Conceptual Math
(a phrase I may later change to Verbal math)

   Language (the English language, anyway) is the highest form of math! Coherent analysis and subsequent understanding by rational real-world-dwelling humans, including about subjects that language-challenged scientists believe are stuck in their esoteric incoherent realm, REALLY depend not on arithmetic but on language + sensory experience - on things like definition, syntax, grammar, paragraph structure, organized presentation PLUS, of course, honest observation.
    In fact, the integers of math are only iconic symbols for verbal and visual concepts, which can't be well or easily understood without translation back into words or images - a difficult feat for language challenged mathematicians. But, in fact, meticulously coherent articulation PLUS obvious correlation with real-world experience can provide those who can read, write, speak, listen and think logically with equations that add up to (i.e. EQUAL) definite credibility and sometimes perfectly obvious validity. I'm talking about a thinking procedure, which, for communication purposes,if not more exact, is a more sensible and therefore a better (i.e. more effective) process than math, which I call conceptual math.

    Adroit exercise of that principle is an important part of what I want to do with the measure of life I've decided to endure, and I can actually do it more effectively if I think of myself as having realistically critical readers among the readers that a website at least theoretically provides.

    Most Americans, unfortunately including most of those who think they're trying hard to be fair, are incapable of objectively reporting on Cuba, not so much because they lack experience or knowledge (which some have and others could have if they'd ever bother to learn Spanish and get past Havana) but because of some very definite and definitely crippling afflictions nobody needs but which they always seem to have and always take to Cuba with them.
    I'm not just talking about the deliberate propagandists: (1) the Miami "exiles," (2) the misinformation specialists in the State Department, and (3) the willingly embedded flacks of America's clearly invested mainstream media. Most anti-Cuba propaganda comes from those sources, but not because they can't be objective (though they probably can't be). They want to smear Cuba; or they're paid to smear Cuba; or smearing Cuba is a convention of their trade that they do without thinking, earning them cheap, no-risk approval, like throwing stones at someone already being stoned. From too much bitterness for too long, the "exiles" may actually think the word truth, in reference to Cuba, means any ugly thing they can think of to say, but they're also willing to lie to achieve their inherited goal. Their island-born dons (lots of the "exiles" have never seen revolutionary Cuba or have spent less time there than I have) want to go back with the U.S. Army, kill all the communists, and restore the inequality that bigshots enjoy in all the still successfully fortified capitalist world And they share that goal with their ironically racist but convenient allies, the simultaneously stupid and cunning anti-communist American businessmen (including most politicians and most media chiefs), to whom good means good for them and their friends in the economic upper class, bad means any "liberal" s.o.b. who tries to queer the fix, objectivity is a lot of useless esoteric hooey, truth is what you tell the suckers it is, and the Miami fantasies about Cuba are fine because they're ready to hand and do the trick.
    But while that gang are the principal conscious and semi-conscious broadcasters of anti-Cuba b.s., it helps their cause a lot that most Americans are perfect b.s. receivers. Most sincerely well-meaning Americans, including or maybe especially liberals, are too willingly trapped inside politically correct intellectual limits. They are:(1) too illogically religious and religiously illogical, (2) too born-again patriotic, (3) too uncritically pious about democracy and "free" enterprise, (4) too shy of even the word communism to see through all the anti-Cuba blather or to look objectively at Cuba, and (5) too rigidly and naively provincial to pay any attention to coherently rational argument and learn from it.

    As everyone well knows, there are many completely irrational convictions in circulation among humans - whole systems of them - the products of social propaganda going back for decades, or for generations, or for thousands of years, so commonly and widely held, so deeply and historically embedded, that entire populations are virtually, maybe genetically unable to confront themselves logically about them. One would hope that individuals original enough to dare to visit Cuba would not be among the afflicted, but steady, never ending propaganda is depressingly effective.

    Religion is the most obvious example of excess baggage that most people carry, and Americans are as hopelessly religious as Muslims. They pour their god (like catsup or sugar) on all public events, speeches, and ceremonies; throughout their legal and political documents and procedures; and even all over their entertainment, literature and news chronicles. On any given day, you can hear pundits on Air America one minute bragging that they always stick to the facts and the next minute declaring, without a trace of self suspicion, that they know what Jesus would say about the Republicans.
    Americans literally believe (it isn't figurative - they believe it) that their god is as real as AT&T and is really their god. They're as sure as Muslims or Jews or the pre-conquest Aztecs that their god made them of special clay, that they are good in a supernatural sense and that lesser peoples who get in their way or who strike back at them are evil in a supernatural sense. It's embarrassing to say this, but I'm not being satirical. This is literal fact and you know it.
    Mystical people can't be trusted to see anything clearly - neither Cuba nor America nor anything else, because they are on the one hand robotically obligated to chant a brain deadening catechism for which there is no evidence at all as if it were clearly true and on the other hand in automatic denial of what's in front of their faces if it's not in their scripture. Republicans and Democrats differ only as splinter groups over their god's relative racism or sexism, sternness or niceness. As coreligionists, they usually look sideways at each other to move their lips in unison.
    So when the pope went to Cuba, it wasn't just the mainstream U.S. media shouting rooftop prayers that that doddering anachronism would save Cuba's lost soul from its atheist leaders who have accomplished more social good than religion ever has or ever will. Most supposedly intellectual American liberals whose voices were heard at the time apparently also thought that an increase in "free" churchgoing would be better for Cuba than having possibly the world's best health care delivery system and a participatory democracy so efficient that hurricane response is routinely near perfect. In fact, Cuba has more churches than it needs (less than 1 would suffice), but it panics childishly religious Americans that the president is an honest atheist and so are most of the people, and the possibility that Cuba's relatively more stable peace and security could partly result from the Cubans being realistically educated while THEY (the Americans) are as mystically brainwashed as the ancient Egyptians appears impossible for Americans to grasp.

    Patriotism. Making double use of the same religious mind cast, virtually all Americans are as rigidly proud of and committed to their second actually worse religion, patriotism, as a flock of black-uniformed movie Germans. And if my saying that shocks you, your shock dramatically proves my point. Your shock is certainly irrational -just as irrational, in fact, as patriotism. I'm not talking about anyone's quite respectable sentimental attachment to his home, the place (not country) where he really knows his way around, has real friends, and feels comfortable - a definition of home that may coincidentally fit Monaco. I'm talking about something not at all rational or respectable: patriotism - the counter-rational deification of a state - the first subterfuge of insider scoundrels conning the rest of "the people" into participating in their own fleecing and flag saluting youth into dying for the rich without questioning why.
   Patriotism doesn't make sense. Period. In a contract, it would be a clause you shouldn't sign your name to. The state posited by Jefferson as subject to abolishment when it doesn't work was meant to be a practical mechanism, not a beloved master. Yet Americans are so inertly and unreflectingly patriotic that even the ACLU can't grasp that the flag salute itself is an abuse of logic and human rights; and the most famously "free" speakers in the land, even while deploring Washington's daily and clearly systemic acts of international gluttony and barbarism and the near daily reports of ordinary Americans living in the streets or in their cars and of old Americans facing economic ruin if they get sick, ARE STILL DUTIFULLY CERTAIN that the (by definition) "great" American system works (or used to work or will work if you let it work or if "the people" take charge - or something like that) and is the best of all possible systems just because it's god-blessed American, while they continually lie to themselves that one specific administration after another and one specific social atrocity after another is an aberration. As long as Americans as a tribal congregation are congenitally incapable of acknowledging even the possibility of what is widely regarded as certain south of the Rio Bravo - that Cuba doesn't just occupy an underdog's moral high ground but is, with all its errors and blemishes, a better conceived, better led, better state than America, which is basically fascist, then almost no American is capable of seeing Cuba objectively.

    Anti-communism probably rises to the religious level only in America (and among the rich in America's sycophantic client states). Obviously (and the word obviously has never been more accurately used), the rich object to communism because it is the antithesis of the win-or-lose system through which the same few thousand rich stay rich, keep running the first world, and keep sucking the blood out of the third world billions, sharing less than half that blood with their own few hundred million "fellow citizens."
   Because the rich 1/10 of 1% who own America don't want the boat rocked, all their lives and before their lives, for 150 years at least, all Americans and several generations of their ancestors have been taught and taught and relentlessly taught, until it seems virtually a genetic conviction, that communism is evil - just evil - not why or even what it is - just that it's evil. Other countries have respected communist and socialist parties, but even to those few slightly deprogrammed American travelers shaken enough by what they've seen in the third world to admit that communist rebels are obviously more benign than their capitalist foes, it's still taboo for Americans to even THINK communism is OK or could succeed. It's too (devilishly?) ideal, they cluck, as if being ideal were a well known flaw. Only primitives are supposed to have taboos. But western society is full of them, and in still-primitive America it's certainly taboo to think (even when it's proven) that communism can work. Most - actually almost all Americans - including reporters, professors, priests, even supposedly leftist intellectuals, feel forbidden (by a kind of automatic life-long drip system of slow but relentless brain irrigation as well as occasional brain-drenching) to go to Cuba and see communism working there. Just IF, by chance, it works there, it is in fact taboo to see that.
    This virtually genetic taboo is so rigid that even otherwise rational and courageous American advocates of social reform in America, when the social reform they advocate is clearly at least socialist, must drum up some politically correct cover name for it, like "single-payer plan," and when defending obviously admirable practices in Cuba are afflicted with a tic-like compulsion to keep interrupting their own arguments with assurances (maybe, subconsciously, to the secret police) that, of course, neither they nor those they stoop to condone are (really) socialists or communists. Cubans call their system socialism (a transitional phase), not communism, because, while some sectors have crossed the finish line, they have not yet achieved full-scale communism. But one politically pious American film-maker strenuously pretends that Cubans overcame their early 90's depression not through the dedication and organizational skill of the Communist Party (God forbid) but by a miracle wrought when "the people" one day just decided to help each other.
    Even Americans with pretensions of economic expertise consistently and maybe totally unconsciously measure communism with a capitalist yardstick. Apparently drawing a blank on the point of communism, they owlishly hoot that the healthy happy educated well-housed well-fed well-dressed never-desperate Cubans just don't know how to make a profit or have the wit to elect a business savvy president (and wind up as poor Latin Americans again - they don't add - it doesn't seem to occur to them).

   Just the words Freedom and Democracy constitute a pair of American glasses so deeply rose tinted that they are opaque. Ronald Reagan actually once declared that Americans are "free" to freeze to death, and most Americans believe that Cubans are FORCED to endure a system that works for them. Americans constantly pass around and swallow the words "freedom" and democracy, or the virtually one-word incantation freedomanddemocracy as if it were some kind of solid gold dope. Blissfully groggy about such totalitarian concerns as definition and context, they "freely" commute between their jobs and their TV sets, "freely" consume the product with the red and white label, "freely" donate their taxes to the arms sellers and the inside bidders, "freely" follow instructions about who and what to vote for, and then "freely" and uncritically allow the democratically elected big shots who "freely" mislead them to hang these two words like colored banners and balloons all over their own barbaric foreign policies and to curse their designated enemies by withholding bestowal of the magic stickers upon them.
    Hey! All existential individual freedom which is compatible with civilization and does not need to be surrendered so that a civilized state can effectively function should be untouchable. But there's freedom and there's "freedom" and there's also free-dumb, and it's dumb to be hypnotized by the mere word. Freedoms, after all, conflict! The mere word freedom has almost NO meaning without squinting hard at it and certainly no moral or ethical value out of context (sugar free, freely illogical, free speech, press freedom, freedom to associate, freedom to assemble, freedom to throw garbage all over the world, free choice, free love, free fire, free fall, "Buy one get one free!", freedom from U.S. imposed democracy, free to get rich at the expense of your fellow man, freedom to cheat or steal or break a contract including even the social contract, etc. - come on!). Americans and Guatemalans are "free" to do a few things Cubans aren't free to do. Cubans are free from a whole lot of shit fucking up life everywhere else including America and it's nothing to fret about that "you" aren't "free" to get rich in Cuba. In American foreign policy jargon, freedom often means freedom from equality. Oh yes it does! And to protect the freedom of rich Americans to free other countries of their riches, they claim they're protecting my freedom by denying my freedom to go to Cuba and find out there's another way to do things. In fact, all borders and bureaucracies, including America's and Cuba's, meant to protect somebody's or something's "freedom" from somebody or something else's freedom, disrupt everyone's freedom to come and go and think or act outside this or that box. The word freedom does not represent a single always noble concept and it is not smart to put it on a banner and wave it as if it did.
   Democracy is something else. The two words shouldn't be glued together as freedomanddemocracy. Sorry about that, but while freedom is a valid concept and even a fundamental human need within an appropriate context, democracy is not necessary. It doesn't apparently even work in the existing scheme of things, and it may be unworkable, because it is NECESSARILY always a contest of propaganda in which the slickest, most pervasive, costliest propaganda almost always wins, which is why the poor almost everywhere except Cuba, including the U.S., regularly vote for the rich who screw them over. That should be obvious if you just scratch your head before you think. But Americans can go to Cuba and love hell out of it and STILL turn around and dutifully condemn it because, instead of perpetual democratic chaos tinkered, untinkered and retinkered by actually rich but supposedly representative pickpockets, the Cubans have a well organized thoughtfully managed system.

    Provincial naivete.The most irritating Yankee handicap is their chesty provincialism. They don't analyze. They just know. "What finally gets you," an observant poet once wrote" is their unbewilderment." If an American newspaper describes a Latin American politician who used to champion the poor but is now ready to do business our way as "reformed," you cannot count on American readers to pull their hair and scream. With decades of opportunity for American liberals to grasp it and write about it, outside this website, I've only once seen an explanation in U.S. print (in a doctoral dissertation) of why Cuba very deliberately and thoughtfully chose to have only one political party, when Americans are religiously sure it takes exactly two. Since it takes the signatures of 5% of the voters to qualify a proposition for the California ballot and a near impossible rigamarole to amend the U.S. Constitution, you wouldn't expect Americans to swallow the theatrical outrage of the so-called "exiles" when a petition signed by only 1/6 of 1% of Cuban voters to subvert their socialist system didn't qualify for the ballot there, but Americans, who rarely understand their own system, routinely assume that the Cuban constitution isn't as important as theirs and that the totally educated Cubans, not being Americans, don't know what they are doing.
    So at a time when secret police are disappearing Americans with Arab names into secret jails and torture chambers without charges, Americans are easily conned into deploring Cuba's lack of "freedom" when Cuban subversives who were certainly recruited, trained, supplied, paid, and directed by agents of a self declared foreign enemy (clear treason as defined in Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution) are duly arrested, charged, tried, convicted in court, and jailed for treason under Article 62 of the Cuban Constitution. There's been no credible evidence for decades (if there ever was) of any Cubans being disappeared or tortured by their government, but, since America is nominally "free" and democratic (according to itself) and Cuba has been declared NOT "free" or democratic (by America), Americans are apparently undismayed and undismayable by Washington's and Miami's hypocritical outrage when the rest of the world approves a Cuban or, more recently, a Venezuelan seat on the UN Human Rights Commission.

     A clear view of Cuba requires a realistic world view like mine - unconfused by vested economic interest or by religious blindness, patriotic blindness, or blind prejudice against important and respectable concepts (communism for instance) that are mindlessly yet stubbornly demonized by the schools, the politicians, the media, and seemingly the air everyone breaths in America. Brain-bound from birth to shun a realistic world view, almost no Americans are free to see Cuba as it is.
    So, though all my experience, which I swear I'll get to in a minute, is important, my most important qualification as an objective reporter on Cuba is that I'm NOT carrying the bagful of superstitions, prejudices, and obsessions described in the last 15 or 16 paragraphs. I'm not religious, patriotic, offended by communism, or confused by sacred jargon.
    It takes someone psychologically free to go against the flow - free to shrug off the comfortable approval of either society or faction in favor of integrity and credibility that probably won't be acknowledged by others; someone who - not being easily or willingly blinded, deafened, intimidated or confused by all he's been told to see in Cuba - is free to see what he actually sees. And, in a world with its mouth full of "freedom," I seem to be one of the few people free to see and think about and write about unspun reality. My saying that may offend some readers, but I can't make my point without making it.

    TO BE CONTINUED SOON

Glen Roberts
&
Jose Marti

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