NM's blog

I have read Leonardo Padura's The Man Who Loved Dogs – a great novel. I am surprised though that Padura describes Cubas as socialist – that he repeats the official line. It is another unfortunate position that does a disservice to socialism and strengthens the anti-socialist arguments: ‘Is that the socialism you want to live in?’. Over four years, 1.2 million Cubans – one tenth of the population – left the island. I have personally experienced life in two Cuban cities for six months. My answer is: No, I wouldn't live in Cuba, but I still defend the ideals of socialism and oppose the American-led imperialism against any anti-capitalist alternative. Padura admi ts ' the perversion of the great egalitarian utopia of the 20th century as manifested in socialist societies.’ Here is the contradiction: a 'perversion' and 'socialist society'.  'There is the productive inefficiency of its socialist, centralised economic system.' Note that Padura does never pu...

Cuba está experimentando su mayor transformación económica en décadas: las empresas privadas han vuelto y los pequeños negocios emplean a una cuarta parte de la fuerza laboral. Sin embargo, la reforma de mercado no ha traído una apertura política. Una casa de color turquesa recién renovada destaca en una Habana desgastada. Dos árboles frutales dan sombra a su patio; un columpio se alza sobre el césped artificial y las ventanas delanteras están polarizadas para mayor privacidad. Una anciana sentada en una silla de ruedas junto a la entrada hablaba sola. Es residente de TaTamanía, el primer hogar de ancianos privado de Cuba, que abrió sus puertas esta primavera en el distrito del Vedado de la capital. Este tipo de negocio estuvo prohibido durante mucho tiempo bajo la revolución, pero en los últimos años, la falta de recursos ha dejado a las instalaciones públicas de cuidado en un estado crítico. Una ex pediatra, Yadira Álvarez, y su esposo, Rolando Pérez, especialista en informática, cre...

 “The western world, structured by centuries of colonisation and the notion of ‘inferior races’, including Arabs and Muslims, was always favourable towards … falsehoods.  “Israel has always been the West’s main proxy to weaken and bully Arab states and populations. It is the West’s primary attack dog in the Middle East.  “Indeed, this horrible massacre of Palestinians is not being accomplished by Israel alone, but by an axis of genocide . Western media have done a good job of concealing the responsibility of western countries in what will probably be the first true enterprise of mass extermination of a people in the 21st century.” Yet Gabon implicitly appeals to the West to use an embargo and other tools to stop Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians instead of appealing to the Arabs who rose up in 2011 and 2019 to topple the rotten regimes that enable Israel and the West to carry on with their crimes.  According to this argument, when states commit mass violence...