Semper Fidelis

I was thinking about this today, reading through hundreds of pages of student essays about academic treaties on how the US film industry bullied (in this case) Latin American countries, through coercive economic embargoes. In the case of Argentina, in the early 40's after their refusal to acquiesce to the"Good Neighbor Policy," and manipulative stereotypical representations of Mexico and its people in the big stick Roosevelt era, under the banner of Manifest Destiny: where intervention was cast as just and patriotic even, in a land of people who could purportedly not be trusted to take care of themselves, and whose imagined violence threatened to spill across borders. (Hmmm. sounds familiar)

So today, this day, thinking on the validity of Pan-American sentiment and resistance to the neo-imperial model, and mulling over the images that Fernando Solanas montaged together his the 2004 film Memorias del saqueo, it is quite clear that this so-imagined Latin America is not without its own indigenous problems, that a coherent and viable left is still utopic in many ways, but that much of what is wrong is exacerbated, if not outright caused by, the greed of a few in power who collude, internationally, to control the lives of many.

(Aside, I have no need for celebrity worship, but Pino Solanas, who made the Hour of the Furnaces, and who wrote the Third Cinema Manifesto about revolutionary filmmaking and how to achieve praxis through intellectual work, is one of my heroes, and he'll be here to give a talk in 2 short weeks, I can't wait to meet him!)

And although my feelings about el barbón have always been mildly ambivalent (how can one rule for quite so long and still be of the people?) I am filled with gut-wrenching emotion, I can hear the song broadcast in the radio of my mind: "Hasta siempre, Comandante". And I wonder, what would have happened if Che hadn't died? and what is so threatening in a progressive political view? and then I ponder whether this stepping down of Fidel isn't one more brilliantly strategic move--by one of the world's most brilliant political minds--aiming to position Cuba in such a way as to be able to (God forbid!) self-govern. If he waited to die, the gringo vultures would already be tearing into his still warm flesh, the country picked to pieces in the bloody maw of neo-liberal "free-trade" that benefits only those who can afford to make the bids, not those whose labor will be exploited. This way, a transition can be controlled, and planned, tragedy need not align itself with veiled economic motivation masquerading as concerns for "national security".

And I think for a moment: It is necessary to name names, and to point fingers (like Solanas and others are doing), it is right and just to govern oneself with respect for the work and lives of others, that the Revolution lives on... Hasta la victoria siempre!