might win?
The American people are NOT a "cancerous tumor", which basically
means it has to be cut out of the human body politic, at least if
the chemotherapy doesn't force it into remission. 

Ultimately, Cuba can't solve its problems in one single country, and
as Joaquin has so eloquently pointed out, the Cubans actually never
claimed to do any such thing. Patria es humanidad, Bolvarianism and
so on, those are steps which the Cubans have taken just as soon as
they could take them. Why do you think they're sending doctors all
over the map, who are soldiers of virtue, rather than sending out
soldiers with military equipment? Because today's struggle is really
a battle fundamentally of IDEAS, not of physical weapons, but of the
enslavement of humanity by bad ideas.

These are the ideas of the Cuban leadership which make a lot of good
sense to me. Not all Cubans think these things, and there is also a
battle of ideas going on among Cubans, and within Cubans every day.
This is why it's essential to have a realistic, and not a romantic
notion of what Cuba really is like.

It's a truism that making a revolution is nothing compared with the
enormity of holding one together and expanding its influence beyond
the shores of one country.

Personally, I'm sure that an end to the blockade will cause major
problems in Cuba - though the least of them will be the critics on
the left who will say Cuba has sold out. But if we are sincere when
we say that the blockade must end, we have to understand that it is
possible it might end while capitalism continues to exist in the U.S.

Like it or not, that's the more probably variant.


Walter Lippmann

====================================================================
JOAQUIN BUSTELO writes:
"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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
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.


Walter Lippmann
Havana, Cuba
"Un paraiso bajo el bloqueo"
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
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