Re: <nettime> Choking Cuban writers

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

What is troubling is that the US is singling out Cuba for economic
warfare while doing its damnest to promote economic bear-hugging
other socialist and ropgue states, presumably on the premise that 
economic well-being will persuade the citzenry to vote with their 
pocketbooks by buying and consumiong US products and services --
mirroring the Western mindset. All hail the surveilling Internet and 
its ideology-free pop-ups and spam.

With Cuba there appears to be a sclerosis of imagination, mirroring,
perhaps, that of the aging Cuban leaders. Do the two sides need
one another to remain immutable as did the Cold Warriors?

Not many Americas give a shit about what happens to Cuba, out of
sight out of mind. For that reason a small group of anti-Castroites
can get their jollies hammering a moribund state at the expense
of those who live under it. Not many anti-Castroites in the US
seem to give a shit about most Cubans, but they adore their
rancid ideology.

What unrestricted intellectural discourse, if not fat-headed tourism, 
could accomplish is the exchange of new ideas to replace the dreary
remnants of the Cold War -- still being milked by lead-assed
ideologues for economic benefit and to avoid having to get a
new mindset.

All praise for the 75 Cuban intellectuals and journalists who bucked
their system -- it would be nice to have a similar percentage of our
mind-workers do the same in the US: risk jail and execution for
defying their source of steady income. Not just pretending to
do so by tickling the imaginary sensitivities of bullheads, but 
performing genuinely criminal acts.

To be sure the US justice system and prison industry are eager 
for this development, Patriot Act-primed.

The odds of civil disobedience becoming criminal in the US is
not at hand, the 60s cauterized sensitivies, and thus there is 
not much to be said of intellectual courage in America, harmless
aestheticization of ideology is paramount -- pays damn swell,
what with galleries and theaters and think-not centers abounding.

Admiring Fidel awaits Broadway splashdown -- distancing
mindwork set to music and dance, then a blockbuster at
the Met to purge whatever slight empathy for the world's poor
remain in salons of democratic and socialist and democratic
socialist and liberative wordgames bountiful.

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