Sunday 27 November 2016

Patria o Muerte

Of course there are shortages of food and medicine in Cuba. The place is under a blockade. Certain restrictions on liberty are also to be expected during a siege.

Those berating Cuba are themselves not averse to intervening in trials, and the restrictions on liberty that they have advocated or enacted in their own countries, including this one, would not embarrass Cuba.

Although they go nowhere near as far as the ones in Saudi Arabia, which is the patron and the paymaster of those who are doing this berating.

Likewise, those paid Saudi puppets are giving effect to economic policies that have left their own countries, including this one, with food shortages and with collapsing healthcare systems.

Britain is now in receipt of Red Cross food parcels, while infant mortality is higher, and life expectancy is lower, in Washington, D.C. than they are in Cuba. These, too, are human rights issues.

Neither the United Kingdom nor the United States, however, is subject to a blockade.

Ignore the ludicrous death figures being bandied about by the only people in the present century to have murdered a Member of Parliament. Cuba would be practically depopulated if those figures were accurate.

Look out for the huge turnout from Africa at Fidel Castro's funeral. Funnily enough, they did not bother for Margaret Thatcher.

When he was released from prison, Nelson Mandela visited Cuba in order to thank the Government there.

He also visited Britain. But not in order to thank the Government here. Very far from it, in fact. That speech at Wembley Stadium is probably on YouTube.

The remaining defenders of that British Government on any issue whatever (and consider that even the present one, which is of the same party, openly believes the NUM instead on the pure facts of Orgreave) peddle a curious fantasy that they had always been in favour of ending apartheid, but that it had had to wait for the fall of the Soviet Union.

I doubt that they are kidding even themselves on that one, or that they have any desire to do so.

We shall pass over their perfectly hilarious suggestion that the fall of the Soviet Union had anything remotely to do with a some utterly uncultured fishwife, or with some old B movie actor who was literally demented and usually asleep.

Although I readily admit that Thatcher and Reagan were intellectual titans compared with Blair and Bush, Cameron and Obama.

The Thatcherites' devotion to the old regime in Pretoria, and to everything for which it stood, was absolutely fanatical.

They openly called for the introduction of apartheid in Britain. Its fall in South Africa was the worst day of their lives, and they will never forgive anyone who was right about it.

So they lash out by shooting and stabbing obscure, first term MPs who were children in the 1980s.

Whereas Cuba itself had been a kind of apartheid state and society before the Revolution. While not yet a perfect example of racial integration, it has long been unrecognisable from that period.

Everyone who lauds the old regime is white. There is a reason for that.

When Hurricane Katrina struck a largely black part of the United States, then the Cuban Government sent immediate aid, while the Bush Administration engaged in something approaching genocide by sheer negligence.

Contrary to what you may have heard, non-commercial homosexual activity between consenting adults in private has been legal in Cuba since 1979, which is longer than in either Scotland or Northern Ireland, and far longer than in several American states.

In any case, since when did those who are rushing to denounce Cuba officially approve of, or even tolerate, that kind of thing?

Cuba's constitutional definition of marriage as "the voluntarily established union between a man and a woman" is exactly what they would at least purport to wish to see in their own countries.

They approve of capital punishment in the United States, and they desire its restoration everywhere else.

They approve of torture at least on behalf of the United States, and not least when that is carried out on the island of Cuba.

Cuba's extremely liberal abortion law is in line with those in all Five of the Eyes, the pillars of the supposed Anglosphere.

Speaking of that fantastical concept, while the present Prime Minister of Canada is not the most impressive person ever to have filled that office, anyone doing so would have said much the same thing on the death of Castro, so resolute a holder out against commercial, cultural, political and military subjugation to the United States.

If to a lesser extent than Cubans, Canadians still recognise the necessity of public ownership in order to ward off American, or Chinese, or any other domination.

But we have lost that sense in Britain, where we let any and everything be gobbled up by any and everyone, just so long as we, the British nation acting politically as the British State, never own anything for ourselves.

Other people's States, as such, are considered perfectly acceptable as the colonisers of our soil and as the enslavers of our people.

Although that is not true of the present Leader of the Labour Party, who is not the hired hand of Kazakhstan that Tony Blair is.

Jeremy Corbyn's measured and nuanced response to the death of Castro bespoke an understanding that people who do not believe in Cuban sovereign self-government and self-respect do not believe in British sovereign self-government and self-respect, either.

There is no sovereignty, no self-government, no self-respect without economic sovereignty, economic self-government, economic self-respect.

There is no command without the commanding heights. Without a measure of nationalisation, there is no nation at all.

That there might arguably have been at some point before the War is immaterial. We are not living at some point before the War.

Before throwing it all away, the United Kingdom achieved such guaranteed sovereignty, self-government and self-respect without everything that marked the Cuban Revolution, which was itself quite some time ago now.

But that was because even the United Kingdom of 1945, bankrupt though it was in financial and many other ways, was not the Cuba of 1959.

That is the Cuba that the, strikingly few, dancers in the streets of Miami insanely wish to see restored to its former sickness.

The rest of us, on the other hand, are waiting for the Cuban doctors to arrive in Britain.

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