Comments on: Freedom of Expression and Socialism in Cuba

By: ron ridenour

ron ridenour — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 15:00:14 +0000

Thank you all for your comments. I especially thank Ron Horn for understanding my origins, my political-solidarity stance with Cuba.
To Lichen will I say that if you are right you leave us only with the raw force of profit determined societies and the consequent extreme suffering of billions of people and constant war. To Garth will I say that I agree that anarchism should be discussed as an alternative–albeit quite Don Quixote–to state run socialism. The fact that some people are discussing rather openly is a postive sign. Another group, ¨color cubano¨, within the culture arena has been discussing racism in Cuba for ten years but is still at the discussion stage.

By: Garth

Garth — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 06:48:39 +0000

Oh yeah, and the idea of full participation from the bottom up is a particularly anarchist idea, so yeah, Cubans have been thinking about it whether they know it or not.

By: Garth

Garth — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 06:46:48 +0000

In the long run… Do whatever you want in the short run, and seize whatever freedom and prosperity you can together, however necessary… You only live once…

By: Garth

Garth — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 06:46:00 +0000

If the issue is supposed to be socialism, they ought to cover anarchism. I’m not saying it’s THE way, and I don’t think anyone’s got it right yet, but that’s why we gotta listen to all the ideas. Besides, if they’re finding that inadequate participation from the populace is the problem, anarchism would be a great topic to study in the interests of socialism.

We’ve forgotten socialism’s beginnings, the split between authoritative and non-authoritative socialists. The authoritative ones produced a sort of single-corporation absolute monopoly over all resources in Russia (after letting the people play around successfully with anarchism even if they didn’t know what anarchism was about).

Basically, nobody’s theory is right, and everyone’s got their own way of doing things. If you try to make them all follow the same theory, well, they just won’t do it. People have to change, not the system. People have to learn, have to stand up for every human right and fight against every injustice. There are myriad different social questions to be answered, and no one theory answers them all, or is particularly flawless. It’s just like fighting over religions…

Of course, it’s amazing they’ve survived at all living right next to a violent imperialist nation (regardless of what country the shots are really being called from ;-) . If they just let everybody do everything they want, the CIA would be right in there ready to smash things up right away.

Which just goes to show, we’re not going to have freedom ANYWHERE until we’ve got freedom EVERYWHERE. It’s a global struggle and every effort from ALL people counts. Every person has different ideas, and if two people talk to each other, they complement each other’s knowledge with their own unique ideas. Overall, good ideas aren’t discarded easily, but ideas like killing millions of Arabs in the name of Zionism er uh the War on Terror, ideas like that don’t last too long.

By: lichen

lichen — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 05:25:27 +0000

I don’t agree that revolutionary marxism needs to be revamped; we don’t need the model at all anymore, we don’t need to rehash the Russian revolution or pretend that it is a bad thing that, for instance, the communist government of Poland went down; the bad thing is that Solidarity was betrayed; that new, creative, dynamic, deeply participatory forms of socialism which do not need Marx have been suppressed.

By: Jennifer Kismat Ali

Jennifer Kismat Ali — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 01:35:52 +0000

i am a student of sociology in trinidad, west indies. i am always interested in the politics of Cuba. it is refreshing to note the efforts that are being made to bring positive change to Cuba. since i have always admired the cuban people and what they have achieved, we in the
caribbean are watching to see further benefits to the people. i think what is needed in all the caribbean is some form of socialist democracy that moves people away from this capitalist mentality that is eroding the life-blood o f our society.

By: jbosanok

jbosanok — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 00:54:05 +0000

I second Ron’s sentiment. Difficult, indeed. All thanks to the author.

By: Ron Horn

Ron Horn — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:36:28 +0000

I really appreciate hearing about Cuban political affairs from this author who I believe is a critical friend of Cuba and socialism. It has been very difficult to get any kind of objective reports–reports that are reasonably free of left-wing sectarianism and right-wing ideology.

By: Michael Kenny

Michael Kenny — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:09:02 +0000

I was amused by the cloudcuckooland bit about the “passive populace, which did not resist the collapse” of the European communist dictatorships. Cubans have obviously never been allowed to see that not only did the populations “not resist”, it was precisely the people who booted the communists out!

Remember the weekly demonstrations in Leipzig, the East German tourists in Hungary who refused to go home, the East Germans breaking down the border gates and sweeping into West Berlin, the Bucharest crowd booing Ceausescu, the crowds who joined Yeltsin when the communists tried to restore the dictatorship and the soldiers who refused to fire on them, the near insurrection in Lithuania, Slovenia walking out of Yugoslavia. To say nothing of Solidarnosc!

Passive my foot!