Around the World, And Above, Part 4
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Around the World, And Above, Part 4
The Cuba interview is… what it is. I'm pretty sure it took place in Miami, though, being as that's where Alvarez is living.
This building isn't "energy-independent" really - you can't really get a skyscraper to be "energy independent - it runs off the Juragua plant, and is the central office for most of the industry in Cienfuegos.
There's something of a sleight of hand going on here - there was a savings and loans association in Malpica tower for a while, but it wasn't, like, the whole tower? And it wasn't a bank, not really. It was like… people pool their resources as a community and use them to pay for communal projects? From, like, replacing the equipment at a children's playground to building a new cinema in the area or renovating a block of flats without having to wait for the central government to get to it. It was never, like, ideal? It was a government guaranteed line of credit for when people wanted to engage with markets, before Cuba got truly into gear transitioning away from playing at having market economics in the ports. It wasn't a very large part of the building even at the peak, Alvarez just used to work there, before getting his fat paycheck from the Americans and then fleeing the country when he got caught.
This cannot be denied. Cuba's never going to be, like "the premier world power" - the days when a small-ish island nation can dominate the globe are done, and no one's shedding tears for them, but Cuba's absolutely brimming with power, affluence and political optimism that's genuinely quite surprising for new arrivals. And there are always a lot of new arrivals.
There's a funny sort of irony to how the soviet union was vital for Cuba during the Cold War, and then Cuba was pretty important in reverse during this war.
Also, it was never the Blitz that caused British rationing, but talking about the u boat war brings it tremendously close to talking about the US blockade, doesn't it?
The ration system is cool though, honestly. It was probably not quite so cool under sanction, but now it is just a pretty straightforward system where the government provides you with what you need to live, and you work on top of that.
Americans love to present Castro as paranoid, now that he's dead and buried - and now that they lack the force projection to threaten Havana. The blockade was what suffocated Cuba's economy. The Americans did literally try to storm Cuba's beaches. Those things happened, Castro didn't make them up!
"Machiavelli's most favoured son". Jesus.
America's strategy was also, like, famously unsuccessful. They radicalised Castro through their unrelenting hatred of an independent and free Cuba, they failed to even begin to remove Cuba's socialist nature, and the whole point of it was removing Castro, so it doesn't really make any sense to describe it as successful whilst also claiming it was the blockade that kept Castro in power.
He's talking out of both sides of his mouth here - the blockade worked and was successful, but also was bad, and helped the communists stay in power. This is because they don't ideologically oppose the principle of blockading communists into submission - they just don't have the naval strength to do it manually or the diplomatic strength to pressure other countries into obeying their sanctions.
This is really weird. Cuba didn't survive the war by being "repressive" or a "fortress society" - Cuba survived by the fact that they very quickly established what was going on, informed the general public; this was about concurrent with Israel, but a fair bit quieter, because they didn't have any land borders for people to notice, and mobilised the militia, swelling the military from about forty thousand to about a million, and they rapidly contained any burgeoning outbreaks.
Turns out that an open and clearly communicated directive on what the plague was, what symptoms it had, the nature of the infection, how it spread and the absence of a cure was enough to prevent a panic and allow for relatively straightforward containment.
This problem is overstated. Even a slow bite will turn someone in a few days - it isn't terribly difficult to quarantine people on their ships for a few days, and most people who would get on a boat and flee to Cuba, especially in the early days, were mostly just relieved to be met by an actual government. People trying to overthrow governments was more common in smaller countries, countries with less notably effective militaries; Iceland is the most commonly cited example, but by no means the only one - a lot of Central American countries spent a good few years executing American adventurers. That was about what started to make it sink in for people; America couldn't stop them any more. The King's crown was slipping from his head, as it were.
There's some weird racist nonsense coming up, but first I'll just stop here for a moment - Cuba was never going to be Iceland. Was never in danger of being Iceland. They did not need to have an example set for them by the West Indies Federation.
Furthermore - the issue with Iceland wasn't a lack of military readiness leaving them susceptible to refugees. Iceland's fatal outbreak wasn't from refugees, it was domestic. Hell, evidence is that it came from one of the American bases on the island before they pulled out. Refugees to Iceland overwhelmingly went peacefully into the isolation camps for 2-3 weeks and were then released. This imagery of the swarms of infected refugees pouring across borders and through ports to overwhelm the poor, naive country with open borders and immigration isn't, like, true?
This is really, like, not true. The men and women of the West Indies Federation - it wasn't that yet, but the pre war governments were mostly imploding, so it became that pretty quick - weren't fighting with small arms and machetes, dude. There's a peculiar sort of racialisation? The idea that the predominantly Black people from these various islands would obviously be using machetes rather than, like… normal modern weapons? And they didn't kill all that many living people - most people came pretty peacefully. It was the American tourists arriving in the Caribbean in those early days with pre-existing bites that were the largest problem. Once the panic kicked off, you didn't get many infected actually making it to places like Antigua.
God, what a truly piteous bootlicker. Even the western tourists were nicer than the former communist ones, you say?
Tourists are arseholes. Doesn't really matter where they're from. That being said - Cuba was doing better during the Cold War, when the mean nasty East Germans were coming, so colour me doubtful that the wealth disparity was worse then than it was when they were getting tourists from the West.
I didn't have to go through this - by the time I arrived, entry was reduced enough that it was just a week in a hotel room, a doctor's visit and then you're in.
But like… this is presented as some terrible tyranny when it was completely normal for a country to do this. Israel did it too. Just because America was in too abject of a state to do this properly doesn't mean it is somehow bad to do it.
Alright, I guess we need to talk about this.
Cuba was intensely and institutionally queerphobic for a long time - this began before the revolution, but Castro's regime continued and intensified it. It was only in the early 2000s, barely before the crisis began, that this started to change in a way that wasn't being reversed at the same time.
It is one of the various things where the crisis probably did Cuba a favour - without the blockade making everything feel quite so fraught, Cuba was able to open up a little, and that combined with the existing trend towards protections for LGBTQ people in Cuba, we finally got to where we are now - there's constitutional protection for LGBTQ people that goes so far beyond just "same-sex marriage" and is consistently updated with input from the entire population. LGBTQ rights within the Republic are the best in the world, and the state has formally apologised for the treatment of queer people historically.
Anecdotally, I feel safe kissing my wife on the street in Havana, and have friends from back home who cannot say the same about London.
Men like Seryosha Garcia Alvarez, men who put quotation marks around "friend" when they talk about their queer friends, who talk about how terribly unfair it was that they were accused of being a homosexual, men who's progressivism begins and ends at snippy remarks about Castro? America can keep them.
Even socialist prison guards are prison guards, but the resettlement camps didn't work like this, so you'll excuse my doubt. Even before they were as lax as they were to me, they didn't keep people in resettlement camps for long - there were millions upon millions of people arriving, they couldn't possibly guard them all in camps like this. You got two to three weeks, then got moved on to a more permanent home.
People had to work in a farm or a factory, sure. There was no alternative - Cuba was not a wealthy country, America's blockade had seen to that, and it wasn't a breadbasket. Feeding as many people as they suddenly had to was Cuba's real crisis, so spare me the crocodile tears that everyone had to work.
12 or 14 hour shifts were not commonplace.
This, on the other hand, is just openly fictional. The Cuban government did not plant prisoners in the camps; people wouldn't be in the fucking camps long enough for it to be worth it, and by and large people didn't need to be "kept in line" because they weren't prisoners. They arrived by choice and they lived in Cuba by choice.
Cuba didn't have any ghouls; once they wiped them out, they didn't reintroduce them, on account of how absolutely idiotic that would be.
There were persistent rumours about ghoul pits, because there are always persistent rumours about ghoul pits, but it was only once the crisis was over that some of the people who moved back to America started to reassure each other that they only believed in them because the communists must've tricked them into it.
The majority of American refugees to Cuba - both during the crisis and subsequently - were not Cubano. Most American Cubanos who identified as such politically died in Miami, refusing to go to Cuba.
Cuba took in a lot of people with absolutely no historic connection to Cuba. There was no border check except the checking for infection that they did. People got let into Cuba without any background checks, because there was a world-destroying crisis, and that isn't the time to be finicky.
The only exception I can think of offhand was when that one cunt who was so mad that Castro took his family's slaves that he fought in the Bay of Pigs, helped the CIA track down and murder Che, trained war criminals in South Vietnam and was so involved in the Iran-Contra affair that he murdered an American federal agent to cover it up… And then had the guts to try to flee to Cuba when things in America got a little bit too spicy.
They still didn't lower him feet first into a ghoul pit, though. They just shot him.
This is where we begin to enter a uniquely American cope. It can't just be that a communist country is doing well, is doing communism, has a happy population and higher quality of life than America. It must be that actually, secretly, without knowing it, America won. The "success" of the "Yankee invasion".
The overwhelming majority of the American refugees to Cuba were people so desperate and grateful that they just integrated into Cuban society because they didn't want to rock the boat. Hell, most of them were never terribly ideological - most people aren't.
We found this back home. Rural Britain wasn't exactly a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment, but when you know, deep in your bones, that the communists are the only reason you aren't grey and moaning right now? You either change your mind on communism, or you stop paying attention to politics.
And in Cuba, especially, for many people things were - whisper it - better than pre-war America. This is another thing the American Junta hates. People keep emigrating to Cuba, and very very few people who went to Cuba in those early years ever came back, even once America had reconquered itself. Very few of those 5 million Americans remained, ideologically, "American" for long.
This isn't true. Like, this sort of pseudo-slavery was much more America's bag, which is why they're so desperate to pretend Cuba also did it.
Cuba just integrated people into the population. The wage thing is a misrepresentation; Cuba's very slowly transitioning away from using currency internally, and one of the things that gets floated every once in a while is to reduce wages across the board, with the idea being that you only get paid so you can personally interact with some of Cuba's capitalist neighbours. It never really goes anywhere, because if we're going to transition away from markets and money, we should just do it, but it gets grabbed occasionally so America can pretend Cuba's got this sort of "work for nebulous reward" thing, too.
Does he think people are stupid? Or just uninformed? Is this just carelessness?
Tell me - if we are to believe that this prison-slave system is how the Americans got out of their alleged prison camps - why was a Floridian able to propose it? Linear time would suggest this hypothetical Floridian would be in a prison camp at the time he came up with this "ingenious" slavery idea.
There's some truth to the fact that the Nortecubanos were integrated within a year, but not because of this shit.
Again… they very much were just to contain the infection. Cuba did not have the resources or personnel to keep people in prison to prevent the "infection" of capitalism. They also did not need to.
This is… almost? True. He implies this was because of the American exiles, and was a "liberalising" trend - private enterprise and what have you.
But no. The economic reforms were away from industry being purely state run or market, and closer to the workers having major control over the means of production in their factories or fields. The "legalised, privately owned" newspapers were newspapers printed by workers collectives unaffiliated with the government, minority rights groups, socialist theorists, university marxist societies. Truthfully they had almost nothing to do with the Nortecubanos at first, and everything to do with the increased freedom after the American blockade went down. Cuba had enough now, could trade freely the world over. Without being under siege any more, they could loosen their control.
Castro… is a difficult one to call. Did he want to crack down? I don't think so. Even to the end, Castro was a Red, and I think - I like to think - he was happy to see Cuba finally get to spread her wings and show everyone her beauty, what marxism could achieve in the Caribbean.
Cuba's decision to provide material support to various countries during the reconquest remains deeply controversial - a lot of people blame them for a lot of dead socialists, but I'm not sure Cuba could've prevented many of those deaths.
This is fucking hilarious. No, in the middle of a vast industrial campaign to arm and support the war efforts of two continents, Cuba did not decide to shift gears into capitalism suddenly. Nor did it develop a fucking "middle class".
I like, by the by, how earlier in the book we hear that most Americans didn't have any practical industrial experience, they were all stupid and had to perform hard manual labour, but now they have "refined skills and practical experience".
No, largely Cuba span up their industry within their existing workforce, with Nortecubanos represented roughly proportionate with the rest of the population.
If he ever comes back to Cuba, Alvarez is going to be punched in the face so hard he'll shit teeth. No, Cubans did not learn from Americans what it was to lay down your life in pursuit of the grand dream of freedom. They learnt that lesson in the 1950s. I guess they did have to learn it from Americans, but not because those Americans were so gosh dang democratic. The opposite, really.
This is purely for American domestic consumption - Cuba is just like us. Cuba is capitalist. Cuba loves us, because we taught them freedom.
There's always got to be a conspiracy with these people. Fidel Castro couldn't have just been an old, sick man who wanted to resign, no, he knew that capitalism was about to win!
Castro retired. Because he was old and tired. No conspiracy needed - he died a year later, you fucking ghoul.
Okay, now is as good a time as I'm going to get to talk about Cuba's democracy, so here goes, because it is a little confusing.
Cuba is still a one party state. The Partido Comunista de Cuba is the only political party within the republic, but Cuba is a democracy.
In 2015, as his last act prior to retirement, Fidel Castro instructed the Seventh Congress of the PCC to rescind the faction ban, allowing different groups within the PCC to campaign against one another.
Democracy in Cuba works within the PCC. We go to regional meetings, and we elect a local delegate from several candidates within the party; there's usually a pretty broad slate, and they're generally very responsive to concerns, because recall is a pretty constant threat, and then they go to the National Assembly and represent our interests. Generally speaking, the factions are not super stable, because there's endless jockeying for a majority in the National Assembly, so individual members will try their best to represent their voting public.
The system is extremely responsive, and I think it is fairly representative, and when combined with the semi-frequent national surveys on constitutional changes to specific laws, I think we have a good thing going - certainly it is more democratic than the Americans have, even if they theoretically have more political parties.
You can't vote against communism, but that isn't terribly surprising, nor does it bother me.
This isn't true at all, really. This is a view of Cuba designed as part of a campaign to convince uninformed Americans not to emigrate there, because America is haemorrhaging young people to places like Cuba and Mexico.
Cuba's got riots, strikes and protests, sure. America doesn't. That doesn't make America more free. Quite the contrary, in fact.
He couldn't stop himself, huh. He got almost all the way through an interview where he pretended to be a "normal Cuban" despite living in Miami and hating Cuba, but he got to the end of the interview and panicked that his new fascist friends might not realise he was with them, so he stuffed "gloating about Che dying," "revolutionaries just want to blow things up" and "unlike the people who make trains run on time" which is such a tired old fascist claim that everyone must recognise it on sight, right?
But then, to make absolutely sure they knew he was a hateful turd, he quotes Winston fucking Churchiil. Wretched man.
Anyway, that's all I have to say about Cuba. If you want to know more - come to Havana! It isn't difficult to get there.
Next up - China. Always touchy for the yanks, talking about China.
Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].
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Donate to a South American group of your choice [HERE] - it's a masterlist.
AN: Found this one a lot easier than Japan, because I wasn't cringing as I read. Comments make me happy so please leave one. If you like. Would you believe the resume of the Cuban Exile who got executed was actually a pruned back take on a real guy.
Article: Cienfuegos, Cuba
[Seryosha Garcia Alvarez suggests I meet him at his office. "The view is breathtaking," he promises. "You will not be disappointed." On the sixty-ninth floor of the Malpica Savings and Loans building, the second-tallest building in Cuba after Havana's José Martí Towers, Señor Alvarez's corner office overlooks both the glittering metropolis and bustling harbor below. It is the "magic hour" for energy-independent buildings like the Malpica, that time of the day when its photovoltaic windows capture the setting sun with their almost imperceptible magenta hue. Señor Alvarez was right. I am not disappointed.]
The Cuba interview is… what it is. I'm pretty sure it took place in Miami, though, being as that's where Alvarez is living.
This building isn't "energy-independent" really - you can't really get a skyscraper to be "energy independent - it runs off the Juragua plant, and is the central office for most of the industry in Cienfuegos.
There's something of a sleight of hand going on here - there was a savings and loans association in Malpica tower for a while, but it wasn't, like, the whole tower? And it wasn't a bank, not really. It was like… people pool their resources as a community and use them to pay for communal projects? From, like, replacing the equipment at a children's playground to building a new cinema in the area or renovating a block of flats without having to wait for the central government to get to it. It was never, like, ideal? It was a government guaranteed line of credit for when people wanted to engage with markets, before Cuba got truly into gear transitioning away from playing at having market economics in the ports. It wasn't a very large part of the building even at the peak, Alvarez just used to work there, before getting his fat paycheck from the Americans and then fleeing the country when he got caught.
Article: Cuba won the Zombie War; maybe that's not the most humble of statements, given what happened to so many other countries, but just look at where we were twenty years ago as opposed to where we are now.
This cannot be denied. Cuba's never going to be, like "the premier world power" - the days when a small-ish island nation can dominate the globe are done, and no one's shedding tears for them, but Cuba's absolutely brimming with power, affluence and political optimism that's genuinely quite surprising for new arrivals. And there are always a lot of new arrivals.
Article: Before the war, we lived in a state of quasi-isolation, worse than during the height of the cold war. At least in my father's day you could count on what amounted to economic welfare from the Soviet Union and their ComEcon puppets. Since the fall of the communist bloc, though, our existence was one of constant deprivation. Rationed food, rationed fuel…the closest comparison I can make is that of Great Britain during the Blitz, and like that other besieged island, we too lived under the dark cloud of an ever-present enemy.
There's a funny sort of irony to how the soviet union was vital for Cuba during the Cold War, and then Cuba was pretty important in reverse during this war.
Also, it was never the Blitz that caused British rationing, but talking about the u boat war brings it tremendously close to talking about the US blockade, doesn't it?
The ration system is cool though, honestly. It was probably not quite so cool under sanction, but now it is just a pretty straightforward system where the government provides you with what you need to live, and you work on top of that.
Article: The U.S. blockade, while not as constricting as during the cold war, nonetheless sought to suffocate our economic lifeblood by punishing any nation that attempted free and open trade. As successful as the U.S. strategy was, its most resounding triumph was allowing Fidel to use our northern oppressor as an excuse to remain in power. "You see how hard our life is," he would say. "The blockade has done this to you, the Yankees have done this to you, and without me, they would be storming our beaches even now!" He was brilliant, Machiavelli's most favored son. He knew we would never remove him while the enemy was at the gates.
Americans love to present Castro as paranoid, now that he's dead and buried - and now that they lack the force projection to threaten Havana. The blockade was what suffocated Cuba's economy. The Americans did literally try to storm Cuba's beaches. Those things happened, Castro didn't make them up!
"Machiavelli's most favoured son". Jesus.
America's strategy was also, like, famously unsuccessful. They radicalised Castro through their unrelenting hatred of an independent and free Cuba, they failed to even begin to remove Cuba's socialist nature, and the whole point of it was removing Castro, so it doesn't really make any sense to describe it as successful whilst also claiming it was the blockade that kept Castro in power.
He's talking out of both sides of his mouth here - the blockade worked and was successful, but also was bad, and helped the communists stay in power. This is because they don't ideologically oppose the principle of blockading communists into submission - they just don't have the naval strength to do it manually or the diplomatic strength to pressure other countries into obeying their sanctions.
Article: Cases were small and immediately contained, mostly Chinese refugees and a few European businessmen. Travel from the United States was still largely prohibited, so we were spared the initial blow of first-wave mass migration. The repressive nature of our fortress society allowed the government to take steps to ensure that the infection was never allowed to spread. All internal travel was suspended, and both the regular army and territorial militias were mobilized. Because Cuba had such a high percentage of doctors per capita, our leader knew the true nature of the infection weeks after the first outbreak was reported.
This is really weird. Cuba didn't survive the war by being "repressive" or a "fortress society" - Cuba survived by the fact that they very quickly established what was going on, informed the general public; this was about concurrent with Israel, but a fair bit quieter, because they didn't have any land borders for people to notice, and mobilised the militia, swelling the military from about forty thousand to about a million, and they rapidly contained any burgeoning outbreaks.
Turns out that an open and clearly communicated directive on what the plague was, what symptoms it had, the nature of the infection, how it spread and the absence of a cure was enough to prevent a panic and allow for relatively straightforward containment.
Article: By the time of the Great Panic, when the world finally woke up to the nightmare breaking down their doors, Cuba had already prepared itself for war.
The simple fact of geography spared us the danger of large-scale, overland swarms. Our invaders came from the sea, specifically from an armada of boat people. Not only did they bring the contagion, as we have seen throughout the world, there were also those who believed in ruling their new homes as modern-day conquistadors.
This problem is overstated. Even a slow bite will turn someone in a few days - it isn't terribly difficult to quarantine people on their ships for a few days, and most people who would get on a boat and flee to Cuba, especially in the early days, were mostly just relieved to be met by an actual government. People trying to overthrow governments was more common in smaller countries, countries with less notably effective militaries; Iceland is the most commonly cited example, but by no means the only one - a lot of Central American countries spent a good few years executing American adventurers. That was about what started to make it sink in for people; America couldn't stop them any more. The King's crown was slipping from his head, as it were.
Article: Look at what happened in Iceland, a prewar paradise, so safe and secure they never found the need to maintain a standing army. What could they do when the American military withdrew? How could they stop the torrent of refugees from Europe and western Russia? Is it no mystery how that once idyllic arctic haven became a cauldron of frozen blood, and why, to this day, it is still the most heavily infested White Zone on the planet? That could have been us, easily, had it not been for the example set by our brothers in the smaller Windward and Leeward Islands.
There's some weird racist nonsense coming up, but first I'll just stop here for a moment - Cuba was never going to be Iceland. Was never in danger of being Iceland. They did not need to have an example set for them by the West Indies Federation.
Furthermore - the issue with Iceland wasn't a lack of military readiness leaving them susceptible to refugees. Iceland's fatal outbreak wasn't from refugees, it was domestic. Hell, evidence is that it came from one of the American bases on the island before they pulled out. Refugees to Iceland overwhelmingly went peacefully into the isolation camps for 2-3 weeks and were then released. This imagery of the swarms of infected refugees pouring across borders and through ports to overwhelm the poor, naive country with open borders and immigration isn't, like, true?
Article: Those men and women, from Anguilla to Trinidad, can proudly take their place as some of the greatest heroes of the war. They first eradicated multiple outbreaks along their archipelago, then, with barely a moment to catch their collective breaths, repelled not only seaborne zombies, but an endless flood of human invaders, too. They spilled their blood so that we did not have to. They forced our would-be latifundista to reconsider their plans for conquest, and realize that if a few civilians armed with nothing but small arms and machetes could defend their homelands so tenaciously, what would they find on the shores of a country armed with everything from main battle tanks to radar-guided antiship missiles?
This is really, like, not true. The men and women of the West Indies Federation - it wasn't that yet, but the pre war governments were mostly imploding, so it became that pretty quick - weren't fighting with small arms and machetes, dude. There's a peculiar sort of racialisation? The idea that the predominantly Black people from these various islands would obviously be using machetes rather than, like… normal modern weapons? And they didn't kill all that many living people - most people came pretty peacefully. It was the American tourists arriving in the Caribbean in those early days with pre-existing bites that were the largest problem. Once the panic kicked off, you didn't get many infected actually making it to places like Antigua.
Article: Not all of the refugees were Yankees; we had our share from mainland Latin America, from Africa, and western Europe, Spain especially—many Spaniards and Canadians had visited Cuba either on business or holiday. I had gotten to know a few of them before the war, nice people, polite, so different from the East Germans of my youth who used to toss handfuls of candy in the air and laugh while we children scrambled for it like rats.
God, what a truly piteous bootlicker. Even the western tourists were nicer than the former communist ones, you say?
Tourists are arseholes. Doesn't really matter where they're from. That being said - Cuba was doing better during the Cold War, when the mean nasty East Germans were coming, so colour me doubtful that the wealth disparity was worse then than it was when they were getting tourists from the West.
Article: The majority of our boat people, however, originated from the United States. Every day more would arrive, by large ship or private craft, even on homemade rafts that brought an ironic smile to our faces. So many of them, a total of five million, equal to almost half of our indigenous population, and along with all the other nationalities, they were placed under the jurisdiction of the government's "Quarantine Resettlement Program."
I didn't have to go through this - by the time I arrived, entry was reduced enough that it was just a week in a hotel room, a doctor's visit and then you're in.
But like… this is presented as some terrible tyranny when it was completely normal for a country to do this. Israel did it too. Just because America was in too abject of a state to do this properly doesn't mean it is somehow bad to do it.
Article: I would not go so far as to call the Resettlement Centers prison camps. They could not compare to the lives suffered by our political dissidents; the writers and teachers . . . I had a "friend" who was accused of being a homosexual. His stories from prison cannot compare to even the harshest Resettlement Center.
Alright, I guess we need to talk about this.
Cuba was intensely and institutionally queerphobic for a long time - this began before the revolution, but Castro's regime continued and intensified it. It was only in the early 2000s, barely before the crisis began, that this started to change in a way that wasn't being reversed at the same time.
It is one of the various things where the crisis probably did Cuba a favour - without the blockade making everything feel quite so fraught, Cuba was able to open up a little, and that combined with the existing trend towards protections for LGBTQ people in Cuba, we finally got to where we are now - there's constitutional protection for LGBTQ people that goes so far beyond just "same-sex marriage" and is consistently updated with input from the entire population. LGBTQ rights within the Republic are the best in the world, and the state has formally apologised for the treatment of queer people historically.
Anecdotally, I feel safe kissing my wife on the street in Havana, and have friends from back home who cannot say the same about London.
Men like Seryosha Garcia Alvarez, men who put quotation marks around "friend" when they talk about their queer friends, who talk about how terribly unfair it was that they were accused of being a homosexual, men who's progressivism begins and ends at snippy remarks about Castro? America can keep them.
Article: It was not easy living, however. These people, no matter what their prewar occupation or status, were initially put to work as field hands, twelve to fourteen hours a day, growing vegetables in what had once been our state-run sugar plantations. At least the climate was on their side. The temperature was dropping, the skies were darkening. Mother Nature was kind to them. The guards, however, were not. "Be glad you're alive," they'd shout after each slap or kick. "Keep complaining and we'll throw you to the zombies!"
Even socialist prison guards are prison guards, but the resettlement camps didn't work like this, so you'll excuse my doubt. Even before they were as lax as they were to me, they didn't keep people in resettlement camps for long - there were millions upon millions of people arriving, they couldn't possibly guard them all in camps like this. You got two to three weeks, then got moved on to a more permanent home.
People had to work in a farm or a factory, sure. There was no alternative - Cuba was not a wealthy country, America's blockade had seen to that, and it wasn't a breadbasket. Feeding as many people as they suddenly had to was Cuba's real crisis, so spare me the crocodile tears that everyone had to work.
12 or 14 hour shifts were not commonplace.
Article: Every camp had a rumor about the dreaded "zombie pits," the hole in which they'd throw the "troublemakers." The DGI [the General Intelligence Directorate] had even planted prisoners in the general population to spread stories about how they personally witnessed men being lowered, headfirst, into the boiling lake of ghouls. This was all just to keep everyone in line, you see, none of it was actually true . . . though . . . there were stories about the "Miami whites."
This, on the other hand, is just openly fictional. The Cuban government did not plant prisoners in the camps; people wouldn't be in the fucking camps long enough for it to be worth it, and by and large people didn't need to be "kept in line" because they weren't prisoners. They arrived by choice and they lived in Cuba by choice.
Cuba didn't have any ghouls; once they wiped them out, they didn't reintroduce them, on account of how absolutely idiotic that would be.
There were persistent rumours about ghoul pits, because there are always persistent rumours about ghoul pits, but it was only once the crisis was over that some of the people who moved back to America started to reassure each other that they only believed in them because the communists must've tricked them into it.
Article: The majority of American Cubanos were welcomed home with open arms. I myself had several relatives living in Daytona who just barely escaped with their lives. The tears of so many reunions in those early, frantic days could have filled the Caribbean Sea. But that first wave of postrevolution immigrants - the affluent elite who had flourished under the old regime and who spent the rest of their lives trying to topple everything we'd worked so hard to build - as far as those aristos were concerned . . . I am not saying there is any proof that they were thrown to the ghouls by their fat, reactionary, Bacardi blanka drinking asses . . . But if they were, they can suck Batista's balls in hell.
The majority of American refugees to Cuba - both during the crisis and subsequently - were not Cubano. Most American Cubanos who identified as such politically died in Miami, refusing to go to Cuba.
Cuba took in a lot of people with absolutely no historic connection to Cuba. There was no border check except the checking for infection that they did. People got let into Cuba without any background checks, because there was a world-destroying crisis, and that isn't the time to be finicky.
The only exception I can think of offhand was when that one cunt who was so mad that Castro took his family's slaves that he fought in the Bay of Pigs, helped the CIA track down and murder Che, trained war criminals in South Vietnam and was so involved in the Iran-Contra affair that he murdered an American federal agent to cover it up… And then had the guts to try to flee to Cuba when things in America got a little bit too spicy.
They still didn't lower him feet first into a ghoul pit, though. They just shot him.
Article: [A thin, satisfied smile crosses his lips.]
Of course, we couldn't have actually attempted this kind of punishment with your people. Rumors and threats were one thing, but physical action . . . push a people, any people too far, and you risk the possibility of revolt. Five million Yankees, all rising in open revolution? Unthinkable. It already took too many troops to maintain the camps, and that was the initial success of the Yankee invasion of Cuba.
This is where we begin to enter a uniquely American cope. It can't just be that a communist country is doing well, is doing communism, has a happy population and higher quality of life than America. It must be that actually, secretly, without knowing it, America won. The "success" of the "Yankee invasion".
The overwhelming majority of the American refugees to Cuba were people so desperate and grateful that they just integrated into Cuban society because they didn't want to rock the boat. Hell, most of them were never terribly ideological - most people aren't.
We found this back home. Rural Britain wasn't exactly a hotbed of revolutionary sentiment, but when you know, deep in your bones, that the communists are the only reason you aren't grey and moaning right now? You either change your mind on communism, or you stop paying attention to politics.
And in Cuba, especially, for many people things were - whisper it - better than pre-war America. This is another thing the American Junta hates. People keep emigrating to Cuba, and very very few people who went to Cuba in those early years ever came back, even once America had reconquered itself. Very few of those 5 million Americans remained, ideologically, "American" for long.
Article: We simply didn't have the manpower to guard five million detainees and almost four thousand kilometers of coastline. We couldn't fight a war on two fronts. And so the decision was made to dissolve the centers and allow 10 percent of the Yankee detainees to work outside the wire on a specialized parole program. These detainees would do the jobs Cubanos no longer wanted - day laborers, dish washers, and street cleaners - and while their wages would be next to nothing, their labor hours would go to a point system that allowed them to buy the freedom of other detainees.
This isn't true. Like, this sort of pseudo-slavery was much more America's bag, which is why they're so desperate to pretend Cuba also did it.
Cuba just integrated people into the population. The wage thing is a misrepresentation; Cuba's very slowly transitioning away from using currency internally, and one of the things that gets floated every once in a while is to reduce wages across the board, with the idea being that you only get paid so you can personally interact with some of Cuba's capitalist neighbours. It never really goes anywhere, because if we're going to transition away from markets and money, we should just do it, but it gets grabbed occasionally so America can pretend Cuba's got this sort of "work for nebulous reward" thing, too.
Article: It was an ingenious idea - some Florida Cubano came up with it - and the camps were drained in six months. At first the government tried to keep track of all of them, but that soon proved impossible. Within a year they had almost fully integrated, the "Nortecubanos," insinuating themselves into every facet of our society.
Does he think people are stupid? Or just uninformed? Is this just carelessness?
Tell me - if we are to believe that this prison-slave system is how the Americans got out of their alleged prison camps - why was a Floridian able to propose it? Linear time would suggest this hypothetical Floridian would be in a prison camp at the time he came up with this "ingenious" slavery idea.
There's some truth to the fact that the Nortecubanos were integrated within a year, but not because of this shit.
Article: Officially the camps had been created to contain the spread of "infection," but that wasn't the kind spread by the dead.
Again… they very much were just to contain the infection. Cuba did not have the resources or personnel to keep people in prison to prevent the "infection" of capitalism. They also did not need to.
Article: You couldn't see this infection at first, not when we were still under siege. It was still behind closed doors, still spoken in whispers. Over the next several years what occurred was not so much a revolution as an evolution, an economic reform here, a legalized, privately owned newspaper there. People began to think more boldly, talk more boldly. Slowly, quietly, the seeds began to take root. I'm sure Fidel would have loved to bring his iron fist crashing down on our fledgling freedoms. Perhaps he might have, if world events had not shifted in our favor. It was when the world governments decided to go on the attack that everything changed forever.
This is… almost? True. He implies this was because of the American exiles, and was a "liberalising" trend - private enterprise and what have you.
But no. The economic reforms were away from industry being purely state run or market, and closer to the workers having major control over the means of production in their factories or fields. The "legalised, privately owned" newspapers were newspapers printed by workers collectives unaffiliated with the government, minority rights groups, socialist theorists, university marxist societies. Truthfully they had almost nothing to do with the Nortecubanos at first, and everything to do with the increased freedom after the American blockade went down. Cuba had enough now, could trade freely the world over. Without being under siege any more, they could loosen their control.
Castro… is a difficult one to call. Did he want to crack down? I don't think so. Even to the end, Castro was a Red, and I think - I like to think - he was happy to see Cuba finally get to spread her wings and show everyone her beauty, what marxism could achieve in the Caribbean.
Cuba's decision to provide material support to various countries during the reconquest remains deeply controversial - a lot of people blame them for a lot of dead socialists, but I'm not sure Cuba could've prevented many of those deaths.
Article: Suddenly we became "the Arsenal of Victory." We were the breadbasket, the manufacturing center, the training ground, and the springboard. We became the air hub for both North and South America, the great dry dock for ten thousand ships. We had money, lots of it, money that created an overnight middle class, and a thriving, capitalist economy that needed the refined skills and practical experience of the Nortecubanos.
This is fucking hilarious. No, in the middle of a vast industrial campaign to arm and support the war efforts of two continents, Cuba did not decide to shift gears into capitalism suddenly. Nor did it develop a fucking "middle class".
I like, by the by, how earlier in the book we hear that most Americans didn't have any practical industrial experience, they were all stupid and had to perform hard manual labour, but now they have "refined skills and practical experience".
No, largely Cuba span up their industry within their existing workforce, with Nortecubanos represented roughly proportionate with the rest of the population.
Article: We shared a bond I don't think can ever be broken. We helped them reclaim their nation, and they helped us reclaim ours. They showed us the meaning of democracy . . . freedom, not just in vague, abstract terms, but on a very real, individually human level. Freedom isn't just something you have for the sake of having, you have to want something else first and then want the freedom to fight for it. That was the lesson we learned from the Nortecubanos. They all had such grand dreams, and they'd lay down their lives for the freedom to make those dreams come true. Why else would El Jefe be so damned afraid of them?
If he ever comes back to Cuba, Alvarez is going to be punched in the face so hard he'll shit teeth. No, Cubans did not learn from Americans what it was to lay down your life in pursuit of the grand dream of freedom. They learnt that lesson in the 1950s. I guess they did have to learn it from Americans, but not because those Americans were so gosh dang democratic. The opposite, really.
This is purely for American domestic consumption - Cuba is just like us. Cuba is capitalist. Cuba loves us, because we taught them freedom.
Article: I'm not surprised that Fidel knew the tides of freedom were coming to sweep him out of power. I am surprised at how well he rode the wave.
[He laughs, gesturing to a photo on the wall of an aged Castro speaking in the Parque Central.]
There's always got to be a conspiracy with these people. Fidel Castro couldn't have just been an old, sick man who wanted to resign, no, he knew that capitalism was about to win!
Castro retired. Because he was old and tired. No conspiracy needed - he died a year later, you fucking ghoul.
Article: Can you believe the cojones of that son of a bitch, to not only embrace the country's new democracy, but to actually take credit for it? Genius. To personally preside over the first free elections of Cuba where his last official act was to vote himself out of power.
Okay, now is as good a time as I'm going to get to talk about Cuba's democracy, so here goes, because it is a little confusing.
Cuba is still a one party state. The Partido Comunista de Cuba is the only political party within the republic, but Cuba is a democracy.
In 2015, as his last act prior to retirement, Fidel Castro instructed the Seventh Congress of the PCC to rescind the faction ban, allowing different groups within the PCC to campaign against one another.
Democracy in Cuba works within the PCC. We go to regional meetings, and we elect a local delegate from several candidates within the party; there's usually a pretty broad slate, and they're generally very responsive to concerns, because recall is a pretty constant threat, and then they go to the National Assembly and represent our interests. Generally speaking, the factions are not super stable, because there's endless jockeying for a majority in the National Assembly, so individual members will try their best to represent their voting public.
The system is extremely responsive, and I think it is fairly representative, and when combined with the semi-frequent national surveys on constitutional changes to specific laws, I think we have a good thing going - certainly it is more democratic than the Americans have, even if they theoretically have more political parties.
You can't vote against communism, but that isn't terribly surprising, nor does it bother me.
Article: That is why his legacy is a statue and not a bloodstain against a wall. Of course our new Latin superpower is anything but idyllic. We have hundreds of political parties and more special-interest groups than sands on our beaches. We have strikes, we have riots, we have protests, it seems, almost every day.
This isn't true at all, really. This is a view of Cuba designed as part of a campaign to convince uninformed Americans not to emigrate there, because America is haemorrhaging young people to places like Cuba and Mexico.
Cuba's got riots, strikes and protests, sure. America doesn't. That doesn't make America more free. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Article: You can see why Che ducked out right after the revolution. It's a lot easier to blow up trains than to make them run on time. What is it that Mister Churchill used to say? "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others." [He laughs.]
He couldn't stop himself, huh. He got almost all the way through an interview where he pretended to be a "normal Cuban" despite living in Miami and hating Cuba, but he got to the end of the interview and panicked that his new fascist friends might not realise he was with them, so he stuffed "gloating about Che dying," "revolutionaries just want to blow things up" and "unlike the people who make trains run on time" which is such a tired old fascist claim that everyone must recognise it on sight, right?
But then, to make absolutely sure they knew he was a hateful turd, he quotes Winston fucking Churchiil. Wretched man.
Anyway, that's all I have to say about Cuba. If you want to know more - come to Havana! It isn't difficult to get there.
Next up - China. Always touchy for the yanks, talking about China.
Donate to the Walvis Bay Railroad [HERE].
Donate to the Sanatorium for Infirm Women in Russia [HERE].
Donate to the Lakota [HERE] - they're trying to rebuild as well as they can.
Donate to a South American group of your choice [HERE] - it's a masterlist.
AN: Found this one a lot easier than Japan, because I wasn't cringing as I read. Comments make me happy so please leave one. If you like. Would you believe the resume of the Cuban Exile who got executed was actually a pruned back take on a real guy.
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