W. Lewis Jr.

In the line at the store, the cashier told the older woman that she should
bring her own grocery bag because  plastic bags weren’t good for the
environment .

The woman apologized to him and explained,
“We didn’t have the green thing back in my day.”

The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today.
The former generation did not care enough to save our environment.”

He was right, that generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.
Back then, they returned their  milk bottles,
soda bottles and  beer bottles to the store.

The store sent them back to the plant to be washed
and sterilized and refilled,
so it could use the same bottles over and over.
So they really were recycled.

But they didn’t have the green thing back in that customer’s day.

In her day, they walked up stairs,
because they didn’t have an escalator in every store and office building. They walked to the grocery store and
didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time they had to go two blocks.

But she was right. They didn’t have the green thing in her day

Back then, they washed the baby’s diapers
because they didn’t have the throw-away kind. They dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts –
wind and  solar power really did dry the clothes.

They refilled their writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen,
and they replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull.

But they didn’t have the green thing back then.

Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus
and kids rode their bikes to school or walked
instead of turning their moms into a 24-hour taxi service.
They had one electrical outlet in a room,
not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances.
And they didn’t need a computerized gadget
to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space
in order to find the nearest pizza joint.

But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful the old folks
were just because they didn’t have the green thing back then?

Katherine Gordy

THE CUBAN REVOLUTION S 50th anniversary has sparked academic conferences, debates and articles assessing its past and future.(1) How and why has the revolution survived? What does the future hold for Cuba? Or, as it is often put, more crudely, what will happen when Fidel/Raul dies?

My responses to these questions have always been short. The Cuban revolution has survived much as any established system survives, through a combination of coercion and consent.(2) The future holds gradual change, again, much as in any system that has been successfully institutionalized.

The questions assume that without Fidel Castro, or his doppelganger brother, there would be no Cuban revolution. They also assume that nothing ever changes in Cuba until crisis forces it. The language of crisis pervades contemporary treatments of Cuba in the United States. Academic and journalistic analyses often argue that the Cuban state prefers this perpetual state of crisis, since it allows it to wield power.

Cuba, by these accounts, is in crisis because Raul has dismissed vice-president Carlos Lage and foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque. It was in crisis because Fidel Castro was ill, Raul had taken over, the Soviet trading block had disappeared, or the dollar had been legalized. Each crisis was supposed to be the beginning of the end. Each time that Cuba pulled through only bolstered Colin Powell s claim, issued after the 2003 arrest of 75 dissidents, that Cuba was an aberration in the West. (3)

But what makes Cuba unique is not, as Powell suggested, infringements on civil liberties or human rights (including the use of capital punishment, which the United States uses with abandon). What distinguishes Cuba from the United States is that in Cuba, ideology and pragmatism are constantly being held in tension. Ideology isn t a dirty word used to dismiss one s opponents. Pragmatism is always couched in ideological terms, and those ideological terms are rooted in history and in practice. The cycle of dream followed by disappointment is one that Cubans are used to.

Socio-economic equality, unified leadership and inclusive nationalism were fundamental aspirations in 19th century debates on annexation, slavery, independence and the nature of the Cuban Republic. The compromising of Cuban independence, most poignantly illustrated in the passing of the Platt Amendment (1902) following the Spanish-American war, was a shock to those who had long struggled for it.The term shock suggests a dramatically different interpretation of Cuban history. Shock recognizes important moments in Cuban history as times of re-evaluation rather than rejection of the past and an embrace of post-crisis normality. In Cuba as elsewhere, crisis may force dramatic change, but the history of the Cuban revolution is one of constant adjustment. The revolution is ready to outlast not just Fidel Castro, but Raul as well.

From Fidel s to Raul s Cuba Observers tend to see Raul as more pragmatic than Fidel, yet such distinctions between hardliners and reformers within the party are rarely useful. Both Castro brothers combine pragmatism and ideology. They would not have been so successful at staying in power were this not the case. within the party who are seeking reforms are motivated by pragmatic and ideological concerns, as are those opposing them. Raul is considered a hardliner, yet he is more concerned with the institutionalization process than Fidel, who tended to oppose in principle various market-oriented policies adopted in 1990s or treat them as temporary measures in light of exceptional circumstances.

If Raul is a hardliner, he is one who believes that new policies, and especially those that appear to mark a change in course, should be considered carefully and introduced with clear guidelines. Laws that are introduced as stopgap measures, as the experience of the 1990s has shown, are laws that few understand and few take seriously.

Raul s style of leadership involves more power sharing and consultation, both with other top party officials and with those below. He is not the only one running the show, although he is still at liberty to dismiss such important government officials as Carlos Lage and Perez-Roque, who were considered members of the Fidel camp and resistant to the institutionalization process.

Unless increased reliance on the market is accompanied by greater popular participation, some worry Cuba will wind up looking like China or Vietnam, with state-run market economies and little or no popular participation. In 2006, Cuban literary critic Desiderio Navarro voiced concern that neo-Stalinist elements might try to take over the power vacuum left by Fidel Castro.(4)

Critics on the left have also argued that pre-revolutionary class divisions in Cuba, obscured in the early years of the revolution, are re-emerging. Their argument shares a striking similarity with the argument that the radicalization of Cuban Revolution in the beginning of the 1960s was a betrayal of the popular reformist movement of middle-class professionals (July 26th Movement) that brought Castro to power.

Many of this movement s members left the country and this export of dissent has been an important element in the consolidation of the revolution. Many on the Cuban Left also departed. They felt betrayed, and still do, by the revolution s centralization of power and the narrowing of realms in which workers, black Cubans, farmers, and others whose interests the revolution claimed to defend could organize themselves.

These critics ignore the transformative nature of the revolutionary process. The revolution has created its own adherents from different classes in Cuban society through a variety of campaigns aimed either at bringing middle-class professionals into the fold (the literacy campaign, for instance) or improving the lot of the large number of people who did not share Cuba s prosperity in the first half of the 20th century. Middle-class converts became some of the strongest believers.

By the 1990s, Cuba s professionals had a variety of pre-revolutionary class backgrounds. The dollar economy created new class divisions that at times coincided with older divisions (people with pre-revolutionary middle-class backgrounds might be more likely to have family abroad from whom they could receive remittances, while black and mulatto Cubans were less likely to have those networks), and at times didn t (professionals, regardless of class background, were some of the hardest hit, were less likely to work in the dollar economy and are often supporters of the revolution).

Marketization: Who Benefits?

The class that does seem to be in the best position to benefit from the incipient market shock is the military, which is responsible for most of the foreign investment and joint ventures in Cuba.

Starting in the 1990s (long before Raul, a career military man, took over), the military became heavily involved in the market economy when the government cut military spending. It is the military s economic model of firm autonomy and hard budgets that is being introduced into the larger economy in the form of the Sistema Perfeccionamiento Empresarial (the System of Enterprise Improvement).

Raul admires the Chinese model, but is aware that Cubans would not tolerate the levels of inequality associated with this or the Vietnamese model. Such inequality would challenge the legitimacy of the revolutionary leadership, which has always attempted to balance growth with equity, and usually privileged the latter.

There is still reason for concern that increasing marketization of the Cuban economy may not be accompanied by greater political opening, so that those who are not among the new elites will remain marginalized.(5) However, this new elite is in part a creation of the revolution and not a class that was sitting in deep freeze for almost 50 years waiting for the right moment to make their move.

Many of these elites are advocating for more popular participation. For instance, Raul s daughter Mariela Castro Esp n is director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education in Havana and a LGBT activist. While not part of the Central Committee, she has pushed for a participatory socialism in Cuba, arguing that this is the most effective way to preserve the socialist achievements of the revolution in the 21st century.(6) Ironically, this was the position of many academics at the Center for the Study of the Americas, which was disbanded in 1995 and its members repremanded in a speech by Raul Castro. Yet critical intellectuals do not identify as dissidents, in spite of such characterizations from abroad and occasionally by the Cuban leadership, and instead insist upon their particular role in the Cuban revolution as organic intellectuals whose loyalty lies with the principles of Cuban socialism.

The dissident movement in Cuba is disorganized and easily discredited by links, both real and fabricated, with the United States. While dissident groups are not all allied with the United States and do not always support U.S. policy toward Cuba nor free market capitalism, their voices are shut out by the war of words between the U.S. and Cuban government.

New Demands

Challenges come from elsewhere, including from those who grew up with the revolution. They don t remember the days of Batista when Cuba was a country of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, but they do remember the 1980s when the Cuban standard of living was something to envy and when Cuba was an important international player. They expect more, and yet their values are shaped by revolutionary ideology.

Another important venue for critique is in the arts. Hip-hop and nueva trova serve as vehicles to raise issues of race and class in Cuba. Literature provides a view of the rough side of Cuban life.

Students have begun making demands. They want their education to mean something. Last year students at the University of Havana met with the president of the National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, and complained about inequality, the privileging of foreigners, the dual currency, and the low purchasing power of the Cuban peso.

It is true that there is great frustration in Cuba. After surviving the collapse of the Soviet Union and a period of extraordinary hardship in Cuba, things seemed to be getting better in the late 1990s and early 2000s, only to slip back again. Changes, such as last year s legalization of cell phone use and the lifting of laws that restricted Cuban access to tourist hotels, are ones that few Cubans can really take advantage of. Many young people, and particularly professionals, are leaving Cuba.

As a consequence, one of Cuba s major challenges is to make use of its highly educated population and avoid brain drain. One way to do that has been through medical missions, which allow Cuban doctors to work abroad and earn a much higher salary than they otherwise would at home.

In some cases, exchanges work in favor of Cuba s larger economy. For example, Venezuela sells oil to Cuba at discounted prices while Cuba sends doctors to Venezuela.

Other issues include: the construction of new housing, as a chronic housing shortage forces generations to live together; the re-evaluation of the Cuban peso to boost its purchasing power and diminish the gap between wage earners and those with access to remittances or the tourist industry; and pursuing ecotourism as a way to capture hard currency without the negative social and environmental effects associated with tourism in the Caribbean and in Cuba.

Finally, another major concern has been with increasing production, particularly in the agricultural sector. The country spends roughly $2 billion annually on food imports. One quarter of that is paid for in cash to U.S. agribusiness. Two-thirds of food production in Cuba comes from private farmers who control only a small fraction of the farmland.

The government has handed over fallow, but arable, land to small farmers and made other increases in material incentives in order to improve production.

Cuba has not always been able to balance growth with equity, but perhaps its greatest legacy is that it has always tried and never allowed itself to lose sight of the latter. Its other legacy may that the politicization of all spheres of Cuban life can feel burdensome to Cubans, but can also spill out beyond control in ways that cannot fit easily into categories of dissidence or party dogmatism.

Everyone has heard that you have to love yourself before someone else can love you. The reason for this is simple – our ideal partner is a reflection of us.

We attract people that are like us. Not just in terms of romantic, sexual/physical attraction. We attract them metaphysically – these people tend to turn up in our lives.

Each of us has a unique belief system, a way of seeing the world that is slightly different to everyone else’s. It’s almost like our ego has a fingerprint. What turns us on, what turns us off? What we feel is important.

Our political preferences, tastes in food and music, and so on, all arise out of this belief system. Our particular thoughts and feelings resonate with different aspects of the world around us. If your thoughts are dark, you like heavy metal. If your thoughts are happy, you like cheesy music. We like certain foods, like for example, coffee, because of the way they make us feel.

The types of people that come into our lives are affected by our beliefs. We meet people who have made the same sorts of choices we make. Where to live, which bar to go to, which supermarket to shop at. All these choices reflect our values and our way of being from day to day, minute to minute.

When you enter a seminar or lecture theatre, where do you sit? On the front row where you can ask questions or the back where you can fall asleep without being noticed? Our personality is reflected in the places we turn up… and so we end up being surrounded by people who are the same way.

Romantic compatibility has a lot to do with this. Why do we always ask our love interest what sort of music they like? We want to know they are on our wavelength. We want to know they are drawn to the same emotional experience, so we can trust that they will understand us.

It seems like this is easily faked. All you have to do is listen to someone talk passionately and agree with them. Find something from your own experience that is similar emotionally and share it. But this can be hard work. It’s much easier if your passions really are similar emotionally. That way, things just happen.

The problem comes when you are romantically attracted to people who are not on your wavelength. This means, people who are not right for you, but who have something that you respect, or admire, or just desire. You want to be with the other person to feel good about yourself, to fill some hole inside you or to change what other people think about you. These relationships are doomed to failure from the start, because of the amount of energy it takes to maintain them.

Do you like yourself? Would you be attracted to someone who was the opposite sex version of you? Are the people you are attracted to your mirror in terms of life philosophy, success, and social hierarchy?

The right person for you has similar political and religious views. Their life philosophy, work ethic, which matches yours perfectly. There are certain adjustments to make across the genders, for example power in men roughly equates to looks in women. But the stress in the relationship is directly proportional to your differences. A certain amount of stress is healthy and keeps things interesting, but only up to a certain breaking point.

When you think of the men or women who naturally come into your life, the ones who have the same interests and world view as you, are you attracted to them? The girls or guys who you know you could get, and just be with, just by turning round and saying you wanted them, and are they the sort of person you want? Are they the sort of person you want to be? If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll probably realize that the things you don’t like about them are the things you don’t like about yourself. So you reject that person and look for the qualities you want to see in yourself, in someone else.

If you like yourself, you will like the people you naturally meet, and they will like you. If you don’t like yourself, you will waste energy trying to get with people who aren’t like you, or you will settle for being with someone you don’t like.

There are two solutions to this. The first, and most important, is to learn to like you. The second is to turn yourself into the person that you want to be.

If you want to like yourself, one way to do it is to realize that you are the perfect you that anyone could be. No-one else can do the things you do quite like you. No-one sees the world quite the same way. No-one has precisely your talents, ambitions, or lack thereof. No-one screws things up the same way; no-one makes the same mistakes and faux pas’. At being you, for all your faults and weaknesses, you would get an A+. It’s ok to be the way you are – it must be, because the way you are IS the way you are.

Once you adopt this philosophy or one like it with regard to yourself, you will start seeing others the same way. The truth is, you probably are attracted to the opposite sex equivalent of you, it’s just you’re also turned off to them, for the same reasons you’re turned off from yourself. Accept yourself, and you will accept them.

Many people think that their drive to improve themselves stems from the things they don’t like about themselves. Feelings of inadequacy, dissatisfaction, or just dislike and hatred for yourself actually won’t change; no matter how much you improve yourself. It is the feeling that needs to be dealt with, not whichever reason you rationalize at the time for feeling it.

It’s actually easier to change and improve yourself once you accept yourself. The same negative feelings of self-non-acceptance lock us in to being those things that we want to change. Change the feeling first, and the specific details will sort themselves out.

Look at the sort of person you want to get together with. You can become the sort of person who they would want to be with, assuming that you’re not already. If the person they want to be with is the sort of person that you don’t like, then you’ll have to let go of those feelings, because those feelings keep you from being like them.

Take the school computer nerd, who wants to get with the cheerleader. But the cheerleader likes the football players. She’s physically active; she parties a lot, and is confident in herself. So she looks for guys who are physically active, party a lot, and are confident in themselves. It makes no sense that she would want to be with a guy who locks himself in his bedroom, is anti-social, and can’t look her in the eye when he speaks.

So to get the girl, the nerd must become the football player. He can still play to his strengths with computers, and he needn’t play football. But he needs to adopt their way of being in terms of inward qualities. If he is truly attracted to the cheerleader, then he wants those qualities for himself anyway, and he dislikes the contradicting qualities he already possesses.

The nerd that truly doesn’t want to become the football player doesn’t truly want the cheerleader. He wants the bookish girl who is already on his wavelength. Either way, the solution is rooted in self-acceptance. If he accepts himself, he will accept the bookish girl. If once he accepts himself, he finds that he wants to become a footballer, he can have the cheerleader too.

Once you accept yourself you will realize your true motives for wanting someone you can’t have. If you want to be with them to compensate for your own shortcomings, you will no longer want them. If you want them because you want to be like their ideal partner, then you will become that person. So there is never a need to change you for someone else.

Accept yourself, and you will like the potential partners you can get.

Improve yourself, and you will get the partner you want.

By: Harris Smothers