BBC News - The Nobel and the ignoble

The big news is that Mario Vargas Llosa finally has been awarded the Nobel Prize. But while reading the BBC account of that, I came across this oddity:

BBC News - Guayabera shirt now official Cuban formal dress code

And these people still think of themselves as “revolutionary”. And who do you suppose is going to iron the things?


As an unrelated item, Vargas Llosa's recognition gives me great satisfaction. I often disagree with him politically, but I respect his serious engagement with politics even if from erroneous neoliberal premises. Most of all, I admire his art and tremendous industry in producing novels that show a rich, complex world far beyond his doctrine or mine.

When I think about V LL and me, I am reminded of Pablo Neruda's late poem “El enemigo” about an encounter with an old ideological adversary. It ends…

Allí estabamos cada uno

con su certidumbre afilada

y endurecida por el tiempo

como dos ciegos que defienden

cada uno su oscuridad.

And there we were, each one / with his certainty honed / and hardened by time / like two blind men, each defending / his incomprehension.

(That's rather loose, but “incomprehension” is closer to Neruda's meaning than “obscurity”. Perhaps “lack of clarity” is closest, except it's too wordy.) 

Hello from Havana | Harvard Magazine July-August 2009

Worth reading. Check out the reader comments, too. Hello from Havana | Harvard Magazine July-August 2009

More on our deeper and wider urbanization

Though this book isn't specifically cited in Mike Davis' Planet of the Slums (see blog entry below), it covers the same ground and uses many of the same case studies. Some of the findings are alarming but the authors eschew Davis' apocalyptic tone.

National Research Council. Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World. Washington DC: The National Academies Press, 2003.

Every big city has problems -- urban population growth is chaotic and frenzied, especially in the global south, and often creates desperate conditions -- but some have found solutions that work better than others. Also, as Davis also notes, urbanization is reaching much wider than ever, that is, urban densities and the reach of urban music, crime, markets, disease, but also of urban opportunities, are extending much farther into what used to be the rural hinterland. The opportunities are real -- urban densities permit economies of scale for providing education, transport, housing and everything else more cheaply -- but are sabotaged by urban problems including the systems of exploitation that Davis focuses on.

For the book we have underway right now my concern is the built environment, the bricks and mortar and steel and tarmac, or clapboard and canvas or adobe and twigs, that make up the physical spaces of the city. This aspect is barely touched on explicitly in this National Research Council publication, but its chapters on the importance of location, "diversity and inequality", the urban economy and "the challenge of urban governance" are all relevant, because these things shape, and are shaped by, the physical structures. Our book is on Latin America, and there are many examples here and literature citations to follow up from São Paulo, Mexico City, and even smaller places like Porto Alegre (and many other cities in Africa and Asia). But there is a startling gap: barely a mention of Cuba, one of the countries that has done the most in innovative projects to confront "diversity and inequality" and other problems. Cuban approaches would be hard to emulate in other, non-socialist countries (although Venezuela is trying), and maybe haven't always been successful even in their own country, but they deserve serious, critical examination. (I'll try to work up something on the topic.)

Guantánamo for the Cubans

Good argument by my friend César Chelala: U.S. SHOULD RETURN GUANTANAMO TO CUBA

Venezuela: preserving or imperiling reform?

I'm impressed by the argument of Venezuela Beyond the Referendum by Nikolas Kozloff. By identifying his "Bolivarian revolution" so strongly with himself, Hugo Chávez may be putting the whole operation -- the re-orientation of the country's wealth toward solving the problems of the poor -- in peril. He has also alienated a lot of people who had been, and wanted to be, allies, but who disagreed with him on some issue or strategy.

This happened in Cuba, too: people who considered themselves revolutionaries and strongly supported what we all understood were the basic principles of the revolution were driven into exile or even into armed resistance (the case of Gutiérrez Menoyo, the most famous example) because of some disagreement with Fidel Castro. Or, mainly, because they wanted different voices to be heard. Fidel survived all those mutinies; Hugo may not be so fortunate. How much better it would be if revolutionary socialists really practiced the democracy they preach. They might still make mistakes, but the mistakes would be shared. And talented, energetic people with independent minds could contribute to the common goal.

Alternatives: Cuba tries to make a socialism that grows

But can it succeed? The Cubans have proven so resilient and Cuban institutions so resistant to joining the "There is no alternative" crowd, that they may just make this work. It's a small economy, but its methods may again -- as they have been repeatedly through the 1960s and 1970s -- be a model for other low-income countries. From the Financial Times: A revolution to repair: New friends come to the aid of Raúl’s Cuba By Richard Lapper

After Fidel: Cuba's prospects

Rafael Hernández is an intelligent and well-informed observer. I knew him when he still had hair. He's well worth listening to.

Cuban tragedy

À propos of recent reports and denials of a financial scandal in Cuba's Ministry of Tourism (one of the few places where anybody can get hold of large number of dollars there), a friend asked me a provocative question: what I thought of Cuba today. Here's the answer he provoked:
Briefly, what I think is that the tragedy of Cuba is that its people have not been permitted to assume [excuse me, I'm using this in the Spanish sense of asumir -- to "appropriate," or to "accept as theirs"] the enormous achievements of 1957 (beginning of the war) or 1959 (triumph of the revolution) to, say, 1970 (when the colossal failure of the "10-million ton sugar harvest" demonstrated the weakness of a command economy) and move on. Those achievements were, 1st, freeing the island from the heavy hand of US capital so that its people had some room to breathe and maneuver ("Cuba libre"); 2nd, hugely reducing disparities in wealth and life-chances (between black and white, rural and urban, rich and poor); 3rd, bringing the entire population to literacy and expanding educational opportunities to create a highly skilled, critically conscious population; 4th, infrastructural and industrial development projects that -- while mostly uncompleted and in some cases misdirected (importing a windowless Czech factory to make refrigerators, for example, or trying to convert the green zone around Havana into an immense coffee plantation) -- nevertheless pointed the way to greater economy autonomy and improved standards of living.

Having done these things, and having developed a literate population fully capable of rational debate, they should have been allowed to open political contests to groups outside the party, and let the enormous ingenuity of the people go into economic projects more constructive than building rafts to float to Miami, or "barbacoas" (improvised lofts) as a homemade solution to the housing crisis. Some very stubborn Cubans inside the party and a pack of crazed and persistent Cubans in Miami conspired (with lots of help from Washington) to keep tensions so high that party leaders are afraid to relax their grip or let Fidel retire.