January 05, 2009

Cuba: Cemetery of Hopes

An excellent editorial today from Front Page Magazine:

Cuba: A Cemetery of Hopes By Theodore Dalrymple

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, the French newspaper, Le Monde, which is vastly more informative about the world than any English-language journal (and therefore loses a lot of money), had a four-page spread.

What was surprising about the tone of three of these four pages, written by Frenchmen, was their hostility to the Revolution. This was surprising because the newspaper is generally left-leaning, and for a very long time the French left felt a deep sympathy for Castro and his dictatorship. From Sartre to Madame Mitterand, prominent French personalities have raised shameful hosannas to the Cuban caudillo and all his works. Last Saturday, in the market of the rich and bourgeois little town near which I live in France, Che Guevara T-shirts were still for sale.

The special correspondent, Guillaume Carpentier, did not mince his words. Under a headline ‘Broken down roads and crumbling facads, empty markets, closed cinemas and bookshops: fifty years after the triumphal entry of the barbudos into the most beautiful city in Latin America,disillusion reigns in Havana,’ he writes:

Practically all cinemas have shut down. Of the 135 cinemas that Havana had – more than Paris or New York – no more than 20 remain open. With nationalisation, they closed one by one, for lack of maintenance, films or electricity... Havana, Cubans complain, is a cemetery of cinemas. It is also a cemetery of bookshops, markets, shops... In short, Cuba is a cemetery of hopes.

Read the whole excellent thing - with a major galleta sin mano to Wayne Smith - right here.

H/T Jose C.

Posted by Val Prieto at January 5, 2009 10:17 AM

Comments

If the Cuban "process" of the last half century has been good or useful for anything, it's that it's provided overwhelming, irrefutable, and eternal proof that the vast majority of the world's so-called liberals and progressives are FULL of SHIT--not just in the sense of being assholes, but in the sense of being false, pernicious, dangerous SOBs who have done Cuba incalculable harm.

They will never admit it, apologize for it or attempt to make restitution. At best, if Cuba ever stands up and walks right, they will either try to find a way to profit from it (again) or move on to another victim. And make no mistake, that's what they want, VICTIMS, not just so they can have their way, but so they can feel superior. That's a major reason why they can't stomach the Cuban exile community, because it did far too well even on alien turf, refused to play the poor submissive minority role, refused to assimilate sufficiently, and refused to be politically "correct" or show proper respect and gratitude to its "betters."

There is no "mother" country, only a heartless, greedy, spiteful bitch. There are no "brother" nations, only perverse, backstabbing bastards. There are no "friends," only those who find it convenient or suitable to act reasonably and decently. The main reason Cuba's in such a deep hole is that Cubans screwed each other and themselves, powerful foreign entities (including the US) found it useful or convenient to reinforce and/or maintain the situation, and Cubans then kept hoping and waiting for the kindness of strangers. It doesn't work that way. Or at least it hasn't so far. But of course, it's only been 50 years.


Posted by: asombra [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 5, 2009 10:30 AM


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