Cuba and the survival of the left

My friend Daniel del Solar just forwarded to me a lengthy, detailed article from Le Monde Diplomatique about the Bush administration's unceasing campaign to destroy the independence of Cuba. (Click for English-language version.) As I just wrote to Daniel, it seems to me that, at least since Nixon, this is what the US Government has been doing all along, with no success, and similar to what they did to Chile with tragic success (the destruction of democracy for a very long period, which meant an opening of the economy to rapine by US and other international business interests). The difference between now and earlier periods is the world context: no more Soviet Union, a much diminished left in most of the hemisphere. Or maybe not so much diminished as fundamentally changed in composition -- less proletarian -- and strategy -- more nationalist & more self-reliant.

The left can't die. It's simply not possible. I think there are two things that can never be killed, even though governments of one kind or another have tried over and over, and the reason is that no matter how suppressed, they spring up again. One is God, i.e., the hope for an individual, nonmaterial solution to desperate situations. The other is what I still think of as communism, though it has other names: the aspiration, even the drive, for a collective and practical (material) solution.