Pogolotti 3
Memories of January
Memories of January
By Graziella Pogolotti
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
It seemed symbolic. The triumph had come with the new year. This time the rebels had entered Santiago and the invasion from East to West took place, led by Camilo and Che. From the remotest places in the world, looks turned toward the little Archipelago, so far unknown.
The overthrow of the dictatorship, which had a professional army trained and armed by the empire, overturned predictions of specialists, rectified by the bearers of common sense. It was the result of a strategy elaborated from a deep knowledge of the historical development of the country, of the analysis of the determining factors of yesterday’s setbacks and of the real contradictions latent in the background of the society. From this stratum was born the victorious popular army that, with its mane [hair], beard and necklaces, showed the unprecedented face of the nation.
For some, it was all over. In the midst of the general euphoria, Fidel was quick to point out that the most difficult battle had just begun. The project of social justice and the conquest of full sovereignty would encounter numerous obstacles. It would imply, among other things, an urgent task of collective learning, of acquiring the first letters to open up paths to science and culture, of understanding where we come from and becoming aware of the place we occupy in the world, because the conflict between exploiters and exploited is reproduced on a planetary scale.
To carry out this collective learning, thought, word and action were brought together into a single beam. The propitious environment was the multitudinous Plaza de la Revolución, but also the TV, a medium that favored the most intimate communication and accentuated the dialogic character of Fidel’s speeches.
In every circumstance, he would reveal the causes of things and from the tumult of ideas, the way to face problems would emerge. No matter how hard it was, the truth had to be shown in its clearest profiles. So it was with the unwavering defense of principles during the dramatic days of the October Crisis and much later with the early prognosis of the possible collapse of the Soviet Union.
With its tiny oligarchy subject to the interests of the empire, Cuba was carrying the scabs of the colony, denounced years ago by Rubén Martínez Villena. It was a destiny shared with many countries that, at the turn of the ’50s of the last century, were fighting to break the old ties. In the United States, the struggle for civil rights was gaining strength. It was not long before the Vietnam War produced a process of radicalization in the emerging generalization. Added to the anti-racist demands were the demands of women and those discriminated against because of their sexual orientation.
In the United Nations, Cuba’s thoughts and words became an emancipatory voice. In an extensive speech that broke the established rules of the game, Fidel warned about the dangers derived from the imposition of neo-colonial forms of domination in the countries that had just gained political independence. His speech kept an expectant audience in suspense. At the Theresa Hotel in Harlem, he received the visit of outstanding personalities of the national liberation movement.
The murder of Patrice Lumumba, captured and tortured, was a sad example. Amilcar Cabral, one of the most lucid African leaders, disappeared. Che fell in Bolivia. The coup against Salvador Allende frustrated his reformist project and with the dictatorship of Pinochet, established by the Chicago boys, through the use of violence, the neo-liberal doctrine. In this way, transnationalized big capital imposed, a new form of colonial appropriation. The consequences are visible in Latin America with the growth of inequality and the exercise of violent practices aggravated by the expansion of drug cartels, the trafficking of persons to which those who aspire to emigrate succumb. The neoliberal resurgence also undermines the welfare policies implemented in the First World as safeguards against the model of a socialist perspective in Eastern Europe.
An attentive and critical observer of the passing of the contemporary world, Fidel warned early on of the dangers looming over our species. His call at that time transcended borders and ideologies. But the depredation of the planet has continued at an accelerated pace.
Apparently dispersed in discourses born from concrete circumstances, free from dogmatic ties, Fidel’s thought was prorojected with remarkable organicity and coherence, to the point of constituting an indispensable tool to continue accompanying us today.
With his ear attentive to the rumors of the earth, his vision encompassed the essential features of the planet’s events. Never axiomatic, he always went through the complex twists and turns of analyzing reality. We cannot fragment it. It is up to us to rescue it in its entirety.
The Sociological View
The Sociological View
Published: Saturday 22 February 2020 | 09:03:07 pm.
By Graziella Pogolotti
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
Grounded in the Industrial Revolution, with the invention of the steam engine, mass production and the resulting competitive drive to ensure the dominance of the world market had its effects, at an accelerating pace, on the life of society. The soot was invading everything. Cities began to grow rapidly. The proletariat was constituted as a social class. The dizzying change had repercussions on the rise of the social sciences. History changed its perspective, the economy became an indispensable reference point, psychology, anthropology and sociology acquired autonomy. The latter permeated other disciplines with its influence.
With the cost of paper now down, the press has a new reading public. It introduced the soap opera into its pages. It was the antecedent of the current soap opera [telenovela]. With the emergence of creative literary giants, narrative reached an unprecedented peak. First, social romanticism and later the proliferation of “costumbrismo” (local color), the latter spread through the novel, sharpened the sociological outlook. The characters moved in a specific context.
The historical perspective left the past behind to shape the approach of the present. The contradictions in everyday life and the exacerbation of individualism in the struggle to survive, to accumulate power and fortune and to move up the social ladder came to the fore. Little read today, Dickens became a bestseller of that time by showing the drama of helpless childhood in the city environment, captured by crime and victim of the debtors’ prison that punished them along with their parents. Balzac warned about the domination of the financial world, enriched by usury and the consequent disappearance of the small merchant. Emile Zola, A French writer preferred by the cigar factory lectors [workers who read live to cigar workers] wanted to systematize the analysis. He articulated the sequence of his novels to a family genealogy that allowed him to focus each of them on a specific sector of reality.
In one of his novels, Zola examines the seduction exerted on women by the emergence of the first department stores. In accordance with the traditional division of labor, women are responsible for taking care of domestic chores, but they also take on the responsibility of buying what is necessary for the home. Pressed by a concrete need, they turn to the dazzling display case that offers all sorts of temptations. To the purchase of the indispensable, they add the dispensable, with the apparent advantage of having a credit card. Not having to take money out of their purse, they lose track of what they have spent. They fall into debt that, in the end, will be unpayable. It was the original cell of the policy of encouraging consumerism, unleashed more than half a century later, a way of avoiding the overproduction crises characteristic of capitalism through the constant increase in demand, with its depredatory effects on the planet’s goods.
Like history and psychology, sociology became a science. It opened up perspectives that went beyond the field of specialists,. It influenced so-called investigative journalism and can help shape the outlook of better-informed citizens. This approach to reality rethought the complex nature of the link between the individual and society. Considered as a subject of history, human beings build their life expectations from a set of determining factors, among which are class roots, family environment and the education system.
Other factors act on the consciousness of each one, among which the media, entertainment, the use of free time and the formation of paradigms stand out. Some time ago, in the miserable favelas, where the essential was lacking, the television antennas were pointed out. Now, in a similar context, cell phones are everywhere. They offer escape routes, projected towards an illusory world that is not their own. The proposal of models of careers towards individual success replaces the image of a virtuous life in the struggle to transform reality for the benefit of all.
It is often forgotten that among the founders of historical science were Marx and Engels, who put knowledge at the service of the emancipatory revolution. The hegemonic power understood the scope of this way of exploring reality and finding the formulas to intervene in it by operating on human subjectivity. Politics has to strengthen the essential revolutionary condition of the sciences devoted to the study of society, a living and therefore changing phenomenon. It is an urgent demand to calibrate in its right measure the concreteness of the facts, without diluting them in vague generalizations. In the demands of the “wretched of the earth” lies the preservation of the future of humanity. Because once the reserves of the tiny Earth are exhausted, it will have no other planet to inhabit.
Respect for the Rights of Others is Peace
Respect for the Rights of Others is Peace
By Graziella Pogolotti
Published: Saturday 15 February 2020 | 08:54:32 pm.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
While still a child, that Indian, moved by the desire to improve himself, left the countryside and went to the city. There he learned Spanish, took possession of Latin and modern languages and entered the complex world of law, animated by the search for principles of justice. From his legendary carriage, Benito Juárez faced the anachronistic French invasion promoted by Napoleon III -Napoleon the Lessar, according to Victor Hugo-, destined to impose on the Mexican Government Maximilian of Austria, who was shot in Querétaro.
For Mexico and Latin America as a whole, Juarez proposed, as a fundamental notion for the coexistence between nations, the indispensable need for mutual respect, that is, non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries, a concept that, except for brief blinks of an eye, has presided over his country’s foreign policy, a safe haven for exiles from all over, of exemplary conduct with the victims of the war in Spain and with those condemned for McCarthyism in the United States.
Because of his civic stature, Benito Juarez has been named Benemérito de las Américas. [Benemerito is Latin, roughly “Meritorious” wl]The evocation of the Mexican hero is timely these days, when, at a dizzying pace, human principles and aspirations are subverted and the most unabashed interventionism in the field of international politics is naturally assumed.
In the 20th century, two world wars produced real holocausts. Picasso, who had condemned with his Guernica the bombing of an unarmed civilian population, then designed his dove of peace, the symbol of universal hope. At the end of the first great conflagration, the failed League of Nations attempted to interpose negotiations on the use of arms. Throughout the ages, regulations had been established with a view to formulating rules of the game regarding international relations.
Nothing was done, however, to contain the arrogant expansion of Nazi Germany into its neighboring territories. In the name of Aryan supremacy, racism was institutionalized. National sentiment became aggressive chauvinism. Devastated territories accompanied the sadism of the gas chambers and concentration camps. The diary of Anne Frank, a little girl who had taken refuge with her family in the basement of the house until she fell into the hands of her victimizers, shocked millions of readers. On the eve of the surrender of the axis formed by Germany, Italy and Japan, Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced a terrible threat to the future of the planet.
The complex architecture of the UN was supposed to provide a space for negotiations, shared by the great powers and the emerging countries. It was intended to sponsor science, education, and culture and to provide platforms for the development of the most disadvantaged. Another global conflagration has not [yet] been triggered, although localized clashes at strategic points have not ceased. Big industry continues to manufacture increasingly sophisticated weaponry.
Under the pretext of the Cold War, the empire multiplied military bases on all continents. So much is the load of dynamite in the world’s precarious balance that one spark can produce an atrocious explosion. Yesterday, colonies inhabited by mixed cultures, the lands of underdeveloped countries hold strategically important minerals and water reserves. Plundering is once again looming over them. Hegemonic discourse legitimizes interventionism with the aim of securing a new world order.
In recent years, the human cost has been enormous. In addition to those who have died in war, there are the migrants who have disappeared in the ocean cemeteries. The survivors of these waves become outcasts. Rejected, their presence encourages xenophobia in rich countries, where adjustment policies reduce the benefits previously promoted by the welfare state.
Having lived a long time, always aware of what is happening inside and outside the island, gives one a perspective on the future of the opposing forces that are making history. After the horrors suffered in the Second World War, everything indicated that the generalized demand for a never again [to war] had been reached. In conjunction with the process of decolonization, specialists recognized the intrinsic value of each culture. They threw into the attic of the useless the old opposition between civilization and barbarism, which justified the adventures of conquest and the oppression of the bearers of a memory and a different color of skin.
However, under the cover of financial power, right-wing thinking was gradually recomposed. The crudest and most ominous expression is found in the speech of the President of the United States. He is appealing to the darkest atavistic feelings that remain in his nation. Manifest Destiny is projected with planetary reach. It justifies interventionism and the imposition of a model of domination.
We, Latin Americans, have a tradition of thought that deserves to be rescued. In the current circumstances, it is the source of an emancipatory proposal based on peace and mutual respect. It constitutes a space of convergence for the whole of humanity in its struggle for its well-being and for resistance in the face of the accelerated depredation of the Earth’s resources.
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