Cuba Overheard (America's got it all wrong on Cuba)

[Mika]

Cuba Overheard
http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=62062

America's got it all wrong on Cuba, says University of Southampton professor of Latin American Studies Elizabeth Dore.

After two years and 100 interviews -- some lasting as long as 30 hours -- with Cubans of diverse backgrounds, mostly in Havana, Dore has concluded that popular American notions about Cuba and a foreign policy partly based on them are misguided.

"Most Americans think that Cuba is a gulag," she said, after speaking at UCLA on Jan. 12, 2007. But, according to the oral histories she has collected, Cuba's political system operates with "probably more consent than coercion."

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"Cubans don't want capitalism and private property," she explains. "At most they're looking for security of tenure" at their state-provided jobs.

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Interviewees did not always retell the official history of Cuba's revolution. Rather, they told more complex stories with what Dore calls "contrapuntals."

Oral histories have their strengths and some inevitable limitations. "In oral history, it's definitely not truth-telling," Dore explains. Rather, it's examining the way people remember their lives and bring the critical thinking of social science to those memories.

[Briar]

1. Cubans don't want capitalism and private property.

At most they're looking for job security."

Which is their real crime, of course. They challenge the primacy of capitalism and the right of the employer to dominion over the employee.

[Mika]

2. Yep. Cuba is on the US shit list bacause there's no sweat shops..

.. pumping out cheap products for the Fortune 500.