Fifty Years In Hell
Carlos Eire, the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, points out the living hell Fidel (and now Raul) Castro presides over. It is not the paradise apologists in the west think it is.
One option was to oppose the so-called Revolution. But if you dared, even by murmuring in the dark, you faced certain imprisonment, torture, or death at the hands of the new elites. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans were brave enough to choose that path, but the world at large never paid much attention to them, or simply denied their existence. The other option was to beg for perpetual banishment. Nearly two million Cubans chose that route, but millions more never got the chance. No one knows for sure how many thousands have drowned at sea while trying to escape.
Exile is never easy, but it is even harder when you are turned into a villain. Fidel loved to portray all of us exiles as arrogant troglodytes who refused to share in the dreams of “the Cuban people” as he imagined them. We were vilified, stripped of our land, our families, and all our belongings, down to wedding rings and family photos. We were picked clean, and the new elites got to keep everything. And many around the world still think of us as selfish louts.
Those who remained behind lost a lot too, besides their basic human rights. As they waved their Cuban flags at mandatory rallies and waited in line with their ration books for scraps, and as they listened to countless promises about a very distant glorious future, they saw other Cubans oozing out of the island in a steady stream, like blood from a gaping wound. And they also had to watch everything crumble around them, helplessly, while new hotels sprang up and hordes of privileged tourists from the capitalist world flowed in like toxic sludge, to exploit them, the ragged noble savages, and to gawk at their ruins and reclaim Cuba as their tawdry playground.
And Europe and Canada have, indeed, turned Cuba into a “destination”. For all the “best” reasons, of course.
Tourism to Hell.
World news | Gaius January 3, 2009
By BlacqesJacquesShellacques, January 3, 2009 @ 7:11 pm
Two sides to the tourism point.
Some of us, including me, think the US embargo wrong because counterproductive.
“Democracy! Whisky! Sexy!” is indeed a powerful thing. I think the USSR fell because they got even a small number of TVs, computers and fax machines. Oh yeah, plus Reagan kicking their stupid asses.
I say go to Cuba, buy stuff, hire people, throw around money, subvert, subvert, subvert.
The USA has allowed the fascists in Cuba to make the embargo a perfect scapegoat.
There are two sides to the argument and even if we are wrong we are not evil. So stuff the comments about the ‘best’ reasons and ‘Tourism to Hell’ where the sun don’t shine.
By Son of a Pig and a Monkey, January 4, 2009 @ 1:41 pm
Went to Cuba in 1986 or 7 on vacation. (Not a US ciizen.) Beautiful beaches, crappy food. When one group went out in a Hobie Cat and flipped it, they had to wait for the other tourists in a Hobie to come back in so the beach-staff could sail out to help them. The whole country felt like a prison. Haven’t gone back, and don’t feel good about having gone at all. Anyway, Mexico and Dominican Republic generally seem cheaper.
By Gaius, January 4, 2009 @ 1:42 pm
Or the twenty or so years of tourism money helped fill the gap left when the Soviets stopped subsidizing Cuba. Those billions helped prop up the tottering totalitarian state. In other words, shoring up a brutal regime.