No Way Out?

Common Sense
John Maxwell

Many, many years ago, when I was a teenager at high school, the local cinema mogul would once or twice a term lend the school a projector and a feature film which had been shown everywhere else. This time the projector worked but the sound didn't. The film was "Whispering Smith", a western epic, starring Alan ladd, then at the height of his stardom, a tough, no-nonsense cowboy.

Unfortunately, without sound, unable even to whisper, bereft of voice, Alan Ladd came across as an animated dummy, running the gamut of emotions from A to B, as I think Dorothy Parker once said. It was all gesture, mechanical: smile, frown, look quizzical; frown again etc etc.
I began to laugh and my fellows, to whom Alan Ladd was a genuine hero, looked at me quizzically.

Alan Ladd raised his eyebrows; I raised mine; he smiled, grimly; so did I; he looked quizzical; so did I. Pretty soon the guys beside me began to laugh and soon the whole school was enjoying an uproarious silent comedy which was meant to be deadly serious.

Later I discovered that Alan Ladd was so short that he had to stand on boxes to kiss his leading ladies. George Bush reminds me of Alan Ladd. And if you turn off his sound you will see why. It is all gesture, no heart.

NO WAY OUT

The headline above is taken from an AP report out of Houston on Friday: 'No Way Out: Many Poor Stuck in Houston'.
The Cubans do it better.

In the the last five years, the Cubans have moved six million people "equivalent to half their population" in response to hurricane threats. According to Prensa Latina, the Cuban news agency, "Most people find refuge in institutions prepared by the Civil Defence System or in houses of relatives and neighbours; part of the spontaneous solidarity of the Cuban people.

In September 2004 alone, over two-and-a-quarter-million people were evacuated before Hurricane Ivan, which reached category five. As a result of precautions taken by the Cuban Civil Defence, the most effective in the world, there were no human losses; something considered amazing in the world, but customary in Cuba."

When they are threatened by a hurricane, every Cuban knows what to do. Every family knows where they are going and how they are getting there. During Hurricane Dennis there were 16 people killed in Cuba, because they had refused to move and hid themselves from the neighbourhood committees which are responsible for such matters.

Those were the first deaths from a hurricane in Cuba for a very long time. The Cubans are in the direct path of hurricanes and when a hurricane's position and direction are known, every man, woman, child and animal is moved to safety.

The entire Cuban people were extremely upset at the deaths from Dennis. It was all so unneccessary, they say.
For Rita there were no reports of casualties, neither dead nor injured last week when almost 238,000 people were evacuated to safe shelters. Nearly 60,000 students from boarding schools (junior high and high) were taken to evacuation centres and their schools secured. Thousands of tourists in Key Coco and Varadero were also transfered to safety.

Cuba is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a national income below that of Jamaica or the Dominican republic. That is, according to how you measure national welfare.
The United States is one of the richest countries in the world and has more millionaires than Barbados has people.

When Hurricane Rita strikes this weekend I pray that no one will die, but I am not at all confident. Rita battered northern Cuba last week but no one died. In Texas 24 people died on Friday when a bus filled with elderly and sick evacuees caught fire.

Roads were jammed and some people were reported stuck for more than half a day trying to get out of Houston.
In some ways the United States resembles Jamaica. Here too, we wait until the last minute to make preparations for events we know are sure to happen.

GOING BANANAS

Jamaica is still trying to get special treatment from the European community for its bananas and sugar, both lost causes 40 years ago, as far as I was concerned. There are, and were, alternatives, but we will not consider them. The reason: if we transform food production in Jamaica into a real agricultural pursuit and not a factory system, we will have to redistribute land, give power to the people and make life less profitable for the coupon clippers.

If we transform agriculture and begin to eat what we produce and produce more of what we eat we will be free from the threat of globalisation, from the threat of being non-competitive beggars and slaves to foreign capital. We will not need to borrow from the international financial institutions.

The crime rate will fall because we will need to educate our children and take better care of them.

We depend on a system which depends on exploitation of the presence of a fluid, volatile reservoir of unemployed whose function is to keep wages down. Full employment means that everyone will have to work for his living. We can't have that.

Somehow, they have it in Cuba. The Cubans operate what the western press reports to be an antiquated, discredited collectivist system which by definition cannot work. Three weeks ago, this dilapidated economy offered to send 1,600 trained emergency doctors to the United states, an offer which was refused.

One wonders if one of them was on that bus in Houston if it would have caught fire in the first place. Last week the Cubans decided to organise an international brigade from those volunteer doctors, ready to go anywhere to help anyone in trouble.

There are thousands of Cuban doctors all over the world, thousands in Africa, thousands in Venezuela, hundreds in Haiti, treating sick poor people.

There must be something wrong with such a system!!
Last week the Cuban president announced that Cuba is well on the way to achieving the lowest infant mortality rate in the hemisphere, below four per thousand births, even better than Canada, he said. He was addressing a graduation ceremony for 1,903 physicians from the island's medical schools.

In addition, Castro announced that Cuba's life expectancy will be highest in the hemisphere. That advance will take place in half the time it took Switzerland and Japan to raise their life expectancies from 70 to 80 years. In Cuba life expectancy is at 77.5 years.

The president noted that medical services in Cuba have increased life expectancy by 18 years from the 60 years at the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

CARIBBEAN PARADOX

Next door to Cuba is Haiti, another of the world's poorest countries, run, like Jamaica, on laissez-faire principles, so laissez -aire, in fact, that the country is not being run by its own people but by a clique put in power by the United States.

The invasion of Haiti and the coup against President Aristide were one of Mr Bush's most ambitious experiments in spreading "freedom". It was done because they thought Aristide would turn into "another Fidel Castro".

To do that, he decapitated Haitian democracy and deposed a president who, unlike him, won the votes and loyalty of an overwhelming majority of his people.

In order to democratise Haiti, the United States, aided and abetted by France, Canada and the Security Council of the United Nations has imposed an oligarchy in Haiti which rules by terror, confident of the approval of the 'civilised' world.

Convicted murderers have been let loose and pardoned and one is about to run for president in a mock election under the auspices, of the so-called United Nations. They are confident that the odd dozen rapes, beatings and occasional massacres will pass unnoticed by the western press, those stalwart defenders of freedom and human rights. They can securely mistreat Haitian women, paying them starvation wages and sterilising them against their will to maintain a disciplined workforce.

This Haitian election is especially significant when one remembers the pious speeches of George Bush and Kofi Annan two weeks ago at the UN summit when they both regretted the advance of terrorism and the decline of democracy in the world.
But all is well.

It is the gesture that is important, not the action. As we watch Mr Bush quizzically raise his eyebrows, wisely frown, sagaciously clench his lips and resolutely point his finger, we know that he is a very serious man, just like Whispering Smith. And we know that his speech was written by an accomplished acolyte of George Orwell, that prophet of newspeak and globalisation.

To safeguard democracy and make assurance doubly sure, in Haiti Messrs Annan (black) and Mr Bush (white) have jointly conceived a multiracial solution, that is sure to get world approval, to the problem of Haitian democracy. Simply announce an election, call for candidates for the election and when they present themselves, lock them up.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of the times, especially of the New York Times, I consider it opportune to write a piece 'in the manner of George Orwell' honouring Western journalism. It will be called: "Homage to Catatonia", and they should all be pleased whenever they awake from their slumbers, five, 10 or 50 years from now.

Meanwhile, we in Jamaica have not been slow in making our marks in the annals of confusion and misfeasance. Some items:
The latest friend of Patterson (FOP), Mr Cartade, is busily spreading his idea of freedom to settlements outside of his Long Mountain gated community.

Having already destroyed a precious pre-Colombian Taino archaeological site and laid waste to a biodiversity hotspot in which there was at least one plant not found anywhere else in the world, Mr Cartade is now happily pumping human excrement onto the lawns and gardens, the roads and footpaths of the Pines of Karachi.

He probably thinks they need manure, and like any nascent politician, he is giving them more than they ever thought they needed.

The minister of finance, now challenging for the prime minister's job, has quietly annexed part of National Heroes' Park for that sublime amenity of civilised life, a car park.

The University of the West Indies, not to be outdone, is busily constructing a patty shop at the intersection of its Queen's Drive and Ring Road.

Soon, invoking GATS, Burger King, MacDonalds and Taco Bell will demand 'national treatment' and Jamaican civilisation will finally come to full flower at the centre of Caribbean intellectual life, complete with the majestic backdrop of the Blue Mountains. This backdrop was once considered so sacred, in fact, that not even fences were to be placed in the sightlines.All we will need is a stall at the main gate selling cowskin soup.

Times change, they say 'tempus fugit' and I am become a fugitive from civilisation.