From our Bureau of Former Tyrants
Quite a day, August 12, in which two momentous changes took place in Cuba.
- First, in 1898 the U.S. won the Spanish-American War and forced Spain to admit defeat, cease hostilities, and relinquish all its colonies, including Cuba.
At Spain’s insistence, no Cubans were allowed to take part in the Treaty of Paris, signed by the U.S. and Spain some months later.
My aunt Lucia, who was born in 1895 and could remember the explosion that sank the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor, also remembered her dad — my grandfather (born in 1871)– saying to her, “ahora vas a tener que aprender Inglés, pues se va a llenar nuestra isla de Americanos.” (Now you’re going to have to learn English, because our island is going to be full of Americans.”
The Spanishh tyrant was gone, but condescending custodians had stepped in, who feared that Cubans could not be trusted to govern themselves. See image above.
Given what has transpired in Cuba since that August day in 1898, maybe those condescending custodians were not entirely wrong.
President William McKinley is often quoted as saying that now the U.S. could finally “”uplift and civilize and Christianize” all of the former Spanish colonies –including Cuba — but that statement really only applied to the Philippines.
When I next realized that the Philippines had dropped into our laps I confess I did not know what to do with them. . . And one night late it came to me this way. . .1) That we could not give them back to Spain- that would be cowardly and dishonorable; 2) that we could not turn them over to France and Germany-our commercial rivals in the Orient-that would be bad business and discreditable; 3) that we not leave them to themselves-they are unfit for self-government-and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s wars; and 4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.
Yes, this statement only cites the Philippines, but American attitudes toward all the savages they had just acquired as colonial subjects tended to be equally prejudiced. Cubans tended to be viewed as no less primitive than the other savages on those other islands that were now the property of the U.S.
One must wonder whether this prejudice has changed at all, or actually become more intense in the past 120 years.
And the same goes for our former colonial overlords, the Spanish, who are largely responsible for turning Castrogonia into an apartheid tourist destination for Europeans and Canadians.
And… oh, those cigar ladies…. so Mammy, so 1898 ! Have fun comparing the Mammies below with the ones labelled “Cuba” in the cartoons directly above.
Those Cuban mammies are a prime example of the disregard and hatred that the castro regime has for the Cuban people. I just can’t think of anything more insulting and humilating than to be associated with cigar chomping, Aunt Jemima’s, but that’s exactly what has happened.
We just keep on sinking lower and lower. But what can one expect? We were taken over by a man who hated the country of his birth and despised the Cubans. All that he ever wanted to do was to get back at us for whatever humilation he felt he suffered as a youngster and absolute power, megalomaniac that he was.
The American president was right. We haven’t understood how to govern ourselves. The Batista period was an example. We forced Batista out [fine, he was a dictator and we wanted a democracy–that’s admirable], but we welcomed in exchange a man who had already garnered a horrible reputation as a student gangster, had been involved in el Bogotazo, and was an overall filthy [literally unwashed] nastry piece of work who used to walk around Havana University with Mein Kampf and the Tomes of Mussolini under his smelly arm. Lord have mercy, if that is not bad enough, we have proven in these 60 years of struggle that we are still unable to govern ourselves. What with the rise of the dialogueros, all of the wealthy traitors that want nothing more than to do business with the regime and finally the cubanoids who have infested Miami. We’re f–ked.
I think that Cuba is completely lost. Even if we were one day are able to rid ourselves of the castro family, Cuba has changed so much, demographically, morally and spiritually that it is completely foreign and strange. Its no longer Cuba.
The old mammies are less cartoonish and certainly less tarted up than the new ones, who practice a form of prostitution (which obviously need not involve sex). Again, black women in pre-Castro Cuba did NOT run around this way, and this was NOT “typical.”