[Marxism] Obama and José Martí [was: obsessive something or other]

[Joaquin Bustelo]

Eli forwards us an article from the Washington Note, by Steve Clemons, which
says: 

"If I was running for President of the United States and had opened the door
for a potential new course in US-Cuba relations, I'd say something about
Raul Castro's moves. But as far as I can tell, Barack Obama and his team
haven't moved a centimeter or said a word of late."

Grasping for anti-Obama arguments, are we? 

Obama is one of the most prominent politicians of a bourgeois-imperialist
party, in fact, the oldest bourgeois party on the entire face of the planet.
As such, he is running for President of the leading imperialist power.

But he also comes from and is supported by the U.S. Black community, which
has caught more hell from and probably given more hell to the bourgeoisie
than just about any other group of people in this country for a century and
a half. 

Eli seems to think by carping on the former he will erase the latter. No he
can't. Life is like that, full of all sorts of contradictions. 

*  *  *

On Cuba policy, if my intention were to fully lift the blockade, withdraw
from Guantanamo, turn over the terrorists on U.S. soil to face exemplary
revolutionary justice, free the Cuba Five and normalize relations with the
island on day one of my administration, I'd do EXACTLY the same thing that
Obama is doing now: I would say absolutely nothing. WHY? Because the
immediate task is to win the election, not do a lot of preaching about a new
Cuba policy to no good PRACTICAL political effect. 

The practical, political effect of statements by Obama in the direction of
any, even the slightest engagement with Cuba is to organize and mobilize the
opposition to a change in policy and focus all its energy on defeating him
in November and specifically in Florida, and then any initiative to change
policy.

No one else *cares* enough about Cuba policy for a statement to have the
slightest electoral impact. The less reactionary sections of the Cuban
community will be won to Obama, if at all, on OTHER grounds, like the Iraq
war, the mortgage crisis, universal health care and so on. Cuba is an
overriding issue only for those living in the past, or living from it.

Were it to be true that Obama intended to turn Cuba policy upside down (and
I sincerely doubt it), the Cubans above all would understand his silence
now. On the Ministry of the Exterior's web site, there is a section devoted
to José Martí, leader of the War of Independence in the 1890's. The day
before he fell in battle he began a letter that was never finished and has
become his political testament, and appears on the MinRex web site as such.
Here is the relevant part: 

* * * 

Now I am every day in danger of giving my life for my country and my duty
--because I understand it and have the will to carry it out-- of preventing,
with Cuba's timely independence, the United States from spreading to the
Antilles and falling, with that additional force, upon our lands of the
Americas.

Everything I have done, and everything I will do, is for that. In silence it
has had to be, because there are things which, if they are to be achieved,
have to be hidden, and if one were to proclaim them openly, this would raise
difficulties too great to be able to achieve the goal....

I lived in the monster and I know its entrails -- and my sling is the sling
of David.

*  *  *

Joaquin