Paradises Lost and Found

Whether anyone is incarcerated, or, worse, assassinated by the FBI, for "disobedience" in the U.S. is a factual question that one might go about answering by talking to the likes of Leonard Pelletier, Hurricane Carter, Geronimo Pratt, or any number of Black Panthers. Be that as it may, is it really worse to be incarcerated for disobedience than for, say, simply being black? Or having the wrong opinions and not knowing when to shut up about them? American jurisprudence, both past and present, is rife with cases of people being locked up, or executed, on grounds which are just as objectionable as desobediencia or reunion ilicita.

Hell's bells: China incarcertes thousands on similar grounds and they have super special buddy trading status. Doesn't this severely undercut any official claim that we embargo and subvert Cuba's government because of human rights violations?

Appeals to Amnesty International to show that somehow -- apart from it being a "Commie dictatorship" -- Cuba really is an awful place relative to the United States really ought to be appeals of full-disclosure: the U.S. is regularly among the worst human rights violators in the Western hemisphere.

Human rights violations are human rights violations; picking and choosing among one's favorites isn't going to give a consistent picture. After all, how many retarded, poor or juvenilles has Cuba executed lately? Texas alone has executed a lot. And will execute a lot more before capital punishment is banned, if ever.

As for having something on the ball and, thus, escaping U.S. corporate wage slavery, sure, there are exceptions. But when did one's claim to live as a free person rest on one's relative intelligence? It's not called wage "slavery" merely for effect.

Of course it's better to be a member of the American elite than the Cuban elite, which may be relatively impoverished, or even relatively small, but certainly isn't an elite of one. But what has the relative advantages of being an American elite over a Cuban elite go to do with anything? It certainly doesn't make America a more fitting place for Elian Gonzalez; nor does it make the average Cuban or average American any more or less well off, any more or less able to exercise their rights as citizens.

The point of all of these exercises is to attack the hypocrisy of the right-wing Cuban and Republican propaganda that Cuba is far and away the worst place on earth and American far and away the best. If you can shake off the shackles of propaganda about Cuba, it's obvious which of those is the biggest lie.

And I'd still rather be born poor or black or brown in Havana than in Washinton D.C. I'd still rather get cancer in Havana as a poor person than in the U.S. But, or so the propaganda goes, if I just had "a little something on the ball" I wouldn't be poor or lacking health care.

After all, if the poor and the uninsured and the hungry children in America really wanted to get ahead they could just, as Newt Gingrich recently suggested, start computer companies and have IPOs. I guess they don't because they're all just so damn lazy.