From Cha-Cha-Cha to Che! Che! Che!: 
Deconstructing the New, Improved, Postcolonial White Man’s Burden

Carlos M. N. Eire

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

			– Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden” (1899)

	There he was, again, Che, my former neighbor, Cuba’s one-time Lord High Executioner. He lay in wait everywhere, around each and every bend of the road, ready to pounce on me in the most unlikely places as I made my way through Europe.  
	Il Che in tutti i colori e a prezzi esorbitanti.1
	Being ambushed by demons would have been less disturbing.  I know how to deal with them, even when they disguise themselves as angels of light.  Holy water and sacred salt can take care of them, and so can a crucifix.
	But Che? How can I deal with his godlike omnipresence?  Nothing seems to repel his spirit, or keep it buried in the mausoleum Fidel built for him.  
	In Arles, where Vincent Van Gogh severed his own ear, Che t-shirts flapped in the wind at the entrance to a souvenir store.  Like a messiah crucified between two thieves, Che glowered at everyone, trapped between a shirt that said “Vodka” and another that joked about dumb blondes. 
	In Bonifacio, Corsica, where Napoleon once spent a few months, a bewildered Che called out to me from a red scarf, asking “how did I get here?” 
	Amongst the Greek ruins of Paestum, by the temples of Poseidon and  Hera, he vied for attention with replicas of ancient artifacts and idols.   
	In Dubrovnik  where customs agents no longer check to see if one’s name is on a long list of enemies of the Yugoslav state, Che looked askance at me from a t-shirt worn by a long-haired teenage boy with an ear ring.  
	In Venice, a canal or two down from the church where the incorruptible body of Saint Lucy is venerated, he gave me the evil eye from a bottle of Che wine.  Fortunately, the Bob Marley bottle beside it made me chill out  instantly. The marketing geniuses who had bottled vino da tabola as Che and Marley wine not only made sure that the Rasta Reggae master looked stoned, but also wedged a picture of a huge cannabis leaf against his face. 
	Could this prove once and for all that Italy still has a monopoly on the sublime?
	Could this also prove that there are still many people on earth clueless enough to believe that the Cuban Revolution is a good thing and that Che is a saint of sorts?
	Unfortunately, the answer to both questions is “yes.”
	And Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an Argentine whose nickname is a rough equivalent of today’s “Dude” has not only come to rule the world of kitsch, but also to embody the heinousness of the Cuban Revolution and the banality of the affluent world’s condescending attitudes towards it. 
	Never mind that turning Che’s image into merchandise is a betrayal of everything he supposedly  stood for.  And never mind  that he would have probably imprisoned or executed each and every one of the spoiled consumers who buy Che paraphernalia thinking that he was a noble idealist and a nice guy, part Robin Hood, part Christ.2   That’s beside the point, and to be expected.  Communists like Che have always laughed at the way in which capitalists easily become “useful idiots” and their own worst enemies.  As Lenin put it: "the Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."3
	So Che, a revolutionary who actually tried to do away with money when he was in charge of Cuba’s treasury,  ends up as a marketing gimmick, with an internet store dedicated solely to the selling of Che trinkets, – a cyberspace emporium which boasts of  “the largest collection of Ernesto Che Guevara merchandise found anywhere in the world.,” proclaiming that  
The spirit and passion of Che Guevara have attracted a vast and devoted international following that avidly embraces Che as the definitive symbol of rebellion, a legendary leader of revolution, and a 20th Century cultural pop icon.4

	Pop Icon indeed, and patron saint of all those racist bigots who believe in what Rudyard Kipling called “the White Man’s Burden.” 
	Allow me to explain: after three years of speaking to hundreds of audiences all over North America about my memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana, and of fielding all sorts of questions, I have finally figured out what makes the Cuban Revolution seem like a good thing to many of the affluent white people I encounter: it’s all due to an  updated version of old-fashioned colonial, imperialist bigotry.
	Time to deconstruct!5 				
	 Those who praise the Cuban Revolution do so for all sorts of reasons, which are too numerous to catalogue.  But no matter what reasons are given, supporters of the Cuban Revolution tend to fall into two categories: the true believers and the closet colonialist bigots. The believers are very serious folk who covet your property, and would eagerly take it from you if you gave them the chance.  The accidental Kiplingesque bigots, in contrast,  love their own property and therefore normally extend to all other landholders of their own kind a grudging or envious respect. Since they are usually most keenly interested in enjoying all the benefits of a free-market economy and the blessings of democracy, they have no interest in revolutions, at least in their own fortunate countries. But they do tend to love revolutions elsewhere, and to admire figures like Che.  Of course, they love him because they think that he fought against those who exploited the poor without realizing that they themselves were the target of his rage, for they, too, are exploiting plenty of people all over the world.  This blindness to their own faults makes them safe enough to have as neighbors, for they tend to believe that the confiscation and redistribution of property is only necessary in other countries, especially in the third world, where the dark-skinned people tend to live.
	The first type of Che and Fidel admirers–the genuine revolutionaries-- are a very small, select group in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia/New Zealand,  but can be found in greater numbers in poorer countries, especially in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.  These are individuals who believe in communism and see it as the only just solution to humankind’s many ills.  In the so-called third world, where many believe in all of the lies and false myths scattered abroad by Fidel Castro’s regime, faith  in communist ideology is fueled by dreams of improvement.  In brief, their poverty drives them to believe in Marxist/Leninist or Maoist or Castroist ideology, and in false representations of .the improvements brought to Cuba by Fidel’s regime.  
	In Europe and North America, within the very heart of the capitalist world, these genuine communists are now a vanishing species.  For these lonely few, and for the hopeful “third world” communists, the Cuban Revolution is not just good for the Cuban people, but for everyone on earth: Fidel’s Cuba is a global paradigm and  great step forward in the struggle against capitalism.  As one die-hard Marxist viewer of the PBS American Experience documentary “Fidel Castro”put it: 	
I think Castro and the people of Cuba have made remarkable achievements... I feel, for the advance of Socialism and the eventual realization of Communism, the dictatorship of the proletarian, as realized by Castro, is entirely needed...Hopefully soon enough we in the nation [United States] can match the will and steadfast dedication of Castro and the Cuban people and end the horrific exploitative and deviating nature of Capitalism as realized in this nation.6

These folk who believe in collectivist communist ideology – and therefore condemn private property and free enterprise – also loathe the basic liberties that are taken for granted by those who live in democratic free-market societies.   For them, the “liberties” of capitalist societies are empty concepts that mask the exploitation of the proletariat, and, in contrast,  the repressive totalitarian regimes of the old Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Fidel’s Cuba represent for them the greatest achievements in human history.7   These revolutionaries and would-be revolutionaries do not have to be racist bigots, though some of them are, in spite of the principles they espouse.  What defines them is not their attitude towards “peoples of colour,” (since many of them fit into that category), but their commitment to communist goals. 
	Since bona-fide, hammer-and-sickle-wielding communists have dwindled after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, but supporters of the Cuban Revolution have not, one must ask: why it is that there are still so many in the capitalist world who idolize Che and find present-day Cuba an exemplary society despite all its well-documented record of human rights abuses?  
	This is where Kipling and his white man’s burden enter the picture .  In a nutshell, the hard, sad truth is that whether they know it or not, or whether they like it or not,  all non-Cubans living in affluent countries who praise Che or Fidel or the Cuban Revolution but refuse to live in Cuba or to actively engage in bringing about the same kind of communist revolution in their own country are really bigots at heart, not much different from  Rudyard Kipling or any other old-fashioned imperialist, colonialist racist.  They are also hypocrites, to boot, for unlike Kipling, they publicly abjure prejudice toward any “other” and scold anyone else who argues that the end always justifies the means.  
	In sum, anyone from the affluent world who thinks that the repressive, soul-crushing, collectivist nightmare that calls itself the Cuban Revolution is good for Cubans but not for themselves is implicitly admitting that they are superior to Cubans in some way, be it morally, economically, intellectually, culturally or racially.  It makes no difference how the differences are parsed; anyone who says that the Cuban Revolution as something that is good for Cubans but not for themselves necessarily implies that Cubans are somehow different and that they are undeserving or incapable of enjoying  the same political, social, and economic rights, either because they are in some way inferior or less developed, or because they are construed as simpler, purer, abnormal or  uncivilized in some essential way, much like Rousseau’s noble savage.  And no one can dispute the fact that most of those who tend to hold such views or who invest capital in Cuba’s tourism industry, or go there as tourists  happen to be Europeans and North Americans of European stock who think of themselves as white and of Cubans as “people of colour.”8
  So, for any of these white folk to  say that Cubans are much better off  living under a brutally repressive totalitarian regime that stifles all dissent is to wallow in bigotry of a racist sort.  
	Ironically, then, Rudyard Kipling, the ultimate spokesman for colonialism, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907,  turns out to be the intellectual and spiritual forebear of today’s politically-correct ideologues, and of anyone who defends the so-called accomplishments of Che, Fidel, and the Cuban Revolution.. In February 1899, when the U.S.A. claimed ownership of what was left of Spain’s empire, Kipling published "The White Man's Burden" in  McClure’s Magazine.  Most readers and critics on both shores of the Atlantic took the poem at face value, as a defense of imperialism and a direct appeal to the colonialist aims of the United States, which seemed so eager to civilize the new-caught wild folk of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Cynics everywhere detected no small amount of self-effacing sarcasm in Kipling’s imperialist anthem, but it mattered little.9  The literalist interpretation won out, and to this day even the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica still sums him up as being “chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism.” 
	It may come as a surprise and a great shock to anyone who defends the virtues of the Cuban Revolution to hear that they are similar in outlook and attitude to Rudyard Kipling, a dead white male who embodies so much political incorrectness.  But the obscene, undeniable truth is that there is virtually no difference between anyone alive today who says that Fidel and Che have done great things for Cubans and anyone in days of yore who argued that the Spanish, Portuguese, British, Belgian, Dutch, French, and United States empires were a blessing to all of the benighted “coloured” folk around the world, those “new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child.”who weren’t gifted with European genes. Kipling’s racism has been updated and cloaked in a different sort of rhetoric, but it is still very much alive and perhaps even more loathsome.  Ironically, then, many of those who prefer to think of the present age as “post-colonial” and whose constant point of reference is respect of “diversity” or “otherness” turn out to be racist colonialist bigots after all, often without realizing it, in spite of themselves.  Their bigotry and racism does not lead them to conquer other people, but it does cause them to think that  those who live outside of the industrialized world can only gain better lives through a different kind of imperialism-- an ideological one.  So they are willing, even eager to see “lesser” folk subjected to all sorts of repression at the hands of their own “enlightened” or “visionary” despots.  Their new, improved white man's burden is selfish rather than selfless, for their goal is not to “send forth” their progeny to civilize  the savages, but rather to approve of all sorts of  atrocious dictatorships  in the name of progress, so they can vacation in such places and enjoy the commercial rewards they eventually reap from the cheap labor and the travel bargains that such tyrannies produce.  The only burden they bear is one they often don’t see or feel at all: that of their inconsistent and hypocritical ethics. 
	This new postcolonial colonialsim is also an updated version of what could be called the  Mussolini principle, that is, the condescending affirmation that some people are incapable of achieving much for themselves without a dictatorship to guide them.  It wasn’t that long ago that many northern Europeans and North Americans believed in the bogus claims of  the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and praised him for making the Italian trains run on time.  The chief assumption behind such an affirmation was that  Italians, like all “swarthy” Mediterraneans were somehow incapable of achieving efficiency without brute force.  Today’s postcolonial neocolonialists are not much different.  They may pat themselves or each other on the back for being open-minded about strong “visionary” leaders like Fidel, who whip into shape an otherwise disorderly people, but just like Mussolini’s supporters in the past, they are really only giving a peculiar twist to all sorts of prejudices.10   In some ways, then, this postcolonial neocolonialism is much more insidious than that of Kipling and his age, for it masquerades as its opposite while condoning all sorts of horrors that in many cases turn out to be much worse than those perpetrated by the old  imperialists.  
	The new postcolonial neocolonialists love to invoke a rhetoric of benevolence and of compassion for the other, just like Kipling’s imperialist white man.  But at least the old imperialists were very much aware of their bigotry and made no effort to hide it.  How did this come to be?  How has such bigotry endured for so long, undetected by the political-correctness police?  The problem is that the police are the worst bigots, in spite of themselves, and that the prejudices they harbor are as thick as trees in an ancient forest, and hard to uproot. 
	My own encounters with ignorant prejudice began right away, as soon as I set foot in the United States.  First came the startling questions from my American schoolmates and their parents.. “You had bathrooms in Cuba?” “Do you know how to use toilet paper?” “You had televisions and radios?” “You used forks and knives?”  “You had schools?”  “You know how to read?”  “Was it hard to get used to pants and shoes?” “Why don’t  you look like a Cuban?” “How did you ever get into this honors class?” And so on.  Then came the history and geography lessons in school, which gradually revealed to me why I was bombarded with so many stupid and offensive questions.  Every history and geography book that I read as a student in American classrooms dealt with all of Latin America as a single, undifferentiated whole, as a place where nearly everyone was poor and dark-skinned and everything was owned by a few incredibly wealthy families who exploited everyone else through corrupt dictatorships.  If there were any illustrations in these textbooks at all, they tended to be photos of poor, half-naked peasants and their primitive hovels, or of ancient Inca or Aztec sites, or of uncivilized natives who wore loincloths and still hunted with bows and arrows.  Every now and then I found a photo or two of Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro in these textbooks, with a few cars on the streets, but the lesson remained the same, in spite of the visual evidence of prosperity and civilization offered by these rare illustrations: all of Latin America was owned by a few wealthy families who exploited millions upon millions of starving,  grass-hut-dwelling, illiterate peasants.  Modern buildings and conveniences such as those depicted on photos of Rio and Buenos Aires were extremely rare and always limited to the privileged few or to foreign tourists.  If Cuba was mentioned at all, it was usually described as a place where everyone toiled at cultivating sugar cane and tobacco –except for those few selfish landlords who did nothing but exploit the labor force, of course.  The only two photos I ever saw of Cuba in an American textbook seemed odd to me.  One photo showed the Morro Castle in Havana harbor, an old Spanish fortress with a prominent lighthouse, which served to identify  the spot where the Maine was blown up.  The other showed a half-naked Afro-Cuban peasant plowing with a team of starving oxen, offered as proof positive of the pigmentation and the poverty and deprivation that were the lot of 99.99% of the Cuban people. 
	I should hasten to add that all of these textbooks used in my American classrooms were written and published before Fidel Castro hijacked Cuba in 1959 and that they bore a closer resemblance to his distorted version of Cuban history than to the truth. Thanks largely to these lousy textbooks and the false information they conveyed about Latin America and Cuba, the image of himself that Fidel would later promote abroad as the hero who saved Cuba from utter destitution and illiteracy was easily mistaken for a fact.  
	I don’t know what Canadian and European textbooks were like at the same time, but given current attitudes towards Fidel’s Revolution in those countries, and given the fact that most of the European publishers of my memoir have refused to use my photo on the cover of their translations because  I “don’t look Cuban enough,”–as they put it-  I assume their distortions were not very different from those I encountered here in the United States. Given their enthusiastic investment in Cuba’s tourism industry, and their wilful blindness to human rights abuses on the island, one must assume that many Canadians and Europeans tend to think of Fidel as a very benevolent paterfamilias who rescued his childish people from an awful fate.  Take, for instance, this incredibly naive observation  penned  by Brian Wilson, Labour Member of Parliament for Cunninghame North, in the United Kingdom:
Cuba's primary service to the world has been to provide living proof that it is possible to conquer poverty, disease and illiteracy in a country that was grossly over-familiar with all three. That is a pretty big service. The fact that it has been delivered in the face of sustained hostility from an obsessive neighbour makes it all the more stunning.11

	Acceptance of the Cuban Revolution as a good and wondrous thing rests squarely on a flawed mythology of Cuba’s past and all of the misconceptions it engenders, including those utopian ones that naively proclaim the Revolution’s total conquest of poverty, disease, and illiteracy.  As there is a yin, so is there a yang in the Big Lie about Cuba,  and you can’t have one without the other: the yin is the lie that tells you Cuba was a very poor country with millions and millions of starving, illiterate, disease-ridden peasants; the yang is the lie that tells you that all of those ills have been vanquished and that Cuba is now some sort of egalitarian New Jerusalem, where there are no tears left to wipe.  It’s this yin-yang, warp-and-woof, alpha-and-omega binary teleology that makes the Big Lie so big, and so believable in the minds of many;  it is wish fulfillment of the highest order for anyone who wants to believe in the altruistic utopian dream of collectivism.12  	
	In sum, the very success of the Revolution depends on a binary  belief system founded on lies about Cuba’s history, past and present,  and on paternalistic, condescending, bigoted opinions about third world people, who, of course, are no longer “half-devil, half-child” but rather “half-monk, half-child”: selfless natives who are so fully satisfied with the crumbs thrown to them by a totalitarian regime that they will happily live like monks and nuns, selflessly, always true to their vows of poverty and obedience, totally unconcerned about their rights as individuals, and totally thrilled with the fact that some greater “visionary” or “principled” paternalistic entity is looking out for their best interests, which,  naturally,  they can’t discern for themselves.  One viewer of the PBS documentary “Fidel Castro” summed up the ying-yang argument and this new, improved, postcolonial racism quite openly:: 
Everyone below the age of 50 don't know [sic] about the conditions of Cuba before Fidel. When a revolution is successful there is a reason and the reason in Cuba was poverty. Without the strength of Castro, Cuba will fall into decline searching for a direction and will come under the fold of the United States just as it was in the 40s and 50s.13

	In many ways, this condescending view of Cuba and Latin America is very similar to that which Westerners have long cultivated towards the so-called “Orient”, that is, all the lands East of Europe.  Though many scholars and leading intellectuals have embraced the critique of these attitudes raised by Edward Said in his grounbreaking book Orientalism, the same sort of correction has yet to take place in regards to Latin America.  What Said critiques in Orientalism is not the idea that there are differences between cultures, but rather the conceit that the West was ever a detached, objective observer.  The imperialist West has long projected many of its prejudices into its studies of other peoples, he argues, and its so-called objectivity needs to be seen for what it really is: a well camouflaged “political doctrine” that always supports an agenda.  According to him, European study of the people they were colonizing was a “cultural apparatus” often laden with “agression” and “judgement.”14   
	What issues forth from “Orientalist”-type reigning assumptions about Cuba is a muddle-headed, condescending praise of the Cuban Revolution as a beacon of hope for the human race.  Never mind the lack of freedom and the constant repression that suffocate every Cuban.  What they need is a strong leader who will lead them out of poverty by redistributing all the property and prohibiting private enterprise.  So what if they can't speak their minds openly or criticize their rulers?  So what if they only have one newspaper to read and it is published by the Central Committee of the Communist Party?  So what if there is constant censorship of every form of scholarship or artistic expression? So what if everyone is forced to go to rallies?  So what if children are required to perform several weeks of “volunteer” agricultural slave labor every year? So what if they are penalized and discriminated against for attending church or religious instruction?  So what if there are forced labor camps and torture cells and constant executions?  So what if people simply disappear in the night never to be seen again, or are beaten and kicked by mobs, or are imprisoned without trial for the crime of “potential delinquency”?   So what if Cubans are not allowed to travel freely and are also prohibited from setting foot in the same establishments and beaches frequented by the affluent tourists from the outside world?  So what if accepting tips or “gifts” from tourists is a criminal act?  That is what is best for them in the same way that working the cotton fields in the summer heat was the best thing for "colored" people here in the United States. 
	A prime example of such bigoted condescension is an article recently published in the travel section of  The Telegraph, which in many ways continues and pays homage to that venerable genre of British prose, the colonialist travelogue, in which the writer is always very careful to camouflage all condescension and in which all foreign squalor is turned into charming differences, or “local “colour” (Italics mine).15  Essential to such writing is the conceit that the differences between the observer and the “other” are substantial, and that this chasm allows the observer to never lose objectivity or to pass judgment.  A second conceit is assuming that the “other”, who is so sorely lacking in the same refinements as the observer, is “exotic” and not bound by the same concept of shame, and is therefore somehow closer to nature, that is, closer to a primitive stage of human development.  To hide all signs of contempt, the primitive other is romanticized and portrayed as guileless and shameless, and as capable of living with less comfort and of enjoying his or her and animal instincts more fully than the reserved and civilized observer. Underlying all such conceits is another one, which is very slippery and so carefully encoded as to pass unnoticed, that is, the pact established between author and reader, and the encoded language of the author/reader that seals that pact and allows shared values to be exchanged or even shaped through the writing and reading processes.
	Key to this pact is the concept of “local colour,” which is so freighted with meaning as to defy definition.  “Local colour” is shorthand for all those very carefully constructed sentences that refer to exotic peculiarities, sentences that are intentionally bereft of explicit judgment but packed with details that highlight the difference between the “other” being described and the reader’s own familiar world.  The assumption encoded into the term “local colour” is obvious: while the familiar seems bland, or colorless, the unfamiliar can seem brighter, or more colorful, like the grass that is always greener on the other side of the hill.  The greater the difference or oddness, the brighter the local color. And, usually, the brighter the “local colour” the wider the qualitative gap between the other and the author/reader, and the more careful the encoding of all judgements about the inferiority of the other vis-a-vis the author/reader.  It stands to reason, then, that places where people themselves are of a different color – which in the case of the British usually means a darker pigmentation  – the meaning of  “local colour” assumes various shades of meaning.  It is no accident that British reserve and politeness made “person of colour” or “coloured person” the acceptable term for all dark-skinned others.  It is a loathsome term that so carefully encodes and veils a whole forest of prejudices – and, sadly, it is also the term that is now politically correct for all those who are judged to be non-whites by white elites, such as the author of this essay..  
	Attempting to provide her readers with a taste of “local colour “ Schuckburg begins her piece in The Telegraph with a thick description of the exotic and very African primitiveness of Havana, where shoes and shirts and decent clothing and sports equipment and even teeth are unnecessary items and where the savage, animalistic rhythms of the jungle – or bush, as British prefer to say – prove so irresistible that even the elderly feel compelled  to dance the day away:
I sit on a bench in a tiny park, and the colour, music and exuberance of old Havana engulf me...An intoxicating blend of Spanish guitars and African drumbeats drifts from a nearby bar, where an elderly couple is performing an afternoon salsa...Three barefoot boys in tattered shorts kick a dented can over the cobbles...Bare-chested men exchange jokes as they push barrows of rubble. A grizzled, toothless man approaches me and holds out his hand. I give him a few tiny coins.	

	Ay Dios mio!  Jesus H. Almsgiving Christ! Did the coins really have to be few and tiny? Yes.  You bet, yes.  Those are perhaps the two most important words in that opening paragraph, for they help to establish two key principles in the slippery, always well-encoded pact between the travel writer and her audience: 1. The observer’s superiority and benign condescension, which are the very basis for her objectivity; 2. The inferiority, simplicity, and primitiveness of the Cubans, who are very happy with their subaltern status.  The outstretched, begging hand reifies the shamelessness of Cubans as well as their submissiveness, and marks them as primitives.  The begging toothless man also confirms the fact that the author is cavorting with inferior subalterns in a much clearer way than any of the other not-so-subtle clues in that first paragraph, including the shirtlessness and shoelessness and the dancing to African drumbeats in the middle of the afternoon.  The coins themselves reify the observer’s superior elite status and the native’s inferiority.  Their small size and number are mentioned (or invented), perhaps as a Freudian slip of sorts, to subtly reveal to the right kind of reader the hidden racist code that permeates the whole article: the few tiny coins sum up the author’s esteem of  the ultimate worth of these shameless primitives, whom she is glad to observe from a safe distance, as one who travels through Cuba rather than as one who lives there, day after day.   The almsgiving, then, confirms. Shuckburgh’s own superior status perhaps a bit too colourfully,  for through this symbolic exchange she reveals her own shamelessness to the beggar and her readers, that is, her shameless, thinly veiled contempt for a nation of beggars who are so care-free as to crack jokes while hauling away the rubble of their own crumbling dwellings and her shameless glee at finding a place where the natives are thrilled to receive even the tiniest of gifts from those who go slumming on their island.  
	One must also ask: Is Ms. Shuckburgh at all aware that her opening  paragraph could be taken as an indictment of the Revolution and proof positive of its many failures?  How could the Revolution be praised as a great success when Cubans beg on the streets, or wear tattered clothing, or no clothing at all?  Why is there rubble to be carted about in barrows?  What has been wrecked?  What is crumbling?  Why barrows?  Where is the power equipment?  Where are the trucks? Where are the great sports programs?  Why are the boys kicking a dented can on the street rather than a ball on a grassy field?  Why are they barefoot?  Where are the shoes promised to everyone by the Revolution?  Where is the Revolution’s great medical and dental care?  Why is the grizzled man toothless?  Why did he lose his teeth?  Aren’t there any dentures to be had? Or razors? 
	Could it get any worse than this? Unfortunately, yes.  The reader has no trouble finding out where the rubble comes from and why it has to be carted  away.
As I look up, a woman leans from an ornate, rusty balcony to hang out washing and waves down at me. Beneath her, the peeling stucco façade of the once-grand house is criss-crossed with wooden scaffolding. It's a typical sight.... Many incredible buildings are crumbling....Beyond Plaza Vieja, the streets are potholed and strewn with rubbish, and families sit on doorsteps in front of squalid, sparsely furnished rooms. The average wage is £ 7 a month [ $13.17 in American dollars] - food is scarce, and housing is in crisis.

	And it keeps getting worse.  Shuckburgh admits  not only that once-lovely Havana is falling to pieces, but that the only money spent on repairs comes from Unesco World Heritage funds  rather than from the Revolution, and that the tiny fraction of dwellings with “leafy courtyards” that are refurbished by Unesco are not used to house or school the shirtless, shoeless, toothless Cubans she so seems to love and admire, but are rather dedicated to “vibrant art galleries” that cater to tourists only.  To her credit as a journalist, Shuckburgh does pause her rickshaw long enough to consider what benefits, if any, Cubans may expect from their government’s heavy investment in tourism, which has now become the Revolution’s leading industry, especially after Fidel closed down over half of Cuba’s sugar refineries in 2005.  But the news is just as depressing on that front. 
The Cubans I speak to hope that tourism and foreign investment will help to alleviate poverty, but admit that the tourist peso, worth 20 times the local peso, is itself creating class divisions between those with access to it and those without.

	Jesus H. Cheek-turning Christ!  If this is praise for the Revolution, then please never let this journalist deliver my eulogy!

	But maybe I should change that plea; perhaps she could be a great eulogist after all.  Ms. Shuckburgh does have a way of turning dross into gold, or at least of making leaps of faith that would make John Wesley and Soren Kierkegaard weep for joy.  Since Saint Ignatius Loyola was blessed with the so-called “gift of tears” and wept constantly (a rare mystical favor that signaled perfect empathy with a suffering world and its crucified Savior), I doubt that Shuckburgh could ratchet up his weeping, but I am certain Saint Ignatius could jump for joy and cry at the same time, for her faith in the Revolution is of exactly the same sort as the faith he wished all good Catholics would  manifest, as he very clearly explained in his Spritiual Exercises, in the thirteenth of his “Rules for Thinking With the Church:”
If we wish to proceed securely in all things, we must hold fast to the following principle: What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines it.16 

	Undaunted by the many references she makes to the misery endured by Cubans, she makes a giant leap of faith and finds ways to see white as black and to praise the Revolution and its leaders.   Shuckbergh waxes poetic about Fidel.  After describing the museum that has been set up in Havana to honor Simón Bolivar -- the revolutionary leader who led South America’s bid for independence from Spanish rule in the early nineteenth century – she bemoans the fact that Britons don’t have any real heroes such as Bolivar that they can look up to.  In contrast, she observes, “Cubans are lucky” to have “several giants to worship - not lightweight media celebrities, but principled, visionary reformers.”  Right at the top of her list of  “principled, visionary reformers” that Cubans get to “worship” (her verb, not mine) stands Fidel Castro, the very same man who bears the responsibility for the crumbling buildings and the shoelessness and all those other miseries she has just so aptly described.  
 There are few photographs of him, and no statues, but for most Cubans, Castro is a living legend who has maintained his communist ideals despite the collapse of communism elsewhere, and despite sanctions and embargoes from the "Enemy" to the north.
	
	And so the twisting leap of faith is made.  It may be an elegant pirouette, and perhaps an admirable one, in a fundamentalist postcolonial sort of way, but it nonetheless a frightening one, which requires a deep abiding trust in the wholesale superiority of abstract ideals.  Fidel is great, she tells us,  because he has pigheadedly forced an entire nation to follow communist principles that were long ago abandoned elsewhere throughout the world as a resounding failure, and because he has done so without any regard whatsoever to the price paid by Cubans.  She also thinks that he is wonderful for having stood up to the United States, the great “Enemy,” and all its bogus sanctions and embargoes.
	Among the many items that Shuckbergh fails to mention –such as the fact that the embargo has not stopped the United States from being Cuba’s top foreign supplier of agricultural products for many, many years– the most significant one to omit is fact is that Fidel has stifled all dissent in order to stick to these principles , and that in the process he has created one of the most brutally repressive regimes in the history of the Western hemisphere, a regime far worse in human rights abuses than any of those that are normally considered heinous, such as those of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the Somoza family in Nicaragua. But the human rights issue is too big for her to ignore altogether.  Nearly everyone on earth is aware of the fact that there are two million Cubans in exile (about 20% of Cuba’s total population), and that these exiles tell tales of kangaroo courts, unfair imprisonment, torture, and summary executions.  So, in order to make mention of this subject and not have it affect her leap of faith, Shuckburgh makes light of it.  And she does so in the most reprehensible way imaginable, by using the fear-ridden comments of the natives as testimonials that should be taken at their face value, and by offering up undigested knee-jerk clichés and Revolutionary groupthink slogans as proof of the fact that Cubans are really, really happy with their lot and especially with their self-appointed “visionary” worship-worthy Maximum Leader.  Of course, it helps that she already thinks of Cubans as simple subalterns who are very happy with their deprivations, and even happier with Fidel’s loathing for democracy.   Prejudice has everything to do with her wilful blindness and her seemingly naive acceptance of silence as proof of unconcern..
The Cubans I speak to all share Castro's patriotism and his distrust of democracy, and are intensely proud of Cuba's egalitarianism, education, health care and sporting achievements. None of them mention human rights or freedom of expression.

	How wonderful.  Yes, I suppose the barefoot boys who were playing with a can were intensely proud of Cuba’s sporting achievements.  And, yes, of course, everyone in Cuba discusses politics openly, especially with foreign journalists who might quote them.   Why not ask any of the two million Cubans who have fled their island home about those human rights abuses – especially those who were prominent artists, writers, musicians, or athletes and were born after the Revolution turned their island into an egalitarian paradise?. Any of them could  explain to her in great detail why no one living under that regime would dare  mention the subject to a foreign reporter, or even to a neighbor or relative, or trusted friend.  All Cubans know that they can end up in prison for saying the wrong thing, and they also know that any of their neighbors, relatives, or friends can turn them in to the authorities as “counter-revolutionaries” for questioning any aspect of the Revolution’s policies. They are also very painfully aware that there are rewards for those who tell on others and that anyone – including one’s own children or parents  – can reap great benefits and gain greater control of their environment by acting as chivatos, or sntiches. Of course, the Revolution does not call them snitches, but principled heroes. 
	Supporters of the Cuban Revolution and of Fidel’s coercive state love to gloss over the human rights issue, principally because they choose to believe that Cubans are different, and that they don’t care and are perhaps incapable of appreciating individual rights or freedom of expression.  Many Cuba supporters also blame the United States for turning Fidel into Mister Mean, for forcing him to be hard on his own people, malgré lui, in spite of himself.  
	Ms. Shuckburgh hinted at this in her travel piece, but Brian Wilson, who was quoted a few pages back,  is very frank about his blame-throwing.   Again, as is often the case with postcolonial neocolonialists,  his arguments circle back to some very bigoted, condescending view of Cubans as different. Wilson concludes his piece in The Guardian by blaming the United States for all of Cuba’s current woes, including Fidel’s repressive policies.  But Wilson would not dare to even hint that there was repression of any sort in Cuba.  No.  In a  stunningly brilliant example of British understatement, evasiveness, and condescension, Wilson speaks of seeing “political paradoxes on every street corner”, hastening to add that such “paradoxes” were the “inevitable” result of forty years of American aggression, and could be ultimately dismissed altogether because they were   “irrelevant to the bigger picture of what Cuba represents as a symbol of human potential”17
	I am willing to wager that for Mr. Wilson “political paradoxes” can only exist in the third world, among the lesser folk, and that while he would also probably speak of Mao’s or Pol Pot’s atrocities as  “paradoxes”, he would instantly switch from speaking cooly about “irrelevant paradoxes” to railing in a much less detached manner about “political repression” or “human rights abuses” when dealing with Hitler’s Third Reich or the Soviet Empire, simply because those being skewered by totalitarianism in such cases were Europeans.  More than that, I am certain that  if he and all his relatives and friends and fellow countrymen were the ones being silenced and deprived of all liberties for the sake of abstract ideals, as citizens of the United Kingdom, Mr. Wilson would not only scream bloody murder instead of whispering about irrelevant paradoxes, but also wage guerilla warfare in the sad remains of Sherwood Forest against the buggers who dared to deny his rights.  
	Whether or not Mr. Wilson or Ms. Shuckburgh or any other such neocolonialist bigot is ever consciously aware that the double standard they apply  to repression is based on racial lines makes no real difference.  The bigotry is there all the same, whether or not it is consciously accepted.  I have circled back to Mr. Wilson because his rhetoric is so transparent and so revealing of the hidden prejudices that make it so difficult to have a genuine dialogue about Cuban history with those who have already made up their minds that Fidel’s totalitarian nightmare is some sort of utopia. Whenever I try to expose the reigning North American and European view of Cuban and Latin American history as an awfully inaccurate caricature, I often get the same distrustful and somewhat hostile reaction.  One incident in particular will forever remain seared in my memory, smoking and stinking until the day I die.  Perhaps even in the afterlife too.
	A year ago, the public library in Westport, Connecticut,  invited me to speak about my memoir. During the question and answer period, one lady asked me why I was defending Batista, the dictator ousted by Fidel Castro.  I very politely explained that I was doing nothing of the kind, and that if she were to read my book she would see that I loathed Batista.  I also explained that Batista was despised by nearly every Cuban, including those who have fled from Fidel, and added that sometimes a very bad tyrant can be replaced by an even worse one – an easily verifiable fact in human history that many Americans seem to have trouble understanding.   Then an elderly gentleman began screaming at me: “You people are ruining this country!  It’s because of you and all your fellow right-wing Cubans in Miami that this country is going to hell!  If it weren’t for you people we’d have a different president right now and we’d all be better off!  It’s all your fault that we are at war in Iraq!  You people should just keep quiet and leave us alone, or get lost!” 
	Then I noticed the number tattooed on the man’s arm.  I didn’t have to ask.  He closed his diatribe by letting us know that he was a Holocaust survivor who had been sent to a Nazi death camp as a child. 
	That someone who had suffered so much due to bigotry and stereotyping should be yelling about all of us exiled Cubans as “you people,” blaming us for ruining his country, and that he, of all people, should fail to understand the many similarities between his behavior and that of the Germans who sent him to a death camp, took me aback as nothing else ever has.   That he should harbor such animosity towards me, personally, and towards all Cuban exiles also taught me a valuable lesson, without which I would not have been able to write this essay: that victims of bigotry can be bigots too.  Anyone can be a bigot, even those who have suffered greatly, and  the more outrageous the prejudice, the more likely it is that it will be invisible to the person who harbors it.  In other words, bigots hold their prejudices to be “self-evident truths,” or  facts, or perhaps even sacred beliefs.  And this is why it is so hard to change a bigot’s mind. 
	Bigotry is unreasonable, and it on images.  The simpler the image, the bigger the lie, the deeper the bigotry.
	No wonder Che is so popular. And no wonder that I and every other Cuban exile who try to expose him and his stinking Revolution are called liars. No wonder the world has come around in the twenty-first century to finding in him, a homophobe who was Grand Inquisitor and Lord High Executioner rolled into one, the embodiment of rebellion against oppression.18  No wonder this  “visionary” hero who stealthily embodies bigotry has earned himself the chance to become 
a new, improved  Rudyard Kipling for the postcolonial world.  And a fashion statement to boot.
	Che has become a totem.  And it is taboo to mess with totems.
	Allow me for a moment to turn to a contemporary of Kipling’s, Emile Durkheim, whose book  Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1906), can shed much light on Che’s place in our culture.19
	Emile Durkheim, thanks to whom universities now have departments of sociology and religious studies, figured out a century ago that societies depend on myths, symbols and rituals as much as religions do, and that states and nations are faith systems established gradually by groups of individuals who project emotional and psychological energy onto certain symbols,.  These symbols, or  totems, as Durkheim called them, eventually come to represent the whole community, and to transcend it: they become the society’s grand axis, the ultimate reference point for its ethical code, the very means of distinguishing right from wrong, good from bad, holy from deviant, clean from unclean.  Totems define every society and how it regulates  behavior: at the very same time, they are a reflection and the touchstone of a society’s values. 
	If you doubt that Che has become a Durkheimian totem, please  read Sarah Shuckburgh’s travel piece on Cuba from beginning to end, for she gives voice to the totemic irrationality of the cult of Che perfectly. Her adulation of Che not only borders on idolatry, but also on mysticism, and bears all the tell-tale marks of totemic worship, which always involves a search for wish-fulfillment and the projection of values onto history..   After describing all of the hardships Cubans have to endure nowadays, she projects her own feelings onto an abstraction of all Cubans who still live on the island, saying that despite all of their suffering, “Cubans remain cheerfully egalitarian, and as enthralled as ever by their most famous hero.”  Then she lapses into her own adolescent totemic fantasies: “I remember my own Che Guevara poster, pinned to my bedroom wall 35 years ago.” Like some teenager poring over photos of her idol in fan magazines, Shuckburgh loses even more of her British reserve and lets loose one of the most superficial and puerile assessments ever made of Che Guevara , the man and the totem:
I marvel at how photogenic Che was - his romantic features utterly mesmerising, from classroom to battlefield. During his brief spell as a short-haired government minister, he looked like a portly Lord Lucan, but luckily, by his death, the Heroic Guerillero had lost weight, and grown his hair and beard, and looked beautiful once more.

	Swooning over Che’s “precious relics” at his mausoleum - a “lock of hair, wisps of his beard, and remnants of clothing he was wearing when killed,”  from which she actually believes she should keep “a respectful distance,” she enjoys a Durkheimian epiphany of sorts in which she is able to juxtapose totems and realize her pure devotion to the replacement of Christian beliefs by communist ideology.  Sadly, when all is said and done, she realizes that her totem Che and his glorious Revolution are all about a leap of faith, without any apparent awareness of her own assent to a monstrous fiction:
The links with religious iconography are startling. He appears as a Christ-like figure, charismatic and courageous, challenging injustice and sacrificing his life to save the oppressed. Che's apparent asceticism, his idealism, his disapproval of greed, his hard work and altruism remind me of the Puritan work ethic, but with individual faith in God replaced by collectivism.

	A secular, totally materialistic religion, but a religion nonetheless.  Yes.  A religion that requires the daily sacrifice of “coloured” victims on the altar of communist ideology and collectivism.  And what she fails to realize is that the holocausts offered up are those very same “oppressed” victims of injustice whose lives she is foolish enough to think Che really improved. . 
	And so it is that for wilfully blind racist tourists such as Shuckburgh, who think that the “local colour” never includes bloodstains and that it is always brightest and most adorable on thinly gilded surfaces that conceal hideous monstrosities, Cuba is much lovelier when seen as the land of Che than as the home of the Cha Cha Cha.						
	Among the parents and grandparents of the new breed of imperialists who have emerged in the postcolonial world – the pale tourist or would-be tourist who could say after reading Shuckburgh’s travelogue “Jeeves, my man, pack those bags; we’re flying down to Havana after tea” – Cuba was once best known for its poverty, sugar, cigars, rum, and music.  And when it came to music, nothing could beat the Cha Cha Cha.  Forget the Mambo and the Rumba and the Conga, its close Cuban cousins.  The Cha-Cha – as the “chi-chi” called it-- was king, at least in the minds of non-Cubans around the world, many of whom couldn’t care less if those dark people who made such great music were really all that poor or not, or whether or not they knew how to read.  But, at its very apogee, in 1959, when Cha-Cha-Cha and Cuban hot-blooded licentiousness had become synonymous in the mind of many a pale tourist or would-be tourist, the party ended abruptly and most impolitely in Cuba. 
	Along came Fidel and his bearded revolutionaries, and they outlawed Christmas and Carnival, along with begging, prostitution,and tourism.  Cubans would no longer be a subaltern people with Christian or capitalist totems.  No longer would they genuflect to a cross or a dollar, or hold their hands out for a few tiny coins, or wait hand and foot on foreign bigots , or screw them for money, or help them dance the night away.  The Cha-Cha-Cha was not so much outlawed as eclipsed .  Thundering, long-winded speeches drowned it out, as did the rhythmic political mantras intoned in unison by mobs of tens of thousands.  Gone were the Tropicana and all other nightclubs; not silenced, but simply upstaged by the Grand Guignol Theatre of the Revolution  – fossilized instantly by the sound of firing squads, their ridiculously-garbed musicians and scantily-clad dancers frozen in a timeless limbo of sorts, as if in some eternal death throe, just like pterodactyls from the Jurassic Age embedded in Bavarian limestone.  
	And, as we all know, in due time, the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those pale tourists and would-be tourists would come to think of Cuba as the land of Che Guevara rather than as the home of the Cha-Cha-Cha; and in due time, after communism failed all over the world,  Fidel would once again call back the tourists and beg for their Dollars and Euros.   Very quickly– in the wink of an eye, some might say – Cuba was transformed from Pleasure Island to Utopia in the minds of many in  the world’s affluent nations, and then back again into Pleasure Island,. 
	And so it was,  that as soon as the imperialists of the postcolonial world stopped taking Cha-Cha lessons, their progeny set up altars to the greatest saint and martyr of the new Utopia, that asthmatic Argentinian who oversaw its firing squads, Ernesto “Che” Guevara..  And now, forty-seven years after he oversaw his first public execution in Cuba and thirty-eight years after his own poetically just death at the hands of a firing squad, Che has a mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba, which resembles that of the fascist Generalisimo Francisco Franco at the Valley of the Fallen, near Madrid,  not only because of its bombastic pretentiousness and overall gestalt, but also because the natives tend to visit it only when they are forced to do so.
	And Cuba is once again a tourist destination where Cubans beg for tiny coins and wait on bigots hand and foot and screw them for money and help them dance the night away, although this time around, unlike before, the corrupt government that calls itself The Revolution forbids 99.99 percent of its people access to these tourist spots, with an apartheid system as heinous as that which made the old South Africa the pariah of the world..  
	And in 2004 Forbes Magazine, which bills itself as “The Tool for Capitalists” and “The Home Page For the World’s Business Leaders” and is not afraid to list Fidel among the richest rulers on earth, estimating his hidden assets at 900 million dollars20, sealed that multimillionaire’s pact with the Almighty Dollar by proclaiming Cuba one of the top ten “sexiest islands in the world,” way up there with Ibiza, Sardinia., Fiji, Koh Lanta, and other hedonistic hot spots.  Yes, a sexy island, which, according to Forbes, qualifies it as a haven for “escapism” where “parties seem to occur on a 24-hour basis.”
These are places where the normal codes of conduct are packed away with the empty suitcases and exhibitionism, whether physical or financial, becomes the order of the day. In such a hedonistic world, restraint is forgotten; yachts jostle for moorings in the harbor, trying to outdo each other in splendor and size; champagne is consumed like water; and work becomes a four-letter word. The primitive rules of attraction run rampant down the sandy beaches and through the rooms of rented seaside villas.21

Forget all the crap about human rights abuses and poverty and food rationing and revolutions and slogans like “Marxism-Leninism or Death!” and all that depressing stuff.  It’s party time in hell!  Good capitalists  like to impress their friends and associates and clobber them with their one-upmanship.  And no other status symbol can trump a trip to exotic, forbidden Cuba. 

What also adds to the sex appeal is a whiff of danger, or the forbidden. Americans have had a long-distance love affair with Cuba since travel was banned there more than 40 years ago...While anyone can jump on a flight to Barbados, it takes planning and a little bit of subterfuge to get to Cuba, which adds to the whole experience. It also guarantees great cocktail party conversation to casually mention that you're just back from a few days in Havana.22

	And Che, poor Che, holy Che, suffers an excruciating martyrdom as a top consumer item and a pop idol, his likeness stamped onto watches that are hawked to unsuspecting capitalists at the trend-setting upper-middlebrow gift shop of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, with the catchy, I’m-so-square-I’m hip, come-on slogan “make a revolutionary statement.”
	And the progeny of the capitalist pigs he so loathed have ditched the Cha-Cha-Cha for a mantra that invokes his sacred name with fervor: “Che! Che! Che!”
	And, somewhere, from his much humbler grave, Kipling does the devil’s bidding and whispers in all their ears constantly, along with Sysyphus, the second stanza of his infamous poem, their hidden gnostic creed:
Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.