My Motives and Qualifications

 

Caution: This document ("My Motives
and Qualifications") may exceed objective
truth tolerance limits of some readers.


   Motives: I have several motives for publishing iammyownreporter.com.
   My motives in brief: (1) to shoot down the illegal Cuban travel law through its own loophole meant for embedded reporters by being my own reporter for my own publication; (2) to join the web revolution against the empire's media dictatorship of official stories; (3) to breach the barricade of lies surrounding Cuba with a smart missile of truth; and (4) (collateral but important) to rebut the claims of language challenged scientists virtually lost in outer and sub-organic space that their arithmetic has supplanted philosophy, by proving that precise English, wielded by a practiced sharpshooter, is still a far more deadly analytical weapon than math.


    (1) For one thing, this website is a passing shot hit past authorities who think they can block the right of human beings who happen to be Americans to go to Cuba and associate with Cubans just by faking up an intimidating law that threatens to cover the court with more words than most people think they can cope with. In fact, every existing human has an existential right, preceding the authority of any state, to go peacefully about the world trying to find out what's up. And, probably because at least Thomas Jefferson understood that such a right lies outside the reasonable concern of any rationally contrived state, the First and Ninth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution outlaw the making of any law that abridges it. Self serving businessmen in Congress whose prototypes hijacked the country as soon as Jefferson got out of their way have indeed made such a law supposedly barring travel to Cuba, but their half cunning legal scribes had to leave a loophole for the press, which they didn't intend uncooperative reporters to use, but it's there - an automatic "license" printed on thin air which permits "regular employees" of a "newsgathering organization" to "gather news" in "enemy" countries. They had no more authority to provide the loophole than they had to make the law. Any presumption of an authority to define or license the press obviously constitutes an abridgment of the freedom of the press - a freedom which every human has the "unalienable" right to exercise and which no government has the authority to grant or withdraw or control or mess with in any way. The presumption of any such authority was specifically forbidden to the U.S. government in writing by its founders. But, even under the pretentiously tangled terms of their offensive illegal law, as my own reporter assigned to Cuba by myself as the editor of my own "newsgathering organization," I'm just as "licensed" as their quisling press and thus protected from their pesky harassment (see "Any American Can Go To Cuba..." on this website).

    (2) Having a website gives me a voice, however small, that establishment editors can't choke off or edit. The best defense the bigshots have against a free press is to own it. But, while business friends and co-conspirators of the aforementioned hijackers of the country, their descendants and hirelings have always owned and kept a useful rein on most U.S. mass media, they were caught off guard by the emergence of the internet, which, at least until they own it too, constitutes an alternative mass media they don't control - and thus, potentially, the vehicle for a new kind of citizens' rebellion that the world sorely needs. So, as an independent journalist, my second motive is just to try the internet out as a way around the establishment gatekeepers and, whether I reach many people or not, to encourage other frustrated truthsayers to use it in the same way. The title of my web pub, "I Am My Own Reporter," clarifies my point. In fact, lots of other people have already thought of this, and you already have a choice of alternative, independent news reporters on the web, some of whom (not all, not even most, but some of whom) are bound to be more honest and more qualified than the main-stream press.

    (3) Obviously, one good use for the internet is to deal with subjects the embedded media have misrepresented and covered up, especially realities outside U.S. borders that don't fit their version of contemporary history. An obvious example is Cuba, and to counter the regular line on Cuba with some objective truth about the place just by writing what I've seen and learned in my travels there and elsewhere is my third motive.
   That's a pretty quixotic motive, of course. Telling any truth that contradicts any entrenched official story and that most people don't care about anyway, hoping it makes a difference, is a lot like hoping to emulate the famous little bird who metaphorically pecked away the mountain.
   And, actually, that's about how I see it, since, as a realist, my philosophical bottom line is, after all, that what is is. And though of course it's just as true that what could be could be and I really think it was possible to make a promising start toward a rational world in 1918 (i.e. what should be could have been), I also think that the subsequent explosion of population growth and deeper entrenchment of capitalism, plus too many businessmen and half-smart lawyers in high places and a generally irrational human resistance (to rationality, in fact) had made the possible too improbable to be worth the struggle by the time I first gave it up in 1970. And now, several decades even later, with the already ruined ecosystem still being relentlessly eaten away by the quickening cancer of a dozen or two dozen X too many still multiplying people and their even more cancerous encampment, with the once slowly crumbling mountain of right-wing denial now growing faster than it's being pecked away, with the WTO and a few important presidents effectively running the world over the heads of ordinary humanity's near irrelevant United Nations, and with all hope for a logical revolution disintegrating into endless war and growing poverty, it's hard to see the point of trying (probably vainly, after all) to teach a few independent intellectuals how Cuba fits into the world-sized mess. But even if "it does no good" or "it's too late," as people keep telling me who (either consciously or subconsciously) must agree with me that the world has as good as already ended (see World's End on nottalkradio), as long as our terminally ill eco-system lingers and I'm still alive, making sense and telling the truth remain my own top priorities - my preferred way of undoubtedly wasting my time.
  So the objective defense of Cuba as an only somewhat flawed model of what could have been is worth articulating for personal intellectual and emotional reasons as well as "just in case it makes a difference." It angers me that Americans are so brainlocked about communism that they just accept any lie about Cuba the Miami "exiles" can dream up (a near limitless category of baloney). And it also angers me that the lame American "left", having lost their nerve after the 1990 Nicaraguan elections and the fall of the Eastern Bloc, have turned their politically correct backs on the one place in the world where the goals that should be theirs are closest to being achieved.
   Insidious lies shouldn't go unchallenged and, in a world way off course, suffering as much from horrible inequality and government by and for the rich as from ecological catastrophe, an important social model like Cuba shouldn't be ignored or covered up. What "shouldn't be" is, of course, and I know I'm mainly shouting alone in the dark now, but at least people looking on the web for reality-based answers to their questions about Cuba can find them here, and people who ask me or any of my readers questions that can't be well answered in a conversational sound bite can be directed here, too.

    (4) My fourth motive for posting this website (iammyownreporter.com) may seem esoteric and, if it doesn't interest you, you don't have to read this, but having a website adds a significant dimension to a lifelong pastime (project, communication experiment, expository habit, artistic pursuit) of mine which interests me so much that I've recently posted a second website (nottalkradio.com ) just for this purpose.

    My fourth motive and purpose is to apply a strategically enhancing external pressure to myself, as I pursue my never-ending effort to clarify and verify (to myself and collaterally to any interested others) the credibility and often the validity of my own objective view of reality by describing it coherently in front of a theoretical and theoretically critical audience.

   I call this a pastime because, once the blip-like nature of life is truly understood and suicide rejected or postponed,  life  is mainly a matter of passing time, whether by doing things temporarily important only inside one's own skull or by contributing a bit to the general quality of the brief human ordeal.
   Some people pass their time by constantly joking. Some repeatedly fall in love. Some never stop eating. My chief website engineer, Marvin, since he's both an artist and a mechanical genius, very cheerfully passes a lot of his time perfecting his computer and digital techniques and fixing his friends' and neighbors' broken contraptions. Fidel Castro, since he had the rare courage, charisma, and intelligence it took to do it, has successfully passed over half a century replacing a fascist puppet regime with a civilized socialist state (to the bitterly vindictive chagrin of the former puppet-masters).
   Joking bores me. I'm too old to chase girls. I need to stop eating so much. My mechanical aptitude, though pretty good as an aptitude, is a bit flabby from lack of exercise, and I'm short on courage and charisma, so I let Marvin adjust my website and fix my car and leave revolutionary leadership to people like Fidel. But I may be as good as good gets with language and the other special skills needed for my main pastime, which is really the main motivator if not apparently the main thrust of this website.
   I'm talking about something maybe only intellectually exciting to people like me, and it'll take a few paragraphs to explain it, but if I can make it clear here (you've already started reading this, after all) and thereby clarify the kind and level of objectivity my pastime (project, experiment, habit, artistic pursuit) requires, maybe I can make the reality of Cuba clear here, too.

   STOP here a moment, though, for a brief journalism lesson: I just used the word objectivity, and you need to understand that objectivity, which is almost always respectable, and neutrality, which is often contemptible, are NOT the same thing. Truth is seldom neutral and neutrality is seldom honest, and, trying to be honest, I am seldom neutral about anything and it would be unobjective to pretend to be. So if you don't like me not being diplomatically neutral, that's your problem; you're disqualified as a useful part of the realistically critical audience I'm theorizing. As a journalist and expository writer, I try to be objective, not neutral, and it is objective clarity I'm talking about here.

   Making things objectively clear to myself and hopefully (if it happens, so be it) to others is the essence of what I'm trying to do. My conscientiousness and therefore the probability of my success are enhanced by the pressure of a modest public exposure (easily achieved on a website), and, as a communication experiment, my pastime obviously demands theses that need clarifying to that public, such as that Cuban communism works.
   It also demands a rare command of the English language, a bent for what I call conceptual math (a conscientious bonding of math and the substantive reality it represents to avoid getting lost in the esoterica of numbers), an offensive level of honesty, an inhuman suppression of denial, and an exceptional willingness to see what's in front of my face.

    What I'm doing - what I've been doing all my life - with greater and greater success I think - is trying to find out and clarify to myself what really IS and what really IS NOT by (a) sharpening my vision with research and experience, (b) looking right at whatever concerns me, Cuba for instance, and (c) coherently articulating what I think I see.

    Since the last step, (c) coherent articulation, is both the least likely to be understood and properly appreciated and an example of the things I think I see that others (including a lot of language-challenged philosophers and mathematicians) don't see, and since it's also the most importantly experimental part of this website's point (trying to pin down reality by describing it),  I'm going to try to pin down a bit of reality here by more carefully pinning down that point.
    Coherence (actually the best synonym for logic) is the essence of logic and realism. If the physical elements of our world didn't coherently (logically) go together, they (including we and our brains) couldn't and wouldn't be together. There'd be nothing but maybe disconnected space dust to talk about and nobody to talk about it. Luckily or unluckily, things do go together, but you still can't talk or even think very effectively about them, and you certainly can't precisely define or explain them, without a serious command of a language just as potentially coherent as the physical world.
    We think first in images, then in words, and then in math; and (understandably, given the precise coherence of math) some of those who've learned to think very well in math , most notably Stephen Hawking, have declared mere verbal philosophizing obsolete and math the ONLY key to truth. I disagree. Those who don't understand the importance of math don't understand much, but mathematicians who don't understand the greater importance of words and images may understand even less.
   In fact, even without language, we can think very effectively and even precisely and definitively in images alone. I think animals do that in a simple way. I think inventors and mechanics do that in a highly sophisticated way. And I think mathematicians don't do it enough. But, as vehicles of thought, neither pure images nor math, which is too image-free and too detached from normal perception, can be philosophical. So, very luckily for the few brooding thinkers perhaps unluckily compelled to coherently (logically) philosophize about the world they live in, the English language works well because (exactly like the world they live in) it goes together coherently and is image rich.
    Too many people, including mathematicians and some English teachers, don't realize that English is an almost mathematically syntactical language and that a good English sentence (not the kind that gets lost in a black hole of false starts and "yoonose") is coherent in the same sense as a math formula or an accurately conceived exploded image of a motor, or that its coherence literally proves its credibility if not its validity. Its mechanically tight syntactical structure (correctly wielded) may make the language only nearly as precise as math, but being multi-dimensional and most importantly image evoking makes it a more complexly and therefore more effectively coherent instrument with which to describe and clarify reality. And that's exactly the same thing and ALL that mathematics does, folks.
   Mathematicians contrive formulas to describe reality, hoping that the apparent resemblance between the formula and reality proves they really have figured reality out, and I'm doing the same thing with language and doing it better. Oh, but you say mathematicians then turn around and apply their formulas to other parts of reality and they keep fitting. Well, not always, but, when they do, great! I'm a fan. But they're not constructing any new universes, like Philip Jose Farmer's lords; they're only trying and sometimes failing to describe the one that's here - same thing I'm doing. Inventors, however, thinking mainly in moving images think up contraptions and turn around and actually make the contraptions, and the contraptions often work, and mechanics who study those contraptions take their mainly image based understanding of one contraption to other contraptions they've never seen and prove over and over that their understanding fits all contraptions by fixing them. And Fidel Castro imagined a socialist Cuba in language and turned around and made his verbal concept work. All I'm doing is figuring things out, in a mathematical enough way, but conceptualizing math by adding up images as well as numbers, and presenting my conceptual math formulas in words to make them more perfectly coherent. In fact, I'm proving with every sentence I'm contriving here that, while its mechanically tight syntactical structure (correctly wielded) may make the language only nearly as precise as math, being multi-dimensional and most importantly image evoking makes it more complexly and therefore more effectively coherent.

    Language, unlike math, is packed with images, and I'm convinced that (with its treacherous ambiguity tightly controlled) its image evoking dimension combined with its syntactical logic and its philosophical capacity to explain any helpful math it incorporates makes precise English a more potent analytical instrument than math.

    Clear thinkers have justifiable faith in numbers, but not even mathematicians can think clearly of the moving parts of interrelated processes in numbers. Spontaneously clear comprehension of how things probably, should, or definitely go together requires the images that art, photography, and words provide.
    Machine manuals show exploded images, not equations strung across the page, because, while a mechanic certainly knows about the numbers that also describe a machine and its function, to actually understand the machine, he has to think in number-free moving images and visualized spatial relationships. He probably has to look up the numbers to refer to them, and he may only have faith in their critical relationship to the more meaningful images in his head or in front of his eyes. But even if he's a math whiz who knows why his skill is inseparable from numbers, a good mechanic's math is more meaningfully conceptual. And so is the math of a mystery writer setting up a complex plot equation that actually mirrors and teaches us about our social world. And so is the math of a political tourist like me who figures out how a contemporary state equates or fails.
    Apparently, conceptual math, being verbally guided and even carried, works better than pure math, because it is instantly coherent and therefore more user friendly to fast and sophisticated human brains too impatient to translate slow and clumsy numbers. I think it indicative that, while the world's currently most famous mathematician is only beginning to suspect (according to himself; he may be b.s.ing) that gods aren't needed and that the universe is both infinite and eternal, I and all my verbally and mechanically talented friends knew these things absolutely when we were kids and haven't worried much about them since. Apparently, setting outer space and sub-atomic reality aside, on the earthbound and eye-bound level of reality that matters the most (and which is the same reality and just as real as the merely magnified version some scientists bury their heads in), images, besides being more relevant, are in fact more immediately self evident than symbols, and if some are mirages, well, there are plenty of mathematical mirages, too. And words, though they like numbers are symbols, are more effective symbols because they are closer to the brain's eye, and also, though most people including mathematicians may only subconsciously realize it, the acrobatic versatility of syntactical combinations of plump and feisty words is much friendlier and much more constructively provocative and useful to impatiently agile human brains than are the rigid, bloodless, one-dimensional formulas of mere arithmetic. Though sentences are secretly rigid, too, to the talented native speaker and reader who swims in words like an otter, they go together the way physical reality goes together and, exactly like the reality they describe (and like images and like math), they prove they make sense by going together. Also, apparently, coherent sentences are essential to guide human comprehension of any complex conglomeration of images and/or numbers. Otherwise, why would machine manuals include explanations, and why would smug mathematicians trying to justify themselves bother to write books?
    Of course there are way too many people who can't read these sentences, but good human brains work better, faster, and on more levels at once with image-based words than with numbers, and while (a) the syntactical coherence (the mechanical perfection) of a carefully articulated argument or explanation or description PROVES its own INTERNAL credibility, (b) its equally coherent sensory link (when there is one) to the brain image banks of experienced and realistic readers (including the writer) also PROVES its probable and often its certain EXTERNAL validity.

    Adroit exercise of that principle is an important part of what I want to do with the measure of life I've decided to endure, and I can actually do it more effectively if I think of myself as having realistically critical readers among the readers that a website at least theoretically provides.
   My qualifications in brief: besides being unafflicted by religion, patriotism or blind faith in free enterprise, democracy, or the word freedom, I'm a retired journalism and English professor; a semi-retired environmental and political activist and organizer; a philosopher, writer, and traveller (speaking adequate Spanish) with experience in 16 Latin American countries, including a series of 80's and 90's summers in Nicaragua as a brigadista and correspondent for the San Diego Review, two years residence in Chiapas, and seven extensive visits to Cuba in '89, '00, '01, '02, '04, '05 and '07 totaling about eight months and covering most of the island.

   Comparing my qualifications to the qualifications of your other sources: Both like and unlike those of anyone else who sets himself up as a webmaster, my qualifications go further back and run deeper than what it says in the little red box above. They have to if, even with all my experience, I'm going to tell you different things about Cuba, maybe the opposite of what you've heard from the newspapers, the president, the "exiles," or whatever speaker you've heard at the library.
    I've been there, of course, and probably most of your sources haven't, or they haven't been there for 45 years, or they always visit the same family and friends who always feed them the same line, or they were in Havana once for a few days talking only to hustlers who spoke English. So it's important that I've talked to a lot more Cubans and other Latin Americans in a lot more of Cuba and a lot more other places, and my account makes unusually good sense. It's internally coherent and therefore credible in a world where nothing can be real that isn't coherent, and it coherently connects to what you know about the world if you know anything.
   But, still, to see what others apparently didn't think to look for and say things nobody's supposed to say, with so much confidence in my own vision, I have to be more profoundly qualified - and I am.
   My most important qualification, though, is actually a negative one that has more to do with your other sources of information about Cuba than with me. Although my fairly good Spanish and my expertise on objective research and writing, which I taught for 25 years, are essential, and I have so much relevant experience it needs detailing and subdividing, which I'll get to in a minute, my most important qualification is something I DON'T have: the bagful of superstitions, prejudices, and obsessions that so profoundly warp the American outlook on reality that most Americans are congenitally unable to see any foreign country objectively, let alone a communist country.

—— Another Caution ——     

If restraint is really a good thing in writing, this document so far is so good that the warning notice on top must seem overstated. But restraint is less virtuous than foolish when it spares grossly counter productive sacred cows from slaughter, so my skittish readers are warned again that some truly offensive ideological beasts are about to be axed.



    Most Americans, unfortunately including most of those who think they're trying hard to be fair, are incapable of objectively reporting on Cuba, not so much because they lack experience or knowledge (which some have and others could have if they'd ever bother to learn Spanish and get past Havana) but because of some very definite and definitely crippling afflictions nobody needs but which they always seem to have and always take to Cuba with them.
    I'm not just talking about the deliberate propagandists: (1) the Miami "exiles," (2) the misinformation specialists in the State Department, and (3) the willingly embedded flacks of America's clearly invested mainstream media. Most anti-Cuba propaganda comes from those sources, but not because they can't be objective (though they probably can't be). They want to smear Cuba; or they're paid to smear Cuba; or smearing Cuba is a convention of their trade that they do without thinking, earning them cheap, no-risk approval, like throwing stones at someone already being stoned. From too much bitterness for too long, the "exiles" may actually think the word truth, in reference to Cuba, means any ugly thing they can think of to say, but they're also willing to lie to achieve their inherited goal. Their island-born dons (lots of the "exiles" have never seen revolutionary Cuba or have spent less time there than I have) want to go back with the U.S. Army, kill all the communists, and restore the inequality that bigshots enjoy in the rest of Latin America. And they share that goal with their ironically racist but convenient allies, the simultaneously stupid and cunning anti-communist American businessmen (including most politicians and most media chiefs), to whom good means good for them and their friends in the economic upper class, bad means any "liberal" s.o.b. who tries to queer the fix, objectivity is a lot of useless esoteric hooey, truth is what you tell the suckers it is, and the Miami fantasies about Cuba are fine because they're ready to hand and do the trick.
    But while that gang are the principal conscious and semi-conscious broadcasters of anti-Cuba b.s., it helps their cause a lot that most Americans are perfect b.s. receivers. Most sincerely well-meaning Americans, including or maybe especially liberals, are too willingly trapped inside politically correct intellectual limits, too illogically religious and religiously illogical, too born-again patriotic, too uncritically pious about democracy and "free" enterprise, and too shy of even the word communism to see through all the anti-Cuba blather or to look objectively at Cuba.

    As everyone well knows, there are many completely irrational convictions in circulation among humans - whole systems of them - the products of social propaganda going back for decades, or for generations, or for thousands of years, so commonly and widely held, so deeply and historically embedded, that entire populations are virtually, maybe genetically unable to confront themselves logically about them. One would hope that individuals original enough to dare to visit Cuba would not be among the afflicted, but steady, never ending propaganda is depressingly effective.
    Religion is the most obvious example of excess baggage that most people carry, and Americans are as hopelessly religious as Muslims. They pour their god (like catsup or sugar) on all public events, speeches, and ceremonies; throughout their legal and political documents and procedures; and even all over their entertainment, literature and news chronicles. On any given day, you can hear pundits on Air America one minute bragging that they always stick to the facts and the next minute declaring, without a trace of self suspicion, that they know what Jesus would say about the Republicans.
    Americans literally believe (it isn't figurative - they believe it) that their god is as real as AT&T and is really their god. They're as sure as Muslims or Jews or the pre-conquest Aztecs that their god made them of special clay, that they are good in a supernatural sense and that lesser peoples who get in their way or who strike back at them are evil in a supernatural sense. It's embarrassing to say this, but I'm not being satirical. This is literal fact and you know it.
    Mystical people can't be trusted to see anything clearly - neither Cuba nor America nor anything else, because they are on the one hand robotically obligated to chant a brain deadening catechism for which there is no evidence at all as if it were clearly true and on the other hand in automatic denial of what's in front of their faces if it's not in their scripture. Republicans and Democrats differ only as splinter groups over their god's relative racism or sexism, sternness or niceness. As co-religionists, they usually look sideways at each other to move their lips in unison.
    So when the pope went to Cuba, it wasn't just the mainstream U.S. media shouting rooftop prayers that that doddering anachronism would save Cuba's lost soul from its atheist leaders who have accomplished more social good than religion ever has or ever will. Most supposedly intellectual American liberals whose voices were heard at the time apparently also thought that an increase in "free" churchgoing would be better for Cuba than having possibly the world's best health care delivery system and a participatory democracy so efficient that hurricane response is routinely near perfect. In fact, Cuba has more churches than it needs (less than 1 would suffice), but it panics childishly religious Americans that the president is an honest atheist and so are most of the people, and the possibility that Cuba's relatively more stable peace and security could partly result from the Cubans being realistically educated while THEY (the Americans) are as mystically brainwashed as the ancient Egyptians appears impossible for Americans to grasp.

    Making double use of the same religious mindcast, virtually all Americans are as rigidly proud of and committed to their second actually worse religion, patriotism, as a flock of black-uniformed movie Germans. And if my saying that shocks you, your shock dramatically proves my point. Your shock is certainly nonrational - just as nonrational, in fact, as patriotism. I'm not talking about anyone's quite respectable sentimental attachment to his home, the place (not country) where he really knows his way around, has real friends, and feels comfortable - a definition of home that may coincidentally fit Monaco. I'm talking about something not at all rational or respectable: patriotism - the counter-rational deification of a state - the first subterfuge of insider scoundrels conning the rest of "the people" into participating in their own fleecing and flag saluting youth into dying for the rich without questioning why.
   Patriotism doesn't make sense. Period. In a contract, it would be a clause you shouldn't sign your name to. The state posited by Jefferson as subject to abolishment when it doesn't work was meant to be a practical mechanism, not a beloved master. Yet Americans are so inertly and unreflectively patriotic that even the ACLU can't grasp that the flag salute itself is an abuse of logic and human rights; and the most famously "free" speakers in the land, even while deploring Washington's daily and clearly systemic acts of international gluttony and barbarism and the near daily reports of ordinary Americans living in the streets or in their cars and of old Americans facing economic ruin if they get sick, ARE STILL DUTIFULLY CERTAIN that the (by definition) "great" AMERican system works (or used to work or will work if you let it work or if "the people" take charge - or something like that) and is the best of all possible systems just because it's godblessed American, while they continually lie to themselves that one specific administration after another and one specific social atrocity after another is an aberration. As long as Americans as a tribal congregation are congenitally incapable of acknowledging even the possibility of what is widely regarded as certain south of the Rio Bravo - that Cuba doesn't just occupy an underdog's moral high ground but is, with all its errors and blemishes, a better conceived, better led, better state than America, which is basically fascist, then almost no American is capable of seeing Cuba objectively.

    And then there's American anti-communism. Obviously (and the word obviously has never been more accurately used), the rich object to communism because it is the antithesis of the win-or-lose system through which the same few thousand rich stay rich, keep running the first world, and keep sucking the blood out of the third world billions, sharing less than half that blood with their own few hundred million "fellow citizens."
   Because the rich 1/10 of 1% who own America don't want the boat rocked, all their lives and before their lives, for 150 years at least, all Americans and several generations of their ancestors have been taught and taught and relentlessly taught, until it seems virtually a genetic conviction, that communism is evil - just evil - not why or even what it is - just that it's evil. Other countries have respected communist and socialist parties, but even to those few slightly deprogrammed American travelers shaken enough by what they've seen in the third world to admit that communist rebels are obviously more benign than their capitalist foes, it's still taboo for Americans to even THINK communism is OK or could succeed. It's too (devilishly?) ideal, they cluck, as if being ideal were a well known flaw. Only primitives are supposed to have taboos. But western society is full of them, and in still-primitive America it's certainly taboo to think (even when it's proven) that communism can work. Most - actually almost all Americans - including reporters, professors, priests, even supposedly leftist intellectuals, feel forbidden (by a kind of automatic life-long drip system of slow but relentless brain irrigation as well as occasional brain-drenching) to go to Cuba and see communism working there. Just IF, by chance, it works there, it is in fact taboo to see that.
    This virtually genetic taboo is so rigid that even otherwise rational and courageous American advocates of social reform in America, when the social reform they advocate is clearly at least socialist, must drum up some politically correct cover name for it, like "single-payer plan," and when defending obviously admirable practices in Cuba are afflicted with a tic-like compulsion to keep interrupting their own arguments with assurances (maybe, subconsciously, to the secret police) that, of course, neither they nor those they stoop to condone are (really) socialists or communists. Cubans call their system socialism (a transitional phase), not communism, because, while some sectors have crossed the finish line, they have not yet achieved full-scale communism. But one politically pious American film-maker strenuously pretends that Cubans overcame their early 90's depression not through the dedication and organizational skill of the Communist Party (God forbid) but by a miracle wrought when "the people" one day just decided to help each other.
    Even Americans with pretensions of economic expertise consistently and maybe totally unconsciously measure communism with a capitalist yardstick. Apparently drawing a blank on the point of communism, they owlishly hoot that the healthy happy educated well-housed well-fed well-dressed never-desperate Cubans just don't know how to make a profit or have the wit to elect a business savvy president (and wind up as poor Latin Americans again - they don't add - it doesn't seem to occur to them).

    The last refuge of a patriot is to adopt a cowboy tone and declare, as Ronald Reagan once really did, that Americans are "free" to freeze to death, and Cubans are forced to endure a system that works for them. Americans constantly pass around and swallow the words "freedom" and democracy, or the virtually one-word incantation freedomanddemocracy as if the mere words were some kind of solid gold dope. Blissfully groggy about such totalitarian concerns as definition and context, they "freely" commute between their jobs and their TV sets, "freely" consume the product with the red and white label, "freely" donate their taxes to the arms sellers and the inside bidders, "freely" follow instructions about who and what to vote for, and then "freely" and uncritically allow the democratically elected bigshots who "freely" mislead them to hang these two words like colored banners and balloons all over their own barbaric foreign policies and to curse their designated enemies by withholding bestowal of the magic stickers upon them.
    Hey! Some freedom is actually important and respectable, and I'm all for the kinds of freedom any rational person ought to be for, probably a lot more consistently and courageously so than some of my anticipated critics, and I've freely denounced Cuba's important freedom deficits IN Cuba, where freedom of speech is constitutionally guaranteed and freely exercised except for speech intended to incite subversion (a normal exception in any country under attack and in many countries not under attack). But holy smoke, folks! There's freedom and there's "freedom" and there's also free-dumb, because - LISTEN! - freedoms conflict! The mere word freedom has almost NO meaning without squinting hard at it and certainly no moral or ethical value out of context (sugar free, freely illogical, free speech, press freedom, freedom to associate, freedom to assemble, freedom to throw garbage all over the world, free choice, free love, free fire, free fall, "Buy one get one free!", freedom from U.S. imposed democracy, free to get rich at the expense of your fellow man, freedom to cheat or steal or break a contract including even the social contract, etc. - come on!). Americans and Guatemalans are "free" to do a few things Cubans aren't free to do. Cubans are free from a whole lot of shit fucking up life everywhere else including America and it's nothing to fret about that "you" aren't "free" to get rich in Cuba. In American foreign policy jargon, freedom often means freedom from equality. Oh yes it does! And to protect the freedom of rich Americans to free other countries of their riches, they claim they're protecting my freedom by denying my freedom to go to Cuba and find out there's another way to do things. In fact, all borders and bureaucracies, including America's and Cuba's, meant to protect somebody's or something's "freedom" from somebody or something else's freedom, disrupt everyone's freedom to come and go and think or act outside this or that box. The word freedom does not represent a single always noble concept and it is not smart to put it on a banner and wave it as if it did.
   In summary, I stand absolutely for all existential individual freedom which is compatible with civiliazation. But I also stand absolutely for civilization and therefore for the surrender of those freedoms which need to be surrendered so that a civilized state can effectively function. If I seem sometimes to behave as an anarchist, it's because, except for Cuba, which is still formative, I know of no state which is really civilized, including the U.S. I stand for freedom, probably more than you do, but rationally, not religiously.
   Democracy is something else. The two words shouldn't be glued together as freedomanddemocracy. Sorry about that, but while freedom is a fundamental concept and those freedoms that are basic existential human rights that don't need to be surrendered so a rationally contrived state can work are often important and may sometimes even be necessary, democracy is not necessary. It doesn't apparently even work in the existing sceme of things, and it may be unworkable, because it is NECESSARILY always a contest of propaganda in which the slickest, most pervasive, costliest propaganda almost always wins, which is why the poor almost everywhere except Cuba, including the U.S., regularly vote for the rich who screw them over. But Americans can go to Cuba and love hell out of it and STILL turn around and dutifully condemn it because, instead of perpetual democratic chaos tinkered, untinkered and retinkered by actually rich but supposedly representative pickpockets, the Cubans have a well organized thoughtfully managed system.

   The most irritating Yankee handicap is their chesty provincialism. They don't analyze. They just know. "What finally gets you," an observant poet once wrote" is their unbewilderment." If an American newspaper describes a Latin American politician who used to champion the poor but is now ready to do business our way as "reformed," you cannot count on American readers to pull their hair and scream. With decades of opportunity for American liberals to grasp it and write about it, outside this website, I've only once seen an explanation in U.S. print (in a doctoral dissertation) of why Cuba very deliberately and thoughtfully chose to have only one political party, when Americans are religiously sure it takes exactly two. Since it takes the signatures of 5% of the voters to qualify a proposition for the California ballot and a near impossible rigamarole to amend the U.S. Constitution, you wouldn't expect Americans to swallow the theatrical outrage of the so-called "exiles" when a petition signed by only 1/6 of 1% of Cuban voters to subvert their socialist system didn't qualify for the ballot there, but Americans, who rarely understand their own system, routinely assume that the Cuban constitution isn't as important as theirs and that the totally educated Cubans, not being Americans, don't know what they are doing.
    So at a time when secret police are disappearing Americans with Arab names into secret jails and torture chambers without charges, Americans are easily conned into deploring Cuba's lack of "freedom" when Cuban subversives who were certainly recruited, trained, supplied, paid, and directed by agents of a self declared foreign enemy (clear treason as defined in Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution) are duly arrested, charged, tried, convicted in court, and jailed for treason under Article 62 of the Cuban Constitution. There's been no credible evidence for decades (if there ever was) of any Cubans being disappeared or tortured by their government, but, since America is nominally "free" and democratic (according to itself) and Cuba has been declared NOT "free" or democratic (by America), Americans are apparently undismayed and undismayable by Washington's and Miami's hypocritical outrage when the rest of the world approves Cuba's seat on the UN Human Rights Commission.

    A clear view of Cuba requires a realistic world view unconfused by vested economic interest or by religious blindness, patriotic blindness, or blind prejudice against important and respectable concepts (communism for instance) that are mindlessly yet stubbornly demonized by the schools, the politicians, the media, and seemingly the air everyone breaths in America. Brainbound from birth to shun a realistic world view, almost no Americans are free to see Cuba as it is.
    So, though all my experience, which I swear I'll get to in a minute, is important, my most important qualification as an objective reporter on Cuba is that I'm NOT carrying the bagful of superstitions, prejudices, and obsessions described in the last 15 or 16 paragraphs. I'm not religious, patriotic, offended by communism, or confused by sacred jargon.
    It takes someone psychologically free to go against the flow - free to shrug off the comfortable approval of either society or faction in favor of integrity and credibility that probably won't be acknowledged by others; someone who - not being easily or willingly blinded, deafened, intimidated or confused by all he's been told to see in Cuba - is free to see what he actually sees. And, in a world with its mouth full of "freedom," I seem to be one of the few people free to see and think about and write about unspun reality. My saying that may offend some readers, but I can't make my point without making it.

    TO BE CONTINUED SOON


Glen Roberts

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