As you know, I seldom send much out on Latin America, though it deserves attention no less than the Middle East or Asia. (Unfortunately, it’s had the “attention” of successive American governments since the early 19th century.) But I’ve published the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano from time to time over the years, most recently his wonderful Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World, which at the moment is a splendid antidote (though better tasting than any doctor’s medicine) to our increasingly U.S.-centric sense of our global self. In the upcoming June issue of the Progressive magazine he has the following piece on poor Cuba, embargoed forever, and on the Castro government’s response to the post-Iraq possibility that it might come into the gun sights of predators and warthogs and so on.
Galeano, to mix languages, is a mensch and the following piece, to my mind, represents exactly the position any genuine anti-imperial movement should take when it comes to repression and execution, whether in Texas or in Cuba. Tom
Cuba hurts
By Eduardo Galeano
The Progressive Magazine
June 2003The recent wave of executions and arrests in Cuba is very good news for the universal superpower, which remains obsessed with removing this persistent thorn from its paw. But it is very bad news-and very sad-for those of us who admired the valor of this tiny country, so capable of greatness, but who also believe that freedom and justice go together or not at all.
It is a time of very bad news: As if the perfidious impunity of the slaughter in Iraq were not enough, the Cuban government is now committing acts that, as Uruguayan writer Carlos Quijano would say, “sin against hope.”
* * *
Rosa Luxembourg, who gave her life for the socialist revolution, disagreed with Lenin over the project of a new society.
Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist, is the author of “The Open Veins of Latin America” and “Memory of Fire.”
To read more Galeano click here
The recent wave of executions and arrests in Cuba is very good news for the universal superpower, which remains obsessed with removing this persistent thorn from its paw. But it is very bad news-and very sad-for those of us who admired the valor of this tiny country, so capable of greatness, but who also believe that freedom and justice go together or not at all.
It is a time of very bad news: As if the perfidious impunity of the slaughter in Iraq were not enough, the Cuban government is now committing acts that, as Uruguayan writer Carlos Quijano would say, “sin against hope.”
* * *
Rosa Luxembourg, who gave her life for the socialist revolution, disagreed with Lenin over the project of a new society.
Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist, is the author of “The Open Veins of Latin America” and “Memory of Fire.”