Socrtease
Verified User
Last night I watched a movie called Lost City. Lost City is a movie by Andy Garcia. It follows a Habana Club Owner in Habana during the Revolution. It is about his family and the schism that developes when two of his brothers become followers of Fidel and Che during the war. Before watching this movie, my belief had always been that the Cuban ex-patriots that live in the US were the foiled supporters of Filguelo Batista, a man that sold his country to the mob and watch as men like Meyer Lansky carry away millions and millions of dollars from Cuba and at the same time run a country that was a model of facism. But Castro was no savior in the end. He and Che purged their country of men and women that did nothing more than work for the government as if they were Batista.
So after watching the movie, I did some investigation of my own. I found out things I did not know. For instance, UNESCO's report on Cuba circa 1957: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class," it starts. "Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S." Also, I did not know that workers basically ignored every call to strike issued by Castro's movement. There were almos no "poor peasants" in Castro's movement in 1957 and 1958. Most if not all of his "vanguard" were middle and upper class that had lost their political voice under Batista and thought that Castro, who early on talked like he was going to reinstate Democracia in Cuba, would turn Cuba around. After the revolution Castro was quoted by his own state run media as saying "Elections? Why? The People have already chosen." Cuba ended up doing nothing more than trading one tryant (Batista) for another (Fidel).
Castro ended up cracking down on every aspect of life in Cuba. You could not hire a musical group unless the government approved it, people who had owned land for 3 and four generations had it stolen from them, especially the Tobacco plantations and the campesino's got to work their ass off making Cigars for Castro, the party members and Europe's elite. Of course Garcia's film has been shelled by the mainstream hollow wood art community for taking the side of the "monied 1%" in 1959 Cuba, so I found an article, in a very unlikely place about a Cuban poet at first supportive of and then later tortured by the Castro regime. His name is Herberto Padilla, Padilla actually left the US in 1959 and came back to Cuba and worked for the regime. He ran a literary paper called Lunes de Revolucion but after almost 9 years of seeing what was happening in his country, he became a critic, and that great man of letters and humanitarianism Castro began to call him enemy.
I think the reason I romanticized Castro and Che for so long is because I knew about the horribly oppressive regimes we supported in El Salvador, Pre-communist Nicaragua and Chile, not to mention that our government LOVED Bastista. So for me, Castro was the guy that had held on and resisted allowing these rightwing facists from talking hold in Habana. Unfortunately, what I was HORRIBLY ignorant of is despite the fact that so many cuban children learned to read in Castros Cuba and so much disease was avoided because of mass innoculation, Castro was every bit the totalitarian that his predecessor Batista was. He was every bit the enemy of freedom, and romanticizing an "anti facist" dictator makes him no less a dictator.
Are there still some ex pats here, or their decendants, that were supporters and benefactors of Batista? Probably. Are there still ex-pats here that took advantage of the poor in Cuba and made their riches on their backs and miss that life they had? Probably. But as so many of you on here have said before, life cannot be idylic on an Island where mothers and fathers put their children into rafts made of car doors and then push out to sea in the hopes that they can survive a 90 mile jaunt across open sea to come here and live. Those people that cross to Florida ARE the people that so many of us for so many years have fooled ourselves into thinking Castro came to save.
I leave you with this:
Song of the Juggler
General, there’s a battle
between your orders and my songs.
It goes on all the time:
night, day.
It knows neither tiredness or sleep–
a battle that has gone on for many years,
so many that my eyes have never seen a sunrise
in which you, your orders, your arms, your trenches
did not figure.
A rich battle
in which, aesthetically speaking, my rags
and your uniform face off.
A theatrical battle–
it only lacks dazzling stage sets
where comedians might come on from anywhere
raising a rumpus as they do in carnivals,
each one showing off his loyalty and valor.
General, I can’t destroy your fleets or your tanks
and I don’t know how long this war will last
but every night one of your orders dies without
being followed,
and, undefeated, one of my songs survives.
–Heberto Padilla
From Legacies
(translated by Alastair Reid and Andrew Hurley)
So after watching the movie, I did some investigation of my own. I found out things I did not know. For instance, UNESCO's report on Cuba circa 1957: "One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class," it starts. "Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S." Also, I did not know that workers basically ignored every call to strike issued by Castro's movement. There were almos no "poor peasants" in Castro's movement in 1957 and 1958. Most if not all of his "vanguard" were middle and upper class that had lost their political voice under Batista and thought that Castro, who early on talked like he was going to reinstate Democracia in Cuba, would turn Cuba around. After the revolution Castro was quoted by his own state run media as saying "Elections? Why? The People have already chosen." Cuba ended up doing nothing more than trading one tryant (Batista) for another (Fidel).
Castro ended up cracking down on every aspect of life in Cuba. You could not hire a musical group unless the government approved it, people who had owned land for 3 and four generations had it stolen from them, especially the Tobacco plantations and the campesino's got to work their ass off making Cigars for Castro, the party members and Europe's elite. Of course Garcia's film has been shelled by the mainstream hollow wood art community for taking the side of the "monied 1%" in 1959 Cuba, so I found an article, in a very unlikely place about a Cuban poet at first supportive of and then later tortured by the Castro regime. His name is Herberto Padilla, Padilla actually left the US in 1959 and came back to Cuba and worked for the regime. He ran a literary paper called Lunes de Revolucion but after almost 9 years of seeing what was happening in his country, he became a critic, and that great man of letters and humanitarianism Castro began to call him enemy.
I think the reason I romanticized Castro and Che for so long is because I knew about the horribly oppressive regimes we supported in El Salvador, Pre-communist Nicaragua and Chile, not to mention that our government LOVED Bastista. So for me, Castro was the guy that had held on and resisted allowing these rightwing facists from talking hold in Habana. Unfortunately, what I was HORRIBLY ignorant of is despite the fact that so many cuban children learned to read in Castros Cuba and so much disease was avoided because of mass innoculation, Castro was every bit the totalitarian that his predecessor Batista was. He was every bit the enemy of freedom, and romanticizing an "anti facist" dictator makes him no less a dictator.
Are there still some ex pats here, or their decendants, that were supporters and benefactors of Batista? Probably. Are there still ex-pats here that took advantage of the poor in Cuba and made their riches on their backs and miss that life they had? Probably. But as so many of you on here have said before, life cannot be idylic on an Island where mothers and fathers put their children into rafts made of car doors and then push out to sea in the hopes that they can survive a 90 mile jaunt across open sea to come here and live. Those people that cross to Florida ARE the people that so many of us for so many years have fooled ourselves into thinking Castro came to save.
I leave you with this:
Song of the Juggler
General, there’s a battle
between your orders and my songs.
It goes on all the time:
night, day.
It knows neither tiredness or sleep–
a battle that has gone on for many years,
so many that my eyes have never seen a sunrise
in which you, your orders, your arms, your trenches
did not figure.
A rich battle
in which, aesthetically speaking, my rags
and your uniform face off.
A theatrical battle–
it only lacks dazzling stage sets
where comedians might come on from anywhere
raising a rumpus as they do in carnivals,
each one showing off his loyalty and valor.
General, I can’t destroy your fleets or your tanks
and I don’t know how long this war will last
but every night one of your orders dies without
being followed,
and, undefeated, one of my songs survives.
–Heberto Padilla
From Legacies
(translated by Alastair Reid and Andrew Hurley)