Radio Utopie

I have no idea what it is about this Death-Cult that has been built around the Cuban Revolution that rightly freed itself from American imperial domination. While we hear much of the zealousness in Cuba under Dr. Castro, the madness that has occurred in every revolution I have ever learned of, (see: The French Revolution) the great gains and the superhuman efforts of all the Cuban people, not Just Dr. Castro, in human rights and welfare, education and national independence go unmentioned.In this latest propaganda effort by the rabid anti-Castro far-right, which is openly funded and supported in the American South by the dark side of the American elite, has brought back from the dead a lock of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara‘s hair cut from his corpse just before his burial to be placed in auction to the highest capitalist bidder.

In a bold anti-Castro PR stroke, the American public is shown the „failure“ of the Cuban revolutionary ideology by selling his hair and other items involved in the actions to stem or reverse the right of people to live free of colonialist repression.
This most recent stunt is seen by rational people for what it is, clearly blatant opportunistic marketing on one part and four parts America‘s illogical obsession with not being able to accept that Cuba has managed to be so close yet so far away. If the Cuban revolutionary movement was so wrong, so evil and so Hitlerian in scope as many Cuban exiles will report the tale, how do they explain the co-option of said imagery by the same capitalist concerns who fuel the flames of anti-Cuban animosity?

While it can be certain that the most dedicated and zealous anti-Castro adherents with access to the media will paint the exhibit as a paean to Cuban communism, those just as zealous on the moderate to radical left would not by fiat even be able to afford the expected six figures the sacred strands could earn. This is an entirely capitalist enterprise and its trappings are classically hypocritical. Yet the logical is not at play here nor are the questions that should be asked, presented.

Like, why would an anti-communist militant want to preserve the physical remains of his arch-enemy, a man he executed over forty years ago? The morbidity of this alone says more about the people dedicated against left-wing ideology than it does about the equally unrealistic mythology that has been built up around the activism of Che Guevara. The left amongst us see in Che‘s life story a man who came from an upper-middle class background and realised that social, political and economic justice should be the same for everyone in the Americas and across the world. The right can only remember the uniformed bearded revolutionary who told the entire United Nations assembly that the old ways of Western imperialism were coming to an end. Wall Street sighed audibly.

Like many other left-wing liberation movements, (such as those that founded the politically socialist Israel) the use of force in Cuba was justified in order to force change in the political environment, a tactic used by the right and left wing including the actions of governments in toppling other nations they decide are hostile to their national military-economic interests. (See: Iraq and Afghanistan) But unlike the special case of U.S. client-state Israel or even earlier, Pol Pot in Cambodia, most left-wing movements and revolutions eventually work against the grain of U.S. control over resources and the political matters that keep those channels clear to foreign interests. While some have undeniably become dictatorships, others remain steadfastly democratic and anti-imperialist.

However, if these same liberation movements were avowedly right-wing, (like the U.S. founded and backed Augusto Pinochet) murderous, prevented the rise of unions, kept wages low, ignored international health, labour and environmental laws, gave unlimited access of national resources to U.S. and EU multinational firms and allowed for a elite class of businessmen and land owners that would work to maintain eh socio-political status-quo, the U.S would call them „Democratic voices in a world of uncertainty.“

We saw this under the Shah, under Marcos, under Batista and many, many others around the world of U.S. political influence. The U.S. under John Kennedy we are told was willing to „Work things out“ with Cuba and they in turn were willing to meet the U.S. halfway without their arm being twisted. We all saw the Bay of Pigs and the U.S. Russian Missile crisis it caused as well as other illegal actions on the part of the United States to bring down the revolutionary government. And after a conspiracy to murder the president of the United States by person or persons still unknown „officially“ was carried out, political relations between the U.S. and Cuba have been irrevocably sour ever since.

It is the extreme elements of the right-wing that is responsible for the creation and maintenance of the diplomatic confusion and apprehension between two peoples who should really have no real trouble between them. Unlike the anti-Castro extremists in Miami and the American intelligence and big business interests behind them, the Cuban people have forgiven the United States for trying to kill their leader as well as the rest of the sordid history of America‘s Manifest Destiny policy towards its neighbour. The U.S. is still childishly holding onto a four decade year-old grudge for losing its entitlement to an island it never truly owned in the first place. It stands free and independent. And for this unforgivable act of autonomy against American capitalist imperialism, Cuba‘s people have paid dearly.

This ridiculous and unfounded obsession with the left and with Cuba‘s revolutionary history exposes itself in this auctioning off of a dead communist‘s hair. And in the brouhaha that haunts that obsession, a spectacle will be made of a physical artifact. The evidence of the extra-legal slaying of an enemy they still cannot manage to live without or continue to make an enormous profit from. In the ideological storm following this auction, only the Marxists will own the moral right to feel vindicated.