8 Comments so far

1. Guillermo February 27th, 2007 6:43 pm

   Very interesting article. I would have never thought Cuba, would be ahead of the United States with regards to gay rights. I guess you learn something new every day.

2. PJD February 27th, 2007 7:28 pm

   Cuba is also ahead of the US in infant mortality, and most measures of health, including life expectancy. Also very low crime.

   The US propaganda machine is very effective in characterizing Cuba and Havana in particular as some kind of place of squalor patrolled by machine-gun wielding Stazi, skies gray all the time, even the Caribbean waters no longer blue… etc…etc… you know, like we were conditioned to think those awful communist places like Warsaw, Prague, Blegrade, Leibzig, etc…were all like - with the the sun suddenly breaking out in all its glory in 1991 - as it will in Cuba when Castro dies.

   What nonsense.

   In reality, Havana is like any other city in the endemically poor Caribbean basin - Hotels, traffic, shops, people getting to work, etc. Even cabarets and nightclubs - but without the gambling and Mafia, and much, lower crime. It is ccertainly much better than Port-Au-Prince or Kingston or Managua, or probably even Caracas.

3. MJustinF February 28th, 2007 7:24 am

   I’m endlessly dismayed by the number of Cuban (so-called) exiles who have come to the US to spread the ideology they claim to have fled: usually the most bigoted, anti-individual rights, anti-homosexual, anti-free-press, anti-free-expression, and certainly pro anything ultra-right-wing and repressive. How did this happen? If Cuba indeed grants an equal recognition to same=gender couples –it will simply be the long overdue correction to what many already believed true socialism was about. Shame on the US. Does that list of shame ever begin to diminish here?

4. Poet February 28th, 2007 10:41 am

   My progressive friends some of you are making the same mistake Bushco made in going into iraq, deciding to support or oppose something on the basis of ideology.

   As despicable of his use of it is Frank Luntz is correct when he observes:

   Americans “on the whole [are] ill-bred, provincial, sullen and frightened. They are…susceptible to mere rhetoric and responsive to arguably bogus appeals to values, no matter what the facts” (Clark Judge, “Words That Work,” OpinionJournal.com, Jan. 23, 2007, citing Frank Luntz’s book by that name).

   Intolerance of homosexuals is not a matter of ideology it is a matter of cultural prejudice that goes back to before the founding of this country, solving such a deep seated disease will not come through any political ideology anymore than invading Iraq in the name of Democracy will causae it to become such.

5. MJustinF February 28th, 2007 2:21 pm

   Poet: I think one of the primary US ideologies that promotes the kind of profound cultural hatred you discuss is the basic ideology promoted by the christo-fascists who seem to be running quite a lot of the show in US at the moment (and in the US invasion of Iraq.) They appeal to the fundamentalists who thrive on that simplistic doctrine: this is what I believe; it must be true because I believe it; therefore my beliefs should control ALL through public policy and laws. It is correct that hatred, bigotry, intolerance of any sort cannot be erased from people’s inner-most beings by law — but laws can protect the targets of those who want their prejudices/ideologies turned into policies and edicts to validate their hatred. Luntz’s observation is dead-on. Attend any local school board’s discussion on creationism and then imagine what must be running through the mind of a US soldier who is the product of a belief system that even considers giving equal time to that mumbojumbo in any public forum and now must be feeling empowered to spread not only US style deomocracy but US style christo-fascism. Was Luntz also talking about South Americans?

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