Cuba and the Rising Sun of Socialism in the Americas
The United States public education system is broken and needs a top-to-bottom restructuring. Teachers must use GoFundMe to get basic supplies. The only thing that the system excels at is being a school-to-prison pipeline, especially for minorities. Even the buildings are designed like prisons. Pigs, usually old and not ready to retire, armed with machine guns and K9s patrol the halls. These glorified mall cops are armed for a war zone!
No where in the entirety of Havana did I see any police or army with this kind of arsenal. Not even in the most sacred halls of government and Cuban monuments did I see authorities with more than a small handgun. Most just carried batons at most. But the Cuban ops had me experience an unforgettable sensation that gives me goosebumps just remembering: For the first time in my life 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙥𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙘𝙤𝙥𝙨 𝙢𝙖𝙙𝙚 𝙢𝙚 𝙛𝙚𝙚𝙡 𝙨𝙖𝙛𝙚. And Not in the sense that all the travel guides had me believe, that the ‘big brother’ Cuban police has a vice grip on the capital to keep the tourist dollars flowing. I saw right through this attempt to denigrate the unbelievable accomplishments of the Cuban people. I wonder what all of those travel guides say about crime in their books for the rest of Latin American cities. I wonder if they blame the danger you can experience everywhere…BUT Cuba on the totalitarian, corrupt, right-wing regimes propped up by the US military and bourgeois tax-haven money? With what impudence can any gringo say even a word about Cuban crime. The USA has 19x the amount of violent crime involving guns as Cuba. The USA has 23x the number of gun murders, (9th highest in the world) as Cuba. We also have 24x as many murders committed by minors (3rd highest), & we have 8x as many executions (7th). The US imprisons more people than anywhere else, 2.3 million.
But we cannot talk about the US Criminal Justice system unless we mention the additional 840k people on parole, & the 3.6 million on probation. The more you look at the numbers the more you envy the stormers of the Bastille. For example: 𝟕𝟔% 𝐎𝐅 𝐏𝐄𝐎𝐏𝐋𝐄 𝐇𝐄𝐋𝐃 𝐈𝐍 𝐉𝐀𝐈𝐋𝐒 𝐀𝐑𝐄 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐕𝐈𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐃 𝐎𝐅 𝐀𝐍𝐘 𝐂𝐑𝐈𝐌𝐄. Each year 600k enter prison, but more than 10 𝘮𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘯 go to jail. This human rights tragedy is driven by predatory local bail practices. Most people arrested are able to pay bail within a few hours or days. But even a small percentage of a figure like 10 million amounts in a shameful number of people who are detained in jail who have been neither convicted nor sentenced of a crime: 540,000. For this half-a-million, their only crime is failing to afford the price tag of freedom: $10k, the median nationwide bail. For a person who can not afford bail, $10k represents about 8 months of income. On top of this, in a given year about 150k people are incarcerated for “technical violations” while on probation or parole, i.e. re-arrested without having committed a crime.
Cuba’s total prison population is 57k; the US’s total child prison population is 63k. Of these 63k, more than 10k were arrested for “offenses” that are not actual crimes. 12k are immigrants and refugees separated from their families. Americans are the largest consumers of drugs in the world, and without our addictions, Reagan and the CIA couldn’t have trafficked cocaine from Nicaragua to fund the Contras. Without our addictions, many hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, Central Americans, and Colombians would not have perished. The Free Market provided, and the invisible hand came with a needle and a crack-rock too. The war on drugs is more of a war on competition for the block. America has raked its talons across the hemisphere, but not Cuba!
There is no opiate crisis in Cuba. There are not Cuban cartels smuggling drugs into Miami. The Cuban government does not sell drugs to finance foreign coups. Cuba does not arrest millions of people of color for non-violent drug possession, and then legalize marijuana, creating a multi-billion dollar market for a white, yuppie Cannabis plantation masters.
While in Havana, every afternoon the school children would release, and I’d see them roaming about the streets in uniform. Just as I felt jealousy of a country of people who could feel proud of their police, I felt jealousy of the Cuban parents who never have to worry about their children getting slaughtered by a Neo-Nazi at school. I felt jealous of what it must be like to live in a country that spends 7% of its GDP on education. As I remembered going hungry in high school because I couldn’t afford lunch, I felt jealous knowing that all Cuban children have their books, uniforms, & meals paid for. Maybe one day, American students, workers and teachers will stand together and demand what is ours, as they have done in Cuba. Maybe one day instead of 7% of kids dropping out, we will match Cuba’s less than 1%.
In all fairness, I have no right to be seriously jealous considering my colossal privilege compared to the average Cuban. Cuba has achieved near-miraculous standards of living, education and especially healthcare, despite half a century of crippling economic blockade, and the troubles of the 90s, after they lost the support of the USSR. That Cuba can accomplish so much, with so little, while America crumbles and squanders enormous wealth, resources, and human lives, so that a select few may live a life of sickening decadence, is a disgrace and every single American who defends the status quo should be ashamed. Disregarding hypothetical morals about privilege, the more I reflect, the more that I understand what my initial reaction of jealousy is a deeper symptom of: anger and shame. For my country, and especially shame that I am complicit in America’s crumbling through my inaction.
And deeper still, fear. Fear that everything I believe in is a lost cause. Fear that the little voice in the back of my head casting doubt on my dream of a brighter future is right. I have a mere handful of memories pre-9/11. Flashes, emotions more than concrete memories. My little brother wasn’t born until after 9/11. We’ve grown up together, a generation of kids who have never known what its like not to be at war. The baby boomers are the first generation to have had it better than their parents as well as their children and I fear that it won’t be any different for Millenials and Gen-Z.
I have a fear that revolves around the haunting idea of Capitalist Realism. Mark Fisher’s book of the same name opens with a discussion of the film Children of Men, a film in which society has fallen worldwide into a bleak dystopia caused by a fertility crisis. ‘Only Britain Soldiers On’, claims a propaganda advert following a world building montage. New York was nuked, and no where else is much better save for the United Kingdom. 18 years since the last child was born, Britain has descended into a hyper fascist Orwellian state complete with ghettos and concentration camps for the massive refugee influx. When the film was released in 2006, it was largely ignored, but has since developed a cult following. In 2006, we were still flying high on ultra-nationalist fervor from the war on terror, and the great recession was still a few years off. But watching the film today is genuinely uncomfortable for how many parallels there are to our own world.
“Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” Fisher writes.
Our only hope is if we prove that a coherent alternative to Capitalism DOES exist. If the United States can afford tax cuts for the rich, the United States can afford to feed, house, and educate every child, from Pre-k through University. If the United States can afford trillion dollar endless wars and bailouts for Wall Street vampires sucking the life from the economy, the United States can afford to end carceral slavery, mass incarceration, the war on drugs and to begin repairing, rebuilding and healing the damage done by generations of racism. And you can be damned sure that we can afford to eradicate the threat of white supremacy, and make mass shootings a thing of the past. Despite all the odds being stacked against them, alternatives to capitalism DO exist today in many countries. None of them are perfect, but the achievements of popular democracy in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and elsewhere are shining beacons of hope that another world is still possible…For now.
Crime Data:
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Cuba/United-States/Crime
Education data:
