Finally managed to download that blog, it wouldn't come the other night .... pretty light stuff, just the guy's rant page, irritating for the way he does hard carriage return each three words and then double-spaces the lines ... he supports the embargo, it would appear .... i always want to ask people like that, What good do you think your embargo will do, and specifically how will it do it? ..... then, What is your alternative to contact between people? ... granted Castro is running a gaol, yes yes, but the question is what do we do about it - Do you want the US to invade the island?
Anything but an unqualified No to the last, and they lose me for sure .... on the embargo, it's always travel i think of more than trade in goods .... it may be true to a degree that the latter could 'support the regime bla bla bla' .... wouldn't by much though, and far stronger is the power of ideas, which people carry around with them all the time ... sure, most visitors will not be travellers, but 'tourists', park their butts on some gringolandia beach and sip drinks worth a month's wages to a cubano, however for every dozen or two of those, there will slip in an intrepid traveller willing to push the limits, curious about what's around the corner behind that Prohibido sign
'If the people who stay there don't want freedom' - we probably don't all get the same images when we hear that term, 'freedom' ... you don't know what you've got till it's gone, says Joni Mitchell, but you also can't comprehend something you've never had - the great majority of cubanos living were born long after the Batista regime, under which only a tiny elite had any 'freedom' as you and i understand the word, and that elite is no longer there
Never heard of Starband, i'll look it up, very interested here in rural access to the net, both in BC and Chiapas our houses are far from cities and ADSL, cable not practical in either case .... all satellite access i've checked out before was unreasonably expensive, though
Another thing about cubanos, of which few seem aware, is the racial split ... a little more than half are black ... the previous regime and the great majority of FNAC et al were/are white ... race relations have changed in the US in the last thirty years, there is now something very like 'freedom', not everybody in Cuba has heard about this, however ..... which is due to Castro controlling expression, yes, well what should we do about that? |
