Re: Cuba Set to Approve New Foreign Investment Projects, Vow to Keep Socialism 'Intac
I'd also like to address Social Democrat's charge that Cuba has not addressed "institutional racism". But first, I would ask that he define it, and give an example of how it operates in Cuba.
Let's agree that there is a serious correlation between your racial ancestry, and your likelihood of, say, going to medical school, or to university at all. I would call this "racial disadvantage", which does not automatically say what the problem is: it might well be, entirely or in part, due to outright racial discrimination: fifty people apply for medical school, only 25 can be taken, and the person making the decision looks at applicants' photographs and where their grades are similar, chooses the whites, mainly. That's possible, and that's racism.
But ... here is another possibility: the person choosing the 25 out of 50 looks only at their grades, and chooses the best 25, which happens to include a lot of whites and few Blacks. Maybe the Blacks got the poorer grades because of some sort of racist discimination among their teachers further back down the line, which would also be racism. But ... I suspect the problem is, the whites come from more middle class families: they heard a wider range of vocabulary when they were growing up; their parents read more books; the have relatives who went to university. The Blacks, less so. So that even if everything the state does is equal, the whites still have an advantage which shows up in their grades without any overt (or even covert) discrimination.
For those interested in this issue, as it applies to Cuba, you should read Fidel Castro's 'interview-biography' with the editor of
Le Monde Diplomatique, written about ten years ago, where he is asked about, and talks about, this very issue.
If this is 'institutional racism', okay, then I believe that exists in Cuba, but I would call it 'Institutional racial disadvantage'. The use of the word 'racism' makes it appear that the problem is some subterranean racists who can be spotted and uprooted, when in fact the cause of the problem is different.
Also, on the dissident, Oscar Paya, who was killed in an automobile accident. If you Google the incident and read all the stories, it's not absolutely clear what happened. There are three possibilities:
--- (1) the driver, another Cuban dissident, fell asleep at the wheel (he was driving) and swerved off the road and ran into a tree. This can happen.
--- (2) they were being followed by a State Security car, which rammed them from behind, without the intention of killing them, but of shaking them up, and making it very unpleasant for foreign political leaders (Paya was being accompanied by two European political people, one from Sweden and one from Spain) to come to Cuba and 'meddle in Cuban affairs'. This is not an uncommon tactic for State Security to use, to intimidate dissidents. Their cars are rammed from behind, but not fatally.
--- (3) they were rammed from behind but with the intention that they should crash and die.
My guess is that the best explanation is (2). I don't think the Cuban secret police are stupid, and to kill European politicians, just when Cuba is trying to woo the EU, would have been stupid. If they really wanted to kill Paya they had decades to do it in; if they had decided to kill him they would have waited until he was not accompanied by Europeans.
So I put this tragic death in the same category as all the innocent Cubans the United States in the 60s: the woman in the big department store in Havana which a Cuban CIA agent burned down; the more than 100 who were killed when a ship carrying arms from Belgium was blown up; the civilians killed -- some of them deliberately and in cold blood -- during the Bay of Pigs invansion (one was a 13 year old volunteer literacy teacher, captured by the invaders and murdered because he was wearing a government uniform).
In any case, all of the political people here, left and right, ought to go to Cuba and see for yourself. You can meet people and argue politics with them -- just go to the Havana bookshop/coffeeshop called Cuba Libro (Google it.). And read -- and contribute to -- the
Havana Times. There are socialists, communists, anarchists, liberals, free-marketeers, ... all of them writing columns in this on-line paper (which has a Spanish and an English version), and you can comment on the columns.
