Pendant que le pote à la Mère Mitterrand et au patron du Diplodocus (le vrai interlocuteur de la fausse interview de PPDA ?) tente de battre le record de Franco (presque 4 ans !), de Tito (un peu plus de deux mois ?), sans parler du Pape ou d’Arafat…
Et qu’à Paris, le Quai et ses annexes du journal de révérence et du Diplodocus préparent déjà les panégyriques (”un grand pays, un grand peuple et une grande civilisation, qui est respecté et qui joue un rôle de stabilisation dans la région”) et Delanoé, les plaques de rues …
Petit retour, à l’occasion de la sortie en France du film d’Andy Garcia (« A lost city », « Adieu Cuba » en VF, qui ne devrait logiquement pas échapper aux sauvages critiques dont il a été l’objet de la part de la presse de gauche – désolé pour le pléonasme! – américaine), sur quelques faits généralement les imbécillités régulièrement présentées comme informations sur l’avant-dernier fossile vivant (pardon: « paradis des travailleurs et patrie ») du socialisme mondial:
« One feature of the Cuban social structure is a large middle class, » it starts. « Cuban workers are more unionized (proportional to the population) than U.S. workers. The average wage for an 8-hour day in Cuba in 1957 is higher than for workers in Belgium, Denmark, France and Germany. Cuban labor receives 66.6 per cent of gross national income. In the U.S. the figure is 70 per cent, in Switzerland 64 per cent. 44 per cent of Cubans are covered by social legislation, a higher percentage than in the U.S. »
UNESCO report on Cuba circa 1957
In 1958 Cuba had a higher per-capita income than Austria and Japan. Cuban industrial workers had the eighth-highest wages in the world. In the 1950s Cuban stevedores earned more per hour than their counterparts in New Orleans and San Francisco. Cuba had established an eight-hour workday in 1933 – five years before FDR’s New Dealers got around to it. Add to this a one-month paid vacation. The much-lauded (by liberals) social democracies of Western Europe didn’t manage this till 30 years later.
And get this, Maxine Waters, Barbara Walters, Andrea Mitchell, Diane Sawyer and the rest of you feminist Castro groupies: Cuban women got three months of paid maternity leave. I repeat, this was in the 1930s. Cuba, a country 71 percent white in 1957, was completely desegregated 30 years before Rosa Parks was dragged off that Birmingham bus and handcuffed. In 1958 Cuba had more female college graduates per capita than the U.S.
before Castro « came to town, » Cuba took in more immigrants (primarily from Europe) as a percentage of population than the U.S. And more Americans lived in Cuba than Cubans in the U.S. Furthermore, inner tubes were used in truck tires, oil drums for oil, and Styrofoam for insulation. None were cherished black market items for use as flotation devices to flee the glorious liberation while fighting off hammerheads and tiger sharks.
the « apparatchiks » Garcia depicts in his movie incarcerated and executed a higher percentage of their countrymen in their first three months in power than Hitler and his apparatchiks jailed and executed in their first three years. As well complain that the guards and police in « Schindler’s List, » « Julia » or « The Diary of Anne Frank » come across as hackneyed caricatures. Instead let’s portray them with more « complexity, » as misguided idealists who followed a leader who unshackled the German working class from its subservience to snooty barons, who eradicated Germany’s unemployment and who ended Germany’s national humiliation at the hands of Europe’s premier imperialist powers.
La suite…