[News] Cuba - Understanding the difference between pobreza and miseria

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Understanding the difference between pobreza and miseria

Posted: 25 Mar 2010 10:33 PM PDT
http://machetera.wordpress.com/

Just back from Cuba where he attended the launch 
of the Spanish translation of his book, 
<http://www.booknoise.net/sciencehistory/index.html>A 
People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives and 
“Low Mechanicks” at the Havana International Book 
Fair, Cliff Conner posted a brief note about his 
visit at the CubaNews listserve.  (The other 
People’s History guy, Howard Zinn, called 
Conner’s book “a delightfully refreshing new look 
at the history of science” and judging from the 
standing room only reception Conner received in 
Cuba, I’m guessing it’s likely well worth the 
read.)  At any rate, Conner’s note apparently 
stirred up a hornet’s nest of outrage from a 
couple of ex-Cubans, who it seems responded with 
the usual tired diatribe about “dissidents,” defectors, etcetera.

Conner’s response is gracious, far more gracious 
than I would have been, but then this blog is 
called Machetera for a reason.  I asked for 
permission to re-post his letter here because I 
think it is well worth having as a reference, 
especially for those who’d like to make a case 
about the Cuban revolution failing to address poverty in Cuba.

People like for instance, Darsi Ferrer, the State 
Department’s new “Cuban dissident” poster child, 
who aside from his interest in secondhand cement, 
is also an aspiring filmmaker.  Really, I’d 
rather not call even more attention to this guy 
but his 
<http://www.cubaencuentro.com/es/multimedia/videos/vivir-en-albergue>film, 
co-produced with help from CANF and some German 
and Czech “NGO’s” (the Czechs, always the Czechs) 
would make you laugh if it were not so deadly 
serious.  Darsi, dressed in a white doctor’s 
coat, with a stethoscope draped around his neck – 
in case you forgot he was a doctor – complains to 
the camera in all seriousness about the “miseria” 
everywhere in Cuba, caused by inadequate housing 
and lack of common medicines.  He does this 
monologue without ever breathing a word about the 
blockade, while his wife paws through grocery 
bags full of clothing straight off the boat from 
Miami (was that a magenta thong or brassiere near 
the end?), doling out pieces one by one to their 
very ordinary and quite healthy looking Cuban 
neighbors.  The film begins and returns to shots 
of people collecting water from pipes coming out 
of a wall, as though this is something terribly 
shocking, and you have to think that it is tragic 
really that Ferrer couldn’t go do a medical 
mission in Haiti so he could learn how people get 
their water there.  The whole production is 
scored with haunting music from the Holocaust 
genre in case you still didn’t get the point, and 
I’m sure it plays very well in drawing rooms on 
Capitol Hill but it’s junk.  Pure, expensive, U.S. bought and paid for junk.

Here’s Conner:

*     *     *    *

A few weeks ago CubaNews published a report I 
wrote of a visit in February to the Havana 
International Book Fair, in which I offered some 
observations about what I had seen in Cuba. I 
received (via some friends I had sent the report 
to) a set of thoughtful comments on it from a 
couple of Cuban ex-pats. I thought their 
commentary was worth a reply, so I wrote one; it 
is appended below. (The names of the people I 
addressed it to and the names of the Cuban 
ex-pats have been changed because I do not have their permission to use them.)

Hi Rhonda and George,

Greetings from Mexico City.

Thanks for sending me Jaime and Alejandro’s 
comments on my “report” from Cuba.  Yes, I did 
find them very interesting and worthwhile, 
although I am quite sure that they and I would 
have to “agree to disagree” about a number of 
things regarding their former homeland. I will 
try to respond to what they wrote point-by-point, 
and will ask you to kindly pass this on to them.

Marush and I entirely agree with them about the 
tackiness of the Tropicana show, but I described 
it the way I did because I didn’t want to seem 
like a cultural snob. Besides, on a certain 
level, if you suspend your critical judgment, it 
can still be quite enjoyable. I also agree that 
the renovation process going on in Habana Vieja 
is better described as “restoration” than “reconstruction.”

I certainly don’t think of all Cubans living in 
the United States as ultra-right-wing fanatics. I 
do think that an ultra-right element dominated 
the first generation of post-revolutionary 
refugees, and still has a lot of political clout, 
but it seems that the younger generation (which 
apparently includes Jaime and Alejandro) is not 
nearly as politically homogeneous as their elders.

Although I wrote my report in a somewhat neutral 
voice, I am in fact a strong partisan of the 
Cuban economic system in contrast to the system 
that afflicts our country and most of the rest of 
the world. I adopted the neutral tone because in 
the context of the current (abysmally uninformed) 
American political discourse, even that will seem 
shockingly pro-Cuba to most of the people I sent 
it to. I wasn’t trying to be deceptive; I simply 
didn’t intend it to be an ideological manifesto.

Of course I recognize that Cuban society is not 
simply an abstract “system” but is organized and 
governed by fallible human beings. Although I 
obviously went there with certain preconceptions, 
and with hopes of seeing more positive than 
negative, I didn’t go with blinders or 
rose-colored glasses on. I was prepared to see it 
“warts and all,” and I did see some warts.

However, I think my preconceptions also 
“unblinded” me to a number of things that most 
apolitical tourists would never notice. For 
example (speaking of blindness), it only occurred 
to me today, after walking around in Mexico City 
for an hour and seeing a shockingly large number 
of blind people, that we had walked around the 
streets of Havana for ten days and did not see a single blind person.

A cynic might want to believe that the Cuban 
government simply hides its “problem people,” but 
I think a much better explanation is that there 
actually are fewer problem people per capita in 
Cuba than there are in other poor countries, and 
that is due to a health care system that really 
works, and really serves the interests of the 
population. (And I did notice indications 
confirming my previous research findings that 
Cuba is especially advanced in the field of eye care.)

Another small point: the “classic cars” are, as 
Jaime and Alejandro say, a stereotype, but if you 
think about it, they are indicative of a very 
profound and important difference between Cuba 
and the United States. They reflect the character 
of a society organized according to “waste not, 
want not” principles as opposed to one organized 
according to the principle of “planned 
obsolescence.” That in turn is an indication of 
an economy based on rationality as opposed to the 
irrationality of the market system. What a 
magnificent example of irrationality planned obsolescence represents!

I’ll take that further and say that this is what 
I see as Cuba’s most positive aspect: it has a 
“system,” including its government, that operates 
according to priorities that are rational from 
the standpoint of the vast majority of the 
population. Contrast Cuba’s universal health care 
with the absurdity of the so-called debate on 
that subject in our country. How embarrassing is 
that comparison for us? And after universal health care is universal education.

Then there is the governmental support for the 
arts that I mentioned in my “report.” (One 
libertarian friend replied that he would rather 
not have any governmental support for the arts 
because it could only be a corrupting influence. 
I think that is an unduly cynical point of view, 
but I acknowledge its legitimacy. As for me, I 
would rather see the NEA increasing arts funding 
rather than cutting it. Ditto the NEH.)

Here is what in my opinion separates Cuba from 
every other country in Latin America and the 
Caribbean. There are two Spanish words that are 
usually translated into English as “poverty”: 
pobreza and miseria. They are not the same thing.

Pobreza is a meager existence, a life of 
continuous hard work and struggle to make ends meet.

Miseria, on the other hand, is to be perpetually 
mired in filth, degradation, squalor, and 
hopelessness (think “slumdog”). There is plenty 
of pobreza in Cuba but virtually no miseria. In 
all of the other countries a substantial 
proportion of the population is wallowing in 
miseria, and most of the rest are in pobreza, 
alongside small middle classes and extremely 
small layers of the obscenely wealthy. But even 
the pobreza in Cuba is qualitatively different 
from – and preferable to – the pobreza elsewhere.

In the other countries, those in pobreza live in 
constant terror of being dragged down into 
miseria. In Cuba that fear has been eliminated by 
the most solid “social safety net” in the world. 
No matter how hard the daily struggle for 
existence, no Cuban has to fear that an 
unexpected illness will drive them into miseria, 
or that their children will be malnourished, or 
not be well educated. And although there is 
plenty of substandard housing in Cuba (a problem 
exacerbated by the 2008 hurricanes), Havana is 
still the only capital city in Latin America that 
doesn’t include a large, fetid 
tin-and-corrugated-cardboard shantytown in its midst.

The whole idea of a rational economy implies one 
that is guided by human intelligence, which is to 
say, the economy has to be planned. And that 
opens up the problem that anything human beings 
are involved in can turn out bad. I am fully 
aware (as I said clearly in my book) that the 
planned economies of the Soviet Union and China 
were severely perverted by entrenched bureaucracies.

So what the discussion over Cuba comes down to is 
whether the Cuban government, like the Soviet and 
Chinese governments, has turned the planned 
economy into a machine of self-enrichment by an entrenched bureaucracy.

It is my considered position that the answer is 
“no”; that the Cuban economy actually does 
prioritize the human needs of its population. 
That is something that I believe cannot be said 
about any other government on the face of the 
earth. (It is also why I think the U.S. 
government is so adamant about isolating Cuba as 
much as it can from the rest of the world. It 
fears its example and the spread of the “rationality virus.”)

Jaime and Alejandro are not entirely accurate in 
assuming that our trip to Cuba was simply a 
visita dirigida. In the first place, I would 
never be so naïve as to think that I could 
actually make solid scientific pronouncements 
about the state of a society based on a few days 
visit, dirigida or otherwise, or even one of several months.

My observations were admittedly impressionistic 
and any evidence I cited is anecdotal. But even 
impressions and anecdotal evidence can be 
worthwhile as long as they aren’t made out to be 
more than they are. I also deny that our visit 
was fully dirigida. As invited Book Fair guests, 
we were offered a number of wonderful 
opportunities by the Ministry of Culture, which 
we could have turned down, but why would we?

On the other hand, all of the people we visited, 
including Georgina, the CP Central Committee 
staffer, were on our own initiative and not 
foisted upon us.  (She happened to be a friend, 
based on time she had spent in the United States, 
of one of our American friends.) And finally, we 
did visit the homes of several people to whom we were in no sense “directed.”

I knew about the classic cars before we went, of 
course, but meeting and riding around with a man 
who owned and lovingly cared for one was a 
revelation. I also knew about the dual currency 
system, but actually experiencing it was worth a thousand second-hand accounts.

We could see the world-famous Coppelia ice-cream 
parlor from our hotel window, so one evening we 
ventured forth to check it out. As we approached 
what we thought was it, we were shooed by a 
security guard in another direction and wound up 
facing a small ice-cream stand that did indeed 
bear the name “Coppelia,” but which we could not 
imagine was the one we had heard about, so we 
turned around and went back to the hotel.

The next day we returned with our friend Walter 
and the mystery was cleared up.  The security 
guard apparently thought he was doing us a favor. 
He could tell at a glance that we were 
foreigners, so he had directed us away from the 
main facility that was for Cubans with moneda 
nacional in their pockets and toward the one that 
was for those of us privileged folk with C.U.C. 
The little stand had the great advantage of 
having no lines, while the main facility had 
long, long lines. Waiting in lines is one of the 
things that is most annoying in the lives of ordinary Cubans.

As for other socioeconomic “warts,” what about 
prostitutes, beggars, and petty street criminals? 
I am told that the increase in tourism has led to 
a rise in prostitution, and I have no reason to 
doubt it, but it was not obvious.

By comparison, when we were in Beijing recently, 
the prostitutes around our upscale hotel were not 
at all shy about advertising their wares.

As for beggars, we were not once directly asked 
for handouts, but on two occasions after we had 
told a street peddler we weren’t interested in 
what he was selling, he shifted to a request for 
money to feed his hungry children.

By comparison with the streets and subways of New 
York, that was rather minimal begging. And as for 
street crime, we were warned not to carry 
expensive cameras or wear flashy jewelry in some 
neighborhoods, and I assume the warnings had some 
basis in reality, but we neither saw nor 
experienced anything that made us feel unsafe.

On the other hand, nobody warned us against 
hailing cabs in Havana, and we took quite a few, 
but we have been sternly warned not to do that 
here in Mexico City. It seems that it is not 
uncommon here for a cab ride to end in the passenger being robbed or worse.

Jaime and Alejandro wrote that “The Cuban sense 
of humor is legendary” in the context of telling 
a joke the point of which was to make fun of the 
shortages and other shortcomings in Cuban society.

The Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, told us a 
number of similar jokes. We heard from others 
that he has written and published a book about 
that genre of humor. His thesis, if I understood 
it right, was that the uptight purists who label 
such jokes “counterrevolutionary” are wrong to do 
so; that those jokes are a manifestation of 
legitimate popular dissatisfaction that shouldn’t 
be swept under the rug. If he really did write 
such a book, I say bravo for him.

Again, what it comes down to is this: Are the 
Cuban Ministers of X, Y, and Z simply bureaucrats 
with no concern for the principles they pretend 
to uphold (like politicians in every other 
country in the world), or do they continue to act 
in accord with the principles of the 1959 
Revolution? My observations, based not on a 
ten-day visit to the island but on forty-plus 
years of close Cuba-watching from afar, suggest 
that by and large the latter is the case.

The one thing I found offensive in Jaime and 
Alejandro’s comments was the placement of the 
word “fascist” in a sentence about Georgina, 
suggesting that Cuban CP Central Committee 
members may be no better than fascists.

If I am right about Cuba having a sociopolitical 
system that is worth defending, then Georgina and 
her fellow CC workers are in the front lines of 
that defense, and I applaud them for it. But if I 
am wrong and Cuba is just another run-of-the-mill 
“corrupt politics as usual” country, that still 
would not justify a comparison with fascism.

Yes, Cuba has a single political party, but 
nobody tries to disguise that fact.  The U.S. 
“two-party” system, on the other hand, which 
offers us a “choice” between two candidates 
hand-picked by corporate interests, is an attempt 
to bamboozle us into thinking we have a voice in 
government. (I almost said “an obvious attempt,” 
but it is obviously not obvious enough, because it still seems to be working.)

Jaime and Alejandro say they are proud of young 
Cuban doctors who do such good work around the 
world, and also of Cuban athletes who do so well 
in international competitions, but they are 
troubled by the fact that so many defect. They 
think it can’t just be about the money, can it? 
Well, trouble yourselves no more; the defections 
are perfectly understandable if you take into 
account the context in which they occur.

First, consider the athletes (and you might also 
have mentioned ballet dancers). When we were at 
the Cuban National Ballet school we met an 
American woman named Mary Jane Doherty who is 
making a documentary film about the ballet 
school. She told us the story of the recent 
defection of a rising teenage star dancer whose 
parents encouraged her not to come back from a competition in Canada.

It was a devastating blow to the school and 
highly demoralizing to her fellow students. Why 
did she do it? Undoubtedly because her parents 
were tired of living in pobreza and saw their 
daughter’s talent as their ticket to a better 
life. As Mary Jane said, who can blame them? But 
it had nothing to do with yearning for artistic 
freedom or anything as noble as that; it really 
was all about the money, and it’s the same with the athletes.

El Duque as a standard bearer for democratic 
rights? Give me a break. My own greatest sports 
hero was Teófilo Stevenson, who Howard Cosell 
ceaselessly castigated as an idiot for refusing 
to defect and thereby losing out on the millions 
he could earn in the United States.

By the way, although we shouldn’t put too heavy a 
moral burden on the young dancer who defected, 
let’s not forget that she took with her a major 
investment that the rest of the Cuban people had 
made in preparing her for stardom. The National 
Ballet School gave her, for free, several years 
of world-class training without which her great 
talent could not have developed.

That gave her an opportunity that girls and boys 
from poor families in most other parts of the 
world would not have had. If you want to put a 
dollar value on that training, we’ll have to wait 
to see what value the market rewards her with. 
But if she gets rich as a ballet star, she will 
really owe it all to the millions of ordinary 
Cubans whose sacrifices subsidized her free training.

Most people in the United States will 
unthinkingly take the position that the girl had 
an unqualified right to defect – no ifs, ands, or 
buts. That is a reflection of the reigning 
ideology of extreme individualism in which the 
individual is everything and the collective is nothing.

In North Korea, the collective is everything and 
the individual is nothing. It seems to me that 
Cuba has managed to strike the best balance 
between the needs of individuals and the needs of 
the collective. (Ironically, it is the place 
where the abstract individual is exalted to the 
sky that allows millions of real flesh-and-blood 
individuals to fall through the cracks.)

It must be remembered that the high-profile 
defections only have to do with a miniscule 
number of highly talented individuals. Just as 
basketball can only be the road out of the ghetto 
for an infinitesimally small percentage of the 
millions of young men dreaming that they may be 
the next LeBron James, neither can defection to 
the land where streets are paved with gold solve 
the social problems of millions of ordinary 
Cubans. And yet they are encouraged to pursue those irrational dreams.

(An aside: Did you ever stop to think about why 
so much attention is paid to the relatively small 
number of poor Cubans who emigrate to the United 
States when at the same time a million poor 
Mexicans cross the border into the United States every year?)

As for doctors who defect, that is a particularly 
sordid story. Are you aware that the United 
States runs a special project devoted to luring 
those very Cuban doctors you are proud of away 
from their overseas missions that serve poor 
people who have no other medical care?* There has 
to be a special circle in hell reserved for the 
despicable officials who thought that one up.

[*]See: 
<http://www.uscis.gov/files/pressrelease/CubanMedPrf091906.pdf>http://www.uscis.gov/files/pressrelease/CubanMedPrf091906.pdf

What I said about tourism and the Cuban economy 
was really just an impressionistic riff; I didn’t 
intend it to be taken as authoritative. I do 
remember that at one time the Cuban economy’s 
dependence on sugarcane production made it a 
classic example of third world monoculture. And I 
continue to believe that tourism will play a 
significant role in Cuba’s ability to survive.

I don’t know whether Jaime and Alejandro are 
correct in their claim that exile family 
remittances account for more income than tourism 
at present – I suspect accurate and reliable 
figures on that score are hard to come by – but 
even if it is true I don’t think it reflects 
badly on Cuba. The remittances are usually cited 
to suggest that the Cuban economy is artificial 
and would collapse without them, but at best they 
only partially offset the negative impact of the 
U.S. economic blockade. Given the choice between 
the remittances and ending the blockade, I’m sure 
the Cubans would gladly take the latter.

Furthermore, I would like to offer an alternative 
reading of Jaime and Alejandro’s statement that 
“Cuba’s dependence, until 20 years ago, was not 
on sugarcane but on the largesse of the Soviet Union.”

First of all, the collapse of the Soviet Union 
did indeed deal a harsh blow to Cuba’s 
noncapitalist economy, but the fact that the 
latter has survived for two decades “on its own” 
should put to rest any notion that Cuba’s 
dependence on the USSR was in any sense absolute. 
I would suggest that Cuba’s relationship with the 
USSR was not one of dependency but one of equal trading partners.

Free-market ideologues assert that when Cuba 
swapped sugar for Soviet oil, the USSR was 
“subsidizing” Cuba by selling them oil at a 
below-market price and buying sugar at an 
above-market price. That, however, implies that 
the world market prices of commodities are the “fair” price.

I would argue that they most decidedly are not. 
Historically, wealthy countries have had the 
financial power to control the terms of 
international trade. As a result, prices of 
things that poor countries produce – raw 
materials, agricultural products – are held low, 
and prices for things they have to import tend to rise.

This is a phenomenon known all too well to the 
poor countries as the “deteriorating terms of 
trade.” There is nothing at all “fair” or 
“natural” about world market prices. The terms of 
trade that the USSR and Cuba worked out were far 
more equitable and, from a moral point of view, far more fair.

I’m afraid I can’t add much more to what I 
already said about Cuba’s Jewish community, 
although I can say that what Dr. Altshuler told 
us supports what Jaime and Alejandro said about its small size.

As for Jaime and Alejandro’s comments about human 
rights abuses in Cuba, this is obviously a hugely 
important issue for two reasons. First, wherever 
people are being victimized, that should be 
brought to light, protested, and 
stopped.  Second, to the extent that such charges 
are true, they damage Cuba’s moral standing in 
the international community, and Cuba’s very 
survival as a positive example of postcapitalist 
society depends in large part on that moral standing.

When I first became a partisan of the Cuban 
Revolution more than forty years ago, the charges 
I heard of human rights abuses disturbed me 
profoundly, so I made an effort to investigate 
them the best I could. After a few years of 
finding that they were almost all bogus claims of 
right-wing exiles, I stopped bothering to investigate.

The one big exception was charges of 
institutional repression of gay Cubans, which was 
indeed a stain on the Revolution. Over the years, 
however, it seems that the situation has changed 
for the better. Not to say that there isn’t still 
a great deal of anti-gay prejudice in Cuba (in 
what country is there not?), but at least the 
problem is no longer one of active institutional mistreatment.

Cuban gay rights advocates continue to make 
demands on their government to be more proactive 
in defending gays against injustices, and it is 
encouraging that the loudest of their voices 
belongs to none other than Mariela Castro, the 
daughter of president Raúl Castro.

The fact that I found most earlier charges of 
human rights abuses in Cuba to be unfounded does 
not mean that I now simply dismiss Jaime and 
Alejandro’s allegations out of hand. I don’t find 
it impossible to believe that human rights abuses exist in Cuba.

Pobreza breeds social conflict everywhere, and 
Cuba is no exception. And wherever there are 
police, the police mentality can lead to human 
rights abuses that are simply intolerable. In the 
past few days I have seen reports in the Mexican 
press of the “women in white” protests in Havana being broken up by police.

I also note that usually trustworthy 
international human rights organizations such as 
Amnesty International have been critical of 
recent Cuban judicial practices. As for the 
“women in white,” I see from CNN reports that 
after they were arrested they were not jailed but were taken to their homes.

I have not heard the official explanation, but I 
suspect it will be that the women were detained 
“for their own protection” from much larger 
groups of angry counterdemonstrators. I would 
have rather seen the police defend the women’s 
peaceful protest against the hostile 
counterdemonstrators, but I can’t say more than that because I wasn’t there.

Jaime and Alejandro specifically cited the case 
of a prisoner named Zamora. I think they are 
referring to Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died in a 
Cuban prison recently as the result of a hunger 
strike. I don’t want to minimize the seriousness 
of this case, but anything more I say about it 
would simply be talking off the top of my head.

I hope if his death did arise from an injustice 
on the part of Cuban authorities, steps will be 
taken to prevent such things from happening 
again. (It’s too late to help him.) I am somewhat 
encouraged by a CNN report that quoted Cuban 
president Raúl Castro as saying that he “lamented 
the death of Cuban prisoner Orlando Zapata 
Tamayo, who died after leading a hunger strike.”

Jaime and Alejandro asked whether Nadine Gordimer 
might write a protest letter on behalf of 
political prisoners in Cuban jails as she did for 
the Cuban Five who are now imprisoned in the 
United States. I can’t speak for Nadine, but I 
can say that my own experience suggests that she 
would not ignore a request to intercede on their behalf.

When I returned home from Cuba I wrote to her and 
asked if she would issue a statement protesting 
the incarceration of an American prisoner of 
conscience, Lynne Stewart, the courageous defense 
attorney who the Bush administration prosecuted 
for conspiring with terrorists because she had 
served as the lawyer for a man accused of terrorism.

I received a rapid response indicating that 
Nadine would investigate the case herself and let 
me know her decision. I don’t think that was a 
brush-off. She undoubtedly receives hundreds of 
similar requests from all over the world every 
year, and she is far too independent-minded to simply rubber-stamp them.

At the press conference I attended, I saw her 
tell the Cuban press officials she would not 
speak until they showed her the Spanish 
translation of her statement.  She told me she 
wanted to make sure they weren’t slipping in anything she hadn’t actually said.

In general, rank-and-file human rights activists 
like myself tend to confine ourselves to 
protesting the abuses of our own respective 
governments. That is not a matter of hypocrisy or 
double standards. Human rights abuses are 
intolerable wherever they occur, but our primary 
duty is to stand up against those that are committed in our own names.

As Cubans, Jaime and Alejandro understandably 
feel most strongly about abuses committed against 
their countrymen and countrywomen, but as ex-pats 
they do not have any more standing in the eyes of 
the Cuban government – probably even less – than 
I do to protest them. Nadine Gordimer is a rare 
exception whose international reputation forces 
governments everywhere to at least hear her protests.

Well, Rhonda and George, when I began this e-mail 
I had not intended to hold forth at such length, 
but I guess it’s one of those “don’t get me 
started” things. The abysmal state of our poor 
planet earth is such that tiny Cuba is the only 
bright spot I see anywhere. If I had a magic wand 
and could wave it and transform all of human 
society into one big Cuban-style society, would I 
do it? Even if it meant that my own living 
standard would decline into pobreza?  In a heartbeat!

To raise the billions of humans who are currently 
in slumdog miseria would be well worth it. 
Besides, if the rational Cuban economy were a 
worldwide system, there’s no reason to think that 
even pobreza could not soon be eliminated. As 
John Lennon sang, “Imagine!” But since I don’t 
have a magic wand, I suppose the world will 
either have to find some other way to free itself 
from the grip of the market system or else 
continue muddling on along its current path to self-destruction.

Cliff




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