leisurely stroll

a leisurely stroll along the Malecon...the main street along the ocean...down to old havana allowed an experience of excessively ¨liberating¨humidity. A number of conversations with people in the street and in the ¨artist´s market¨revealed the complexity of opinion one finds in Cuba...there is not the subservience to the ¨party line¨often caricatured in the US as though Cubans are somehow robots rather than human beings working through personal, interpersonal, local, national and international conflicts and contradictions across a complex array of social forces, cultural productions, economic unpredictabilities, ideological interrogations, institutional structures, power relations and the strong influence of the organization of social relations of production, distribution and consumption. There are plenty of frustrations around numerous issues...Cuba IS a poor country...and various forms of poverty are evident... struggling heroically to maintain an experiment in alternative politics and economics in the face of an outside world that is not very sympathetic to that struggle, to say the least. It does seem that Cuba´s remarkable ability to survive and to some extent even flourish, in the face of so many struggles, attacks of various sorts, and deprivations, along with the Cuban´s ability to maintain a high level of human development as measured by education, health and health care, sustainable agriculture, scientific advancements, cultural programs, etc., might suggest that Cuba offers a model that should be studied carefully by the rest of the world as we face increasing problems around economic collapse, global climate calamities, military aggressions, and other threats. the struggle continues...viva la revolucion! d