Cuba is a beautiful place filled with amazingly incredible people, my people. But these people deserve so much more. Cuba was the pearl of the Antilles, the preferred island for the Spanish, and the envy of Latin America. Havana was beautiful the way San Francisco and Barcelona are today, not the way ancient Aztec temples or Egyptian pyramids are; but what was once the vibrant home of my abuelos and their contemporaries is now a pretty, boho chic relic for American visitors.
I have friends on the left who eagerly visited Cuba and came back saying how wonderful it is. Socialism is that hip.
Socialism “that hip.” It must also appear virtuous, and even effective, to those who have been “taught” that Castro inherited a socioeconomic basket case of Sub-Saharan African proportions and not a county that — by the standards of 1959 — ranked the highest in Latin America and was even ahead of many European countries let alone all Asian Tigers.
Here’s my charitable interpretation (or best attempt, anyway): it’s not socialism itself that’s popular, but the “authenticity” of Cuba, free as it is of chain restaurants, Hilton Hotel accommodations, tourist traps, etc. Your modern hipster doofus is not so much a committed socialist, but he has a real disdain for commercial culture, or maybe what Bryan Caplan would call anti-market bias, and he distrusts for-profit entities large enough that the employees don’t all know each other. Thus, he finds Havana a worthwhile escape from that, as it’s a lot closer than Romania or Belarus, and the residents are non-white, so it is untroubling that they remain impoverished, as that’s assumed to be their natural state.
I think there’s also the class-signaling element of it. Remember how in Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks described the Bobo tendency to turn vacations into ordeals, like climbing a mountain or skiing across a glacier? Well, the Caribbean is a perfectly sensible and attractive vacation destination for Americans of all stripes, but see…if you’re of a certain social set, you can’t go to some five star all-inclusive resort like Sandals or Paradise Island and sip margaritas and lay on the beach…how plebeian! You pick some backward undeveloped spot on the map, instead, where you can experience a bit of some indigenous culture in order to expand your horizons while you relax and disconnect from the modern world (but not too backward and undeveloped, like Port au Prince; that’s just depressing).
Anyway, that’s my take, based on my boss, who probably makes 200k a year, is on partner track, and certainly no socialist, having taken a trip there a couple years ago with her friends and come back and yakked about it to me.
See? Nationalism is not all bad. A proud Cuban. Nothing wrong with that. And even lefties can love a nationalist country if it has the right exoticism.
And no mention of Cuba’s “diversity.” How can that be? Can a society without a thriving grievances industry truly be appealing to a leftist?
Give the hipsters a little slack. This is not nearly as bad as Raghuran Rajan going on about “China will continue to have enlightened meritocratic leadership.”
The reason that US natives love Cuba may be that like Cubans, they gained their nation by a revolt of the elites. Castro, and more importantly, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes and Calixto Garcia, like George Washington and many of the other individuals who launched the colonial rebellions, were products of plantations, either children of rich plantation owners or plantation owners themselves. So Americans, like Cubans, have a sort of imbedded cultural deference to elite authority and a propensity to worship the shackles of abject submission to authority and play sports like baseball where the arbitrary whim of the umpire calling pitches and strikes rules the game. In contrast, rebellions against colonial masters in much of South America were led by commoners such as the great Tiradentes in Brazil and José Joaquín de Olmedo in Guyaquil. And this is part of why life in most of South America has a much less authoritarian cast than it does in Cuba and the US and much less of the strict segregation of society into labeled castes.
If American hipsters wanted to experience something really different, they would spend a few weeks in South America in a third tier city or town, away from the coasts, and get to know a few actual working people. Cuba is not the only place that there is a whole different world outside the industrial cubicle farms and hyper-structured and controlled bureaucracies that define the typical American life.
Is it possible that the natural beauty of a country and the warmth of its human inhabitants is independent of the political system that is imposed on it? I have not been to Cuba, but I know people who visited as medical professionals who were very impressed by the warmth of the people. Our economic/political systems ought to be organic arising out of our needs and organized to answer those needs. Unfortunately, oppressive governmental structures arise in small and in large societies, in primitive and in advanced countries. I believe that we in the US are better off than most, maybe all others. We need to be vigilant to preserve what we have. What are the best policies to help other nations advance? The policies of isolation and boycott 1960 resulted in Fidel living a long time, never missing a meal, and never dropping the whip.
Um.. This sounds like you are finding the worst in your opponents that you don’t like.
The article is fairly mundane picture of a 3rd generation Cuban-American who enjoyed the visit to the homeland and has little to do with politics.
Can’t a place be a wonderful place visit, good people but have poor econo-political system?
(That said I did Obama opening the US relations with Cuba as the Castro brothers can’t last forever and I do believe Trump’s retraction was decrease the long chances of US influence in Cuba.)
I wonder if the peoples of American allies such as South Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea and Guatemala also deserve more. Or if only Cubans and Iranians deserve more. I really wonder.
A bunch of points in no particular order.
1. I’d trust the hipsters more if they went to lots of different places, with various sociopolitical regimes, and had the same pre-conceived opinions of each place, then afterwards still insisted that Cuba was the best place to visit and the place we should all learn a lot from. I’d even trust them more if they went to all the Carribean locations over and over and pronounced that Cuba was obviously the best rather than Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico or other places that are somewhat similar.
2?. Lots of screwed up (by our standards) places have inhabitants who demonstrate human warmth and are kind and friendly to foreigners / tourists. And many of these places look like they have a lot of potential and really should be better off.
3. I believe Paul Hollander wrote some of the paradigmatic books on “political pilgrims” who went to Communist countries and came back talking about how great things are.
4. Don’t underestimate the “tropical wonderland” and “exotica” factor. Cuba is a tropical island, not very isolated or benighted, and fairly developed yet obviously different from the Mainland USA, in a way that lots of people like. I’m saying this based on revealed preference. It is revealed preferred that the inhabitants of many “Nordic or Anglo Saxon Protestant / Germanic temperate places” tend to long for visits to places south of them that are warmer, sunnier, more Latin, more relaxed. Europeans do it, Americans do it.
In contrast, it takes a different personality to go to some place like Communist Romania and say “this is great!” Compared to Cuba, communist Romania was colder, drabber, and exotic but not “let’s go there for a vacation” exotic. More likely you would say it was characterized by Stalinist architecture, poor cuts of meat, surly service workers, grandiose and highly polluting smokestack industries. And Ceaucescu (sp?) was a strongman less easily romanticized than Castro.
Paul Hollander, RIP.
His book on “Political pilgrims” is apropos to this thread.
The tribute below notes a larger thread in his work is an interest in “self delusion.” We could ask our hipster friends, “So, when you are moving to Cuba for good?”
https://www.nas.org/articles/a_tribute_to_paul_hollander