Catgirl Horsegirl

Guevara’s ‘heresy’ reflected his profound perception of socialism as a transitional stage – the period between capitalism and communism – in which the qualitative tasks of preparing human consciousness and social relations for communist society were as important as the quantitative tasks of developing the forces of production. ‘We fight poverty but we also fight alienation’, he said: ‘Marx was concerned with both with economic facts and their reflection in the mind, which he called a “fact of consciousness.” If communism neglects facts of consciousness, it can serve as a method of distribution but it will no longer express revolutionary moral values.’ Through the revolutionary process, Cubans would transform themselves and this would in turn impact upon the institutions and relations they established within the Revolution.

-Yaffe (2009) Pgs. 9-10

This was heresy??? God. Old Soviet dogmatism’s a migraine.

This earlier section in the book has me very curious about the specifics of his critiques.

Guevara challenged the way in which Marxism had been interpreted and applied in the socialist bloc, condemned the dogmatism of the USSR and set up an alternative economic management system in Cuba. Through his systematic critique of Soviet political economy, by 1966 he was able to conclude that without a dramatic policy change, capitalism would return to the Soviet Union. [!!!]

Pg. 2

Prior to the Cuban Revolution of 1959 there was a lack of community identification and empowerment in Cuba. The country’s Batista-run government was a dictatorship supportive of America’s off-shore business interests, and Cubans were not able to participate actively in decision-making in areas that most affected their community organizations and workplaces. An attempt to change people’s perspectives from the individual to the collective was led by Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, who believed that living under a capitalist economic system caused people to adopt traits characterized by individual greed, profit, and selfishness. His aim was to instill in the Cuban people new values that emphasized moral convictions of social justice and a collective rather than an individualist approach to life (Benjamin, 1997). According to Juan Antonio Blanco, Director of the Felix Varela Center, a Cuban non-governmental organization studying ethics and politics, one of the goals of the Cuban Revolution was to create those new perspectives and values in Cuban citizens. It sought to create Guevara’s vision of el hombre nuevo, the new man. The Cuban Revolution thus sought to be not only a vehicle for redistributing wealth in Cuba but also to release the Cuban people’s creativity and participation in society (Benjamin, 1997). One of the vehicles for bringing about that change in values was the introduction of structural changes and the creation of mass participatory organizations which were intended to restructure traditional attitudes and beliefs and to transform Cubans into selfless and cooperative members of the community (Salas, 1983).

The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.

This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.

Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.

This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.

In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.

Then in 2020:

Tags here making the crucial point that it's not that art is politically useless as a rule, but that individualist, spontaneous agitation is ineffective. Propaganda can be as useful for us as for them, but it needs to be produced for clear aims to suit the circumstances, spread and utilised effectively as part of a defined programme and strategy.

genuinely one of the coolest styles ive ever seen AND ITS 3D

- More estrogen than what your doc is giving you