When I was 16, my mom presented me with the complete works of Che Guevera, copies of all his transcripted speeches, and a bright red Che T-shirt, bearing that familiar, empathetic silhouette. When I was your age, she said, Che was my hero. As an adult, my parents’ incessant advice to me, somewhat of a road-worn cat in my own right, is always, Boy, you gotta go to Cuba before Fidel Castro dies and the friggin’ Americans flood the place with new cars and consumer junk. They’re from a generation that adored Trudeau and maintained reasonable hopes of a system recalibrated to suit the needs of the many. They’re not communists. Au contraire, my mom spent over a decade as a politician here in Canada and my dad votes conservative. But they, like their progeny, are politicized socialists in the extreme.
So now Fidel’s on the way out, as far as anyone cares to extrapolate, and his brother’s not the man of the people that this unflappable stalwart of populism was, in an age of elitism. You can almost see the froth at the corner of the mouths of all the Yankee businessmen at the prospect of filling one more little niche economy with monocultural garbage in hopes of causing a miniscule spike in the growth of a market that is in the process of eating itself. Just one more little hit of dirty skag at the ass end of a junkie’s bell curve. Soon they’ll be in there proclaiming the victory of ‘democracy’, bulldozing villages to create opulent beach resorts, broadcasting any kind of advertisement that an analyst decided was a hit, and just generally sucking out the place’s soul through a vacuum called development.
Fidel, I’m not a communist; I don’t agree with half of the things you say; regardless, our sincerest thanks for being one of the only people on this goddamned planet to keep the wolves at bay until now. We love you. Get well soon.
Gracias. Que te vayas con Dios.
Friday, August 04, 2006
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2 comments:
The Germans have already bulldozed plantations (that belonged to the people who fled Cuba when Castro took over) to build resorts.
Heres part of a Barbara Kay editorial published today 10/08/2006 in the National Post:
Left-wing Quebec intellectuals and politicians (Pierre Trudeau being an obvious example) have always enjoyed flirtations with causes that wrap themselves in the mantle of "liberation" from colonialist oppressors -- including their very own home-grown Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ), which gave them a frisson of pleasure as it sowed terror throughout Canada in the late '60s with mailbox bombs, kidnappings and a murder.
Their cultural and historical sympathy for Arab countries from the francophonie -- Morocco, Algeria, Lebanon -- joined with reflexive anti-Americanism and a fat streak of anti-Semitism that has marbled the intellectual discourse of Quebec throughout its history, has made Quebec the most anti-Israel of the provinces, and therefore the most vulnerable to tolerance for Islamist terrorist sympathizers. (...)
Think about what this would mean if Quebec ever were to become independent, and detached from the leadership of politicians who know the difference between a democracy and a gang of fanatical exterminationists.
You can bet that Hezbollah would be off the official terrorism list by Day two of the Republic of Quebec's existence. By Day three, word would go out to the Islamosphere that Quebec was the new "Londonistan," to cite the title of a riveting new book by British journalist Melanie Phillips, chronicling the rise of militant Islam in her country.
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