Awwww. How awful. You’ve got to feel sorry for this girl.
She’s not only assuming that the “embargo” is about to be lifted, and that American businesses will thrive in Castrogonia, but also lamenting the fact that Cubans may soon get to live like Americans.
No more squalor, no more deprivation, no more groveling, no more uniqueness in their repressive and truly primitive lifestyle.
Poof! No more human zoo.
Poof! No more chances to feel superior.
Poof! No more “contraband” to brag about back home.
Imagine that. Boo hoo. The land of noble savages might soon lose its charm, and so might its forbidden products.
So, all you non-Cubans who are hankering to visit the world’s best human zoo, get to it. Hurry up.
This may very well be the most puerile, most bigoted, and most offensive article published in response to the new policies announced by the current occupant of the White House.
And it’s also perhaps the most revealing, for it clearly shows that there are many Americans who think about Cuba and its repressed natives as necessarily primitive, that is, as inherently inferior and best suited for gawking at when that inferiority is on full display.
No doubt about it: everyone who cheered and clapped this week after Wednesday’s speech by the current occupant of the White House shares this mindset.
To them, we Cubans are inferior beings, fit only to amuse foreigners through our subaltern status and our primitive allure.
And then, there’s the issue of double standards when it comes to slumming. Imagine if the lamentations in this essay were about a poor inner city American ghetto rather than Cuba. Imagine, just imagine what the response would be!
Five things I will miss most about an isolated Cuba
by Cindy Hoedel, Kansas City Star
Historic changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba are coming. Having traveled legally to the island in 2002, my feelings about the breakthrough are mixed.
As I watched President Obama outline his vision of increased travel and commerce between our countries, down to the oddly specific detail of American credit cards being accepted in Havana, I couldn’t kick the sensation that — poof! — one of the world’s last truly exotic destinations has vanished.
Havana’s immense appeal for me lay in its foreignness, its lack of McDonald’s, ATMs and mobile hotspots. The impossibility of phoning home or turning on CNN created a cocoon of delicious isolation.
I grew up hearing my mother talk about how Havana was a favorite destination when she was a stewardess for TWA in the 1950s, before the revolution. It was amazing nearly half a century later to stroll past the same hotels, boulevards and big-fin Cadillacs she had described, worn but essentially unchanged.
I welcome normalized ties with this very close neighbor, but there are things I will miss when the embargo is fully lifted:
Paladares: When I was in Havana, the government issued licenses to ordinary Cubans that allowed them to serve home-cooked meals to tourists inside their homes. I ate the best meal of my trip in a young couple’s bedroom on a flimsy card table covered with a tattered but ironed lace cloth. The husband rode up on a bicycle with a fish that the wife fried with plantains, garlic and fresh herbs over a propane burner.
Playas del Este: European tourists flock to Varadero, which regularly shows up on most-beautiful-beaches lists, but when our B&B hosts told us Cubans weren’t allowed to go there, we went to Playa Santa Maria del Mar instead, one of a string of beaches east of Havana where the natives go to swim and picnic. We were the only non-Cubans there and we spoke no Spanish but a group of kids invited us to sit with them while one boy played a beat-up guitar and the rest sang.
The Malecón: This 5-mile-long oceanfront promenade will lose a lot of its charm when neon KFC and Gap signs obscure the orange glow of the old streetlights, when traffic clogs the road between the buildings and the sea, and tourists in Hawaiian shirts taking selfies replace skinny teenagers necking on top of the wall at night.
Coco Taxis: Actually these football-helmet-shaped motorized tricycles will probably increase in number, but I imagine they will become more reliable, perhaps even summonable by Uber. Shame, because one of the most interesting afternoons we spent involved two Coco Taxis — the first broke down and the second ran out of gas. Driver number two then stopped a belching farm truck and insisted that the farmer take all three of us the rest of the way, because the taxi driver didn’t want to send us off alone with a stranger. I felt like an extra in the film “Guantanamera.”
Contraband: There is no greater thrill than going through customs in Miami and declaring Cohiba cigars and Havana Club rum (if you travel to Cuba on a visa, you can bring them back legally) and watching the other travelers’ eyes widen with envy. When everybody can do it, the delicious illicit feeling will be lost.
Fucking disgusting. But then, what else can we expect from the sub-human trash that is the left…
Queen Marie Antoinette never said “If the people have no bread, let them eat cake,” but even if she had, she would have been no worse than this Hoedel person. Actually, she would have been better, having spent her entire life in a totally insulated and rarefied environment completely unacquainted with poverty or material need. Presumably, Hoedel has not lived her life in such a bubble and should have some sort of clue. To her “credit,” however, she’s an absolutely classic, textbook case of ironclad insensitivity, self-absorption and fatuous shallowness. Lord have mercy.
I’m telling you, those typical Cuban women are to die for, even if they’d make Aunt Jemima blush with shame. But don’t mind them, who’re just trying to make a living, mind the tourists who go for this kind of grotesque caricature and heavy-handed stereotyping.
Really disgusting. Unfortunately, I’ve heard this vomit- nducing attitude before.