Is It Hello, Goodbye for Cuba Too?

Photo by Ricardo IV Tamayo on Unsplash

After the first sip, my coffee went cold at breakfast. Perhaps it cooled from disgust over how the corporate news media covered Stephen Colbert’s final episode of The Late Show the night before. Network news presented Colbert and The Late Show as if they were antifascist, in the spirit of a Weimar Republic cabaret act in early 1930s Berlin. If only that were true, democracy would have a chance to return to the USA.

The Late Show, like any network program, wasn’t about rocking boats but calming fears. More or less, it did that. Although sometimes, and very meekly, it drew outside of the lines. When it did, it lightly mocked Trump, whose thin skin bruised like a banana. However, unlike a banana, Trump was vengeful over the slightest blemish. So The Late Show had to go. Cancelling The Late Show wasn’t television executives caving to fascism so much as aligning themselves with fascism and the rewards it offers corporate oligopolies that won’t even pay lip service to free speech.

But don’t mistake Colbert’s gentle mockery for antifascism. Very wealthy people are never truly antifascist, whether they are entertainers or corporate executives. Instead of ending The Late Show like Howard Beale in Network, demanding viewers be mad as hell and not take it anymore, Colbert went out as he began: with a nostalgic whimper and Paul McCartney playing Hello, Goodbye.

It’s a song that Marco Rubio also wants to sing to socialist Cuba. Network news, and the nightly talk shows, not surprisingly, don’t see Cuba’s defiance against America’s 64-year blockade—and now oil embargo—as antifascism in the way they framed Colbert’s The Late Show. When I watch or read the corporate news media, I get the sense that they support what appears to be an imminent attack on Cuba by the USA. When corporate journalists consistently describe Cuba’s government as a regime, it becomes evident which side they support in the struggle over Cuba.

I don’t really know the Cuba of today. But once I knew it well enough that I married a Cuban and lived there for a short while. We were in love for a short while, until we weren’t. This summer, we will celebrate thirty years of divorce.

During my marriage and time in Cuba, I came to understand a few things about the country and its people. My then-wife was not a communist, but she was a patriot, outraged by how Cuba suffered after the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the island to fend for itself while enduring the U.S. trade embargo.

In the 1990s, America’s wrath against the Cuban people became tangible to me during my many stays in Havana. The island smelled of the sea, tobacco, and famine.

Havana’s street dogs were skin and bones—so hungry they had no bark or bite left in them. As for the Cubans who lived in the run-down, paint-peeled apartments and rotting homes of the capital, they weren’t much better off than the city’s street dogs.

For most residents, rationed rice, beans, and an unlimited supply of cheap local cigarettes made up the daily diet.

The port was widowed from trade, barren of freighters or cruise ships.

At the Malecón, Cubans with makeshift fishing poles cast their lines into the water, hoping to catch their evening meal.

The city’s famed but fading Payret cinema marquee announced, without irony, that Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy was showing that week and every other week after that. Nearby, the façade of the Kid Chocolate Sports Complex flaked in the Caribbean sun, casting a shadow of decrepitude across the pavement.

Cubans, pencil-thin from starvation rations, darted through the streets in faded but immaculately clean clothes, heading either to official jobs or off to make real money in the underground black-market economy.

In the evenings, power shortages were commonplace. I hurried across murky streets as if I were inside a scene from The Third Man. To survive, people traded on the black market and relied on relatives overseas to send money.

In the moments between one hustle ending and another beginning, young people drank rum, smoked illegal weed, and fantasised that the West was a place where they would be free to make their own destiny.

Like Moscow for the sisters in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the United States represented a place where happiness and wealth were abundant, sustained by counterfeit nostalgia and propaganda.

Of course, it was fantasy then, just as it is now. But I never blame people clinging to existence and sanity by their fingertips for escaping reality through dreams. It is how humanity keeps going—either by fomenting revolution or dreaming of escape from present miseries.

Few nations in modern history have endured what Cuba faces every day to maintain its independence and way of life.

A way of life that includes universal public healthcare, free education, comprehensive sports programs, housing, and support for an ageing population.

Is it perfect? No. But America has never allowed Cuba simply to be Cuba.

If the USA invades or further destabilises Cuba, mass death awaits ordinary Cubans. If it falls to America, Batista-era exiles and American hedge-fund carpetbaggers will dismantle its healthcare and education systems, reducing ordinary Cubans to conditions resembling those in Haiti.

For decades, many have predicted Cuba’s demise, only to be surprised by its resourcefulness and determination to remain independent.

Yet Cuba is like a cat steadily running out of its nine lives.

Should Cuba fall, all of us will feel its collapse. It will create a refugee crisis that dwarfs the current one. Trump and much of America’s governing class would be emboldened by Cuba’s absorption into Fortress America. It would signal to them that the annexation of Canada could begin in earnest.

Once that happens, America’s nightly talk shows will do what they always do: give fascism a laugh track, allowing people to convince themselves that a punchline before bedtime is dissent while excusing their collaboration with evil during America’s daylight hours.

Thanks for reading and supporting this Substack. Without your loyalty, I honestly don’t know where I’d be. You’ve helped keep both my father’s legacy alive and the wolf from my door.

The last few months have been difficult. New subscriptions have slowed, and some long-time readers have had to step away because of the cost-of-living crisis. This month alone, I lost three annual subscribers for that reason. But we plod on.

Next week, I hope, The Green and Pleasant Land will be sent to my father’s old publisher for consideration. A small independent publisher has already expressed interest in bringing it into print, which is heartening. But for my father’s legacy—and for the book itself—it makes sense to try first for the widest possible readership.

I’m starting my rent appeal earlier this month, so I’m offering annual subscriptions at 20% off. My subscription rates haven’t changed since 2021: $3.50 a month or $30 a year.

Take care,
John