Since I have had far more than the usual time for lofty speculation, now that I am old and retired and provided for, at least NOW, by my pension and social security, and stuck entirely indoors with only non-conversational animal companions, I have though a lot about the Caribbean, Cuba and Dominican Republic specifically.
As learned people who study African American history have often said, American history is the history of Slavery. And the wider your perspective, the more you see how true this is. I became interested in Dominican Republic via a novel I have been reading by Isabelle Allende, The Island Beneath the Sea. It is an epic of the Gone With the Wind, or Dr. Zhivago variety. There is a central romance, if it can be called that, a major revolution, failed uprisings and immigration in it. There is the history of the exploitation of the "New World" by the old world in it. First the Spanish, spear-headed by Christopher Columbus come and annihilate the indigenous people, then set to major exploitation of whatever can be taken, by theft, mining, lumbering, the destruction of native species, the enslavement of first the indigenous people, then the slaves to produce the first in a variety of exploitable crops, sugar cane.
When all the natives are dead, people are kidnapped wholesale from Africa and sold into bondage. The average lifespan of a sugar cane slave was 18 months. At first they were cheap enough that they could be easily replaced. When the slave trade was outlawed by sea, internal slave breeding and selling took over but that drove the price up. Meanwhile, slaves were escaping, forming bands and rebelling, usually to fail and be slaughtered, but the groups formed and formed and grew and eventually succeeded.
Colonial exploiters fled to Cuba and the US, in particular to cheap land and a familiar climate in Louisiana. Then Napoleon sold us the land.
The successful revolutions had to find some support until they puled themselves together and found a source of income different from the old one. When the oppressed peasants revolted under the leadership of Castro in Cuba, they turned to Russia, another communist/socialist state. For a long successful period Cuban products went to Russia and loans and investments and materials went to Cuba from the USSR. Then the communist state fell, the Berlin wall came down and Cuba had no sponsor.
The Cubans, under the leadership by then of Batiste, turned to the US where mobsters were happy to invest via hotels and casinos to launder crime profits. The Revolution was being hijacked by capitalism and crime and Castro founded a new revolution and took
Cuba back. But without Soviet help, the country declined from its pinnacle of free education and free medical care, into decrepitude and abject poverty, bread lines, shortages, no more electric power and plumbing. Castro turned to dictatorship to hold things together while he tried to figure it out. He never did.
And I can't either. Communism is a failure, capitalism is so destructive it has to eventually fail. I thought maybe I should have studied economics, but so far, no one seems to have come up with an answer. The Scandinavian countries are doing well, but only so long as the balance of power stays stable, between the two, seemingly insane super powers, Russia and America.
So, slave culture came here and made America what it was before the Civil War, and the affects of that trauma upon an entire population can still be felt as can the deep prejudice of white people against people of color.
My final thought was, I can't figure this out. Far ore intelligent and gifted people than I am haven't figure it out, maybe I should look inward rather than outward for answers. As in the Carle Woese, life is a stream, a child puts a stick in the stream and eddies and swirls are created, then they are absorbed back into the stream and keep on flowing.
It seems that all I can do at this point, is observe and wait to see what will happen next.
After Cuba Libre on Netflix, I watched Castro and the Cameraman, an independent documentary, then I watched a clever and interesting film on Che Guevara, where a man reading a biography of Che Guevara travels to all the places in C. G.'s life and explains the import of that time and place in the life of one of the most recognized and revered historical figures of the 20th century.
It made me think how little we know or are taught about our closest neighbors, Mexico, Cuba, Canada. I imagine few of the people I know could even name the leaders of those three countries. Miguel Diaz--Canal is head of Cuba, Andreas Manuel Lopez Abrader is president of Mexico and as we are all most likely more aware, Justin Trudeau is prime minister of Canada. All of these countries as does our own, have a bloody, long history of struggle to exploit the Americas through colonialism, escape from exploitation by a revolution against colonialism, and the struggle to find a successful economic system for the people. We haven't struggled enough with finding a solution to save our land and water, however.
Happy Trails, whether in the world or in your head!
Jo Ann
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