A land of endless waiting and palpable erosion

March 21, 2016 8:45 AM

Cuba on the Edge of Change
posted by BuddhaInABucket (7 comments total)

Dear Gray Lady:

CSS was not developed with the intent of making your online readership seasick from wildly surging and receding photographs.
posted by belarius at 8:59 AM on March 21, 2016 [9 favorites]

"Though Cuban society has been closed off from the world for a half-century, there remains an uncanny openness about the nation’s people. Pop into a random apartment and the worst you may get is a wary stare, followed by a joke. Cubans seem inoculated from the preoccupation with privacy that infects other countries. Life is lived in public here, doors cast open to the night, beckoning the passers-by."

As happy as I am with the current rapprochement, what a spectacularly tone deaf way to casually describe a country with a fully functional and brutal state apparatus for internal surveillance and repression and where Committees for the Defense of the Revolution exist in every neighborhood to report on "counter-revolutionary" activity. In our excitement for the end of what has ultimately aged into a ridiculously absurd approach to Cuban/American relations, lets not forget that this is a brutal dictatorship we are talking about and maybe think critically about how and why Cuba might have had the "preoccupation with privacy that infects other countries" beaten out of it.

Fuck this nauseatingly motion sick mess of trite five dollar words and noble savage tropes.
posted by Blasdelb at 9:30 AM on March 21, 2016 [16 favorites]

Yeah - I'd like to go again once before everything is "ruined" by money. As the pictures demonstrate, there is an aesthetic fascination in the decay. But when I was there the brute poverty and the surveillance and the repression and the despair was so over-powering, I went home before planned and didn't see half of the things I'd wanted to see.
At the time, Spain was doing a lot to help with education and planning, while Spanish businesses were building tourist facilities. But as I understand it, the government side of this pulled out after the bank crash. I don't know about the commercial side.
posted by mumimor at 10:03 AM on March 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

If you want a Latin American country with a pacifist foreign and domestic policy, a comfortable social safety net, and a willingness to pose as a living and functioning critique of the United States and the United States's influence in the region, there is such a country.

It's called Costa Rica.

If instead your attention and apologia are directed towards Cuba, it's for reasons besides what I listed above. Reasons that may not reflect well on you.
posted by ocschwar at 10:11 AM on March 21, 2016 [3 favorites]

Bueno, eso escaló rápidamente.
posted by Flashman at 10:42 AM on March 21, 2016 [2 favorites]

Related: This photo of Airforce One about to make a landing in Havana has been making the rounds over the weekend.
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:58 AM on March 21, 2016

China, Iran, Cuba... it will take decades to overturn generations of messaging. Nuanced complicated relationships don't fit soundbytes well. Would love to see stories from entirely different perspectives/ideologies than just the NYT
posted by infini at 11:25 AM on March 21, 2016 [2 favorites]