Fidel retires

"This is the event that fifty years of U.S. policy was designed to stop." Sarah Stephens - Huffington Post

David Seaton's News Links

Compared to Switzerland, Castro’s Cuba is truly a vile tyranny. However, compared to neighboring Haiti, the favelas of Brazil or even post-Katrina New Orleans, for that matter, Cuba is Switzerland.

Cuba may be the only country in the world where African slavery once existed where today there are no children of color living in squalor, without preventive medical care or proper schooling. Could that have been achieved without such brutal repression? It is difficult to say, because it has never happened anyplace else.

I wrote this in a post last year about infant mortality in Mississippi:

On lifelong reading and observation I have come to the conclusion that African slavery and its aftermath form a pan-American nation and that Mississippi has more in common with the Dominican Republic than with Iowa and more in common with Haiti than Vermont. So I don't compare Cuba, for example, with Sweden, France, Lichtenstein or Canada. I compare it with Jamaica, Brazil and... Mississippi.

I 'll stand on that. DS

Mississippi: born under a bad sign

Two li'l darkies
Lyin' in bed
One was sick
An' the other most dead.
Went fo' de doctor
Doctor he said,
"Feed dem babies on shortnin' bread"
Shortnin' Bread (traditional)
______

Lord why was I born in Mississippi,
when it's so hard to get ahead
Why was I born in Mississippi,
when it's so hard to get ahead
Every black child born in Mississippi
you know the poor child is born dead

When he came into the world
the doctor spank him, the black baby cry
When he came into the world
the doctor spank him, the black baby cry
Everybody thought he had a life
and that's why the black baby died

He will never speak his language
the poor baby will never speak his mind
Lord he will never speak his language
the poor baby will never speak his mind
The poor child will never know his mind
why in the world he's so poor

Lord why was I born in Mississippi
when it's so hard to get ahead
Lord why was I born in Mississippi
when it's so hard to get ahead
Every black child born in Mississippi
you know the poor child was born dead
JB Lenoir

David Seaton's News Links
On a personal note: when I was a very small boy, at the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the 50s, my family spent a lot of time in Biloxi Mississippi, which at that time was a charming place and not the tacky nightmare it has since become. All of that was blown away by Katrina I understand, but I'm sure it will be even worse when reconstructed.

Anyway, neighboring Keesler air force base was a tiny thing in that period and there were no casinos and all that goes with them either, just warm breezes off the Gulf of Mexico, Forrest Gumpy shrimp and oyster boats and soft-voiced people, young and old, white and black, that loved small children... nothing like Chicago.

Nearly every Friday we drove over to New Orleans to spend the weekend, and in those days, before expressways, that entailed a leisurely drive though the Mississippi Delta, the area described in article below. That is where I saw the terrible after effects of slavery for the first time. And there I saw the decedents of the Slaves in their true historical context, not huddled around oil drum braziers on the freezing winter corners of Chicago's South Side... like creatures from another planet.

This was just before the mechanization of cotton which finally took place when the black people of Mississippi were allowed to vote, and thus before the black diaspora to the ghettos of the north that followed it. Those were the days before America's poor were sent to live in mobile homes and trailers and the black people of the Delta lived in amazingly rundown, unpainted, weatherbeaten shacks and dressed in rags... you could have been in Haiti, Salvador de Bahia, Jamaica, Cuba or Trinidad: anywhere where forcibly transported Africans were abandoned to their fate and stranded like rusting cars on blocks or busted washing machines rotting in the grass. Machines that no longer serve. The immense cruelty of slavery was impressed on me long before I was eight years old.

On lifelong reading and observation I came to the conclusion that African slavery and its aftermath form a pan-American nation and that Mississippi has more in common with the Dominican Republic than with Iowa and more in common with Haiti than Vermont. So I don't compare Cuba, for example, with Sweden, France, Lichtenstein or Canada. I compare it with Jamaica, Brazil and... Mississippi.

The article from the New York Times is about infant mortality among the poor blacks of the Mississippi Delta. In some counties in Mississippi it is as high as 20 deaths per thousand births, which is a little better than Albania, but not as good as Panama with 17 per 1000. The US average infant mortality rate for blacks in 2003 was 14 per 1000. The US global average is 6.50.... "Afro" Cuba, as black as Mississipi, has 6.33 per 1000! DS

In Turnabout, Infant Deaths Climb in South - New York Times
Abstract: For decades, Mississippi and neighboring states with large black populations and expanses of enduring poverty made steady progress in reducing infant death. But, in what health experts call an ominous portent, progress has stalled and in recent years the death rate has risen in Mississippi and several other states. The setbacks have raised questions about the impact of cuts in welfare and Medicaid and of poor access to doctors, and, many doctors say, the growing epidemics of obesity, diabetes and hypertension among potential mothers, some of whom tip the scales here at 300 to 400 pounds. “I don’t think the rise is a fluke, and it’s a disturbing trend, not only in Mississippi but throughout the Southeast,” said Dr. Christina Glick, a neonatologist in Jackson, Miss., and past president of the National Perinatal Association. To the shock of Mississippi officials, who in 2004 had seen the infant mortality rate — defined as deaths by the age of 1 year per thousand live births — fall to 9.7, the rate jumped sharply in 2005, to 11.4. The national average in 2003, the last year for which data have been compiled, was 6.9. Smaller rises also occurred in 2005 in Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee. Louisiana and South Carolina saw rises in 2004 and have not yet reported on 2005. Whether the rises continue or not, federal officials say, rates have stagnated in the Deep South at levels well above the national average. Most striking, here and throughout the country, is the large racial disparity. In Mississippi, infant deaths among blacks rose to 17 per thousand births in 2005 from 14.2 per thousand in 2004, while those among whites rose to 6.6 per thousand from 6.1. (The national average in 2003 was 5.7 for whites and 14.0 for blacks.) The overall jump in Mississippi meant that 65 more babies died in 2005 than in the previous year, for a total of 481. READ IT ALL

A little thought for May Day

David Seaton's News Links

When George W. Bush talks about the problem of human rights in Cuba, perhaps he should begin with that part of Cuba that he controls, Guantanamo. Very possibly Fidel Castro's Cuban prisoners have more legal guarantees than George W. Bush's Cuban prisoners do. DS

Gitmo: still a 'legal black hole - Editorial - Los Angeles Times
Abstract: The Bush administration has a shameful record when it comes to detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base who assert that they are wrongly being held as "enemy combatants." At first, the administration argued that detainees had no right to consult a lawyer, period. Later, it had to disavow a mean-spirited attack by a Pentagon official on lawyers who had dared to represent "terrorists." Now the administration is rightly being criticized for asking a federal court to scale back the detainees' access to their lawyers (only three visits once an attorney has been retained) and to place restrictions on attorney-client mail. The rationale for the crackdown is that lawyers have encouraged a hunger strike and other "threats to security" by informing detainees about events in the outside world, including the war in Lebanon and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. READ IT ALL

Michael Moore: the Picasso of agit-prop

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Michael Moore is a genius at agitation-propaganda.

The working people who cleaned up the mess after the 9-11 attack are sick because of inhaling toxic dust. They do not receive adequate medical care, except as charity cases. Michael Moore takes them to Communist Cuba where first class medical care is available free and there they receive the "Elvis treatment". I can't imagine a more powerful metaphor. What a lovely kick in the gonads for the flag waving "patriots" of the American right. A real work of art. ¡Olé! DS

Michael Moore takes 9-11 Victims to Cuba for treatment - New York Post
Abstract: Filmmaker Michael Moore's production company took ailing Ground Zero responders to Cuba in a stunt aimed at showing that the U.S. health-care system is inferior to Fidel Castro's socialized medicine, according to several sources with knowledge of the trip. The trip was to be filmed as part of the controversial director's latest documentary, "Sicko," an attack on American drug companies and HMOs that Moore hopes to debut at the Cannes Film Festival next month.(...) Responders were told Cuban doctors had developed new techniques for treating lung cancer and other respiratory illness, and that health care in the communist country was free, according to those offered the two-week February trip. Cuba has made recent advancements in biotechnology and exports its cancer treatments to 40 countries around the world, raking in an estimated $100 million a year, according to The Associated Press. In 2004 the U.S. government granted an exception to its economic embargo against Cuba and allowed a California drug company to test three cancer vaccines developed in Havana, according to the AP.(...) Some called the trip a success, at least logistics-wise. "From what I heard through the grapevine, those people that went are utterly happy," said John Feal, who runs the Fealgood Foundation to help raise money for responders and was approached by Moore to find responders willing to take the trip. "They got the Elvis treatment." Although he has been a critic of Cuba, Moore grew popular there after a pirated version of his movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11," was played on state-owned TV. READ IT ALL

Rutgers, race, history... heavy stuff

David Seaton's News Links

Right away, I have to say that Don Imus should be fired because he's an idiot. Did he think he was being "down"? Nobody could be so stupid as not to realize that the young women's feelings would be hurt by being called "nappy headed hos". Publicly calling a young lady a "whore" can get you (and your network) sued for defamation.

In a purely American context, however, "nappy headed" caused equal pain and was considered equally offensive, and that's what I'd like to talk about. I'd just like to use the incident as starting point for some personal observations made from having lived so many years away from the States.

I come from the suburbs of Chicago, which were, and probably still are at heart, as racist as Alabama, but in my family of liberal Democrats, the "N" word was never, ever pronounced, even by the Saint Louis Missouri branch. African-Americans who worked with my stepfather (a musician) came to dinner with the same regularity as his white fellow workers did... although there were neighbors of ours that didn't like that. I went to integrated public schools in a university town with a large, old, African-American community with no overt, or vulgar redneck type racism. Still the tension was always there and flavored all areas of life. There were so many things you couldn't say, gestures of friendship that were frowned upon (by both races) etc, etc. Until I went to school abroad I thought that this was universal and something intrinsic to relations between races, I found out, in fact that it was really about history.

Over here I went to school with dozens of Cubans. Most of them had some African blood somewhere, "la gotita" or "little drop", what Cuban author Gulliermo Cabrera Infante called, referring to a parisian Cuban intellectual, "the Congo was a tributary of his Seine". Some were white as the driven snow... I was blown away by how little that meant and really blown away how they talked to each other. Everybody, white and brown alike called each other, "Negro" (pronounced "naygrow") and "Negra" and mulato and mulata. I had a drop dead beautiful, Cuban girlfriend who insisted that I call her mi Negra... she said it made her feel sexy... she liked to call me her "chinito" ("little Chinaman" and I was redheaded little mick). Racial terms, were terms of affection!

Then I went to art school in England with several African-Africans and again discovered that relations between people of different colors could be perfectly natural. Even with fellow students of British Caribbean origin you didn't have to walk on eggshells like with African-Americans.

Funnily enough it was the war in the Balkans and the hatred between the Serbs and the Bosnians that suddenly made it all fall into to place for me. Serbs and Bosnians are both Slavs, they both speak the same language, but history has made them enemies.

Color in the United States is just a "warning signal" that history has walked into the room. America is millions of little Bosnias. That history of slavery is pretty horrible, but slavery was horrible in Cuba too. I think it has something to do with America's puritanical steak, with its hatred of vulnerability and slavery is total vulnerability. Anyway, I would really like it if the scandal was about calling a nice group of young ladies "whores" and not about mentioning their "nappy" heads. DS