The Latest Nonsense From Mark LeVine

“On the one hand, Trump’s America seems determined to pursue isolationism and return to a mythical past where America was Great and everyone else, whether blacks at home or small island nations abroad, knew their place.”

UC Irvine professor and part-time rocker, Mark LeVine, has taken a moment off from bashing Israel to travel to Cuba, and like so many gullible Western tourists, he has seen the future, and it is Cuba. Writing for Al Jazeera, the propaganda arm of the despicable Qatar regime, LeVine compares the island favorably to Donald Trump’s “racist and imperialistic” America.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/07/cuba-future-promising-170716124102463.html

If you are wondering what is missing from LeVine’s hagiographic description of the socialist paradise, it is the decades of oppression under the Castro brothers that replaced the decades of oppression under former dictator Fulgencio Batista, who they overthrew. That’s when an Argentine revolutionary named Che Guevara (He’s the guy whose face you see on all those tee shirts at Berkeley riots) ran the kangaroo courts that sent hundreds, if not thousands, to the firing squads in the heady days after Castro marched into Havana.

In addition, along with all the “happy Americans” touring Cuba these days are lots of happy Europeans, who for a long time have been visiting Cuba to take advantage of the under-age prostitutes. I didn’t see that in LeVine’s glowing portrait.

Of course, Levine does point out that there is really a  divide between white/Hispanic Cubans and black Cubans. But, he adds, it’s all a carryover from American imperialism. Pity he didn’t interview American  cop-killer fugitive JoAnne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur while he was there.

“Equally worrying is the uneasy relationship between the country’s African and white populations, as reflected in the clear if not gross segregation of many professions along racial lines. While Cuba’s revolutionaries since the time of Jose Marti have tried to downplay or even deny enduring racism, Cuba’s history is suffused with the dual savagery of slavery and colonialism, followed in the twentieth century by US imperialism and near feudal autocracy based in good measure on racial exploitation.”

Indeed, LeVine’s latest treatise, if you want to call it that, is devoted as much to trashing the US, especially now that Trump is president, as it is to celebrating Cuba’s “glorious” present future. It is all part of the leftist identity. LeVine spends most of his waking hours devoted to supporting the Palestinian cause and delegitimizing Israel. That is also part of the leftist identity. It goes something like this: Palestinians are good, but Israel is bad. Israel is bad because it is America’s strongest ally in the Middle East. America is bad because it is capitalist as opposed to Marxist. Cuba is good because it is Marxist and an adversary of America. It all makes perfect sense, you see, at least in LeVine’s academic world. Add a few more issues like LGBT, Black Lives Matter, Islamophobia, and feminism, and you have what academics now call, “intersectionality”, the new form of leftist logic.

Of course, I admit I have never visited Cuba, but I have made numerous trips to communist and former communist countries in the East bloc of Europe and former USSR. I saw enough to convince me that communism, mixed with the requisite political oppression, doesn’t work. In Europe it resulted in empty shelves, empty restaurants where you still couldn’t get a table, and people driving around in Trabants. In Cuba, instead of Trabants, you have 1953 DeSotos, driven by doctors who make as much as garbage collectors. But who needs anything else when you have useful idiot Westerners who think it’s all just grand?