Isn’t it? Scahill’s tweet seems to have been the catalyst that prompted the emotional response due to her family history. I don’t want to see Cuba turned into vacation land for Americans either but maybe it’s time to let the Cuban people decide for themselves whether they want a Big Mac or not instead of leaving it up to Castro or Scahill. That was my take anyway.
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Yes. I hope “steady as she goes” is the guiding principle as Cuba “modernizes” and liberalizes and they are able to chart some middle course between the uniquely obscene excesses of U.S. and Chinese capitalism. The “socialist paradise” ought to look to Scandinavia to learn how real socialism works.
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In regions, some countries are “First among equals”. South America has two co-“firsts”: Brasil and Argentina. Tha land portion of Latin America north of South America has Mexico. The Caribbean has Cuba. These are the largest, most populous and most influential countries of each region.
For 50+ years, the main Caribbean country, over 800 miles long and with nearly the size of Pennsylvania, has been muted, as far as the United States. Eventually, the center of Caribbean gravity (particularly the Spanish-speaking part) will shift to Cuba and away from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic (although the Puerto Ricans have U.S. Territorial status to modify this somewhat).
The conversation I had with a close Dominican friend today consisted mostly of shouts of joy and jubilation–but the actual unfoldings for the Cuban people I cannot imagine. Your in-law will be such an interesting person to talk to, based on this alone. His silences will be worth more than most non-natives’ speeches.
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You’re just as bad as the people you criticize and it suggests that you’ve never really been to a “before and after” place. I have. Ko Samui in Thailand was one of the original “backpacker’s paradises” of SE Asian “discovered” in the late 1970s. When I visited there in 1990, we stayed in one of the beach side bungalow complexes, there was just one paved road circling the island, and only two Western style resort complexes. Ten years later, the “main street” of Lamai boasts a Starbucks, McDonalds and a Subway. And that is how you fuck over someplace not already thoroughly Westernized. It doesn’t have to be all one thing or the other. However, unfettered capitalism and FREEDUM have a way of overwhelming things. Quite frankly, I expect this to be Cuba’s fate.
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“I know they cloud my judgment.”
that is a key line in this piece…
The transfer of victimhood, the vendetta cycle, can only be broken when the next generation refuses to act as the victims for their antecedents.
On both sides of the Florida Straits.
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I spent Christmas 2004 in Slovenia, the same year they joined the EU. The people there were very excited about the possibilities.
We had a guide as part of the package holiday and one of the extra social activities we could sign up for was a schnapps tasting tour. We drove out into the country to what turned out to be an old farm house with what they called a black kitchen where they smoked meats. I remember thinking there was no way the that place wouldn’t run afoul of some state or federal regulations in the US with their homemade schnapps, cheeses and meats and wondering how much their new freedoms were going to change the character of the place.
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“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
–T. S. Eliot
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And that Subway, McDonalds and Starbucks provided as stable wage for any local kid who wanted to work there. Do you think the young girl behind the counter making sandwhiches at Subway after school should have just accepted her fate of working in the local go-go bar servicing the backpackers in the back rooms?
I’ve travelled through India, and the entire backpacker circuit of SE Asia. Believe me, I had more than my fair share of nauseating, patronizing, spoiled, entitled backpacker laments of how things “were better” back when the locals were living in abject hand to mouth poverty without any any hope of their children or grandchildren getting an education or joining a middle class. Spoiled rich kids who didn’t care anything about the lives or the plight of of the locals, other than to serve as the picturesque backdrop for their “authentic travel experiences”, or the ancillary sideplot characters in their travel stories traded over Singhas and Changs at the backpack bars.
After your temporary romantic escapades, you got the opportunity to go home and live your comfortable bourgeois middle class life, while the people serving your food and cleaning your rooms were stuck there day after day ,year after year, for just enough money to keep from starving to death. The children of Koh Samui deserved the same chances in life you got. They don’t need you and other rich spoiled Western backpackers to decide their lives and decide what’s best for them. Hell isn’t having a Subway on your main street providing a possibility for a stable wage and discretionary income to anyone who wants to work there, Hell is being sold by your family into the local brothel servicing the local rural farmers for a couple of dollars worth of baht because they need food to feed the rest of their family, and that’s the only means of work available to a poor young girl in Chang Mai.
PS - If Western Corporatism is a plague, backpackers are the vermin that spread it around the world.
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Yes, I don’t know if I should bring this issue up to him.
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I thought most of the brothel work was done servicing tourists?
Local culture can be overwhelmed by corporate culture and the results are often the loss of an area’s cultural heritage.
Not only that, development can go badly wrong. Witness the air in Beijing.
And the type of poverty may change… a hard working subsistence farmer may be tempted or forced off the family land only to find that the job market is unstable and that he no longer has a livelihood to fall back on. So while you had very poor farmers you tended not to have people actually starving in Thailand in the 1960s where as now very poor people are apparent in the cities according to a 2005 visitor. My guess is that income inequality has increased, that the middle class has also increased but that some portion of Thai society has been forced into the direst of poverty. I don’t know where it nets.
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More than a little extreme aren’t you? And it’s evident that you don’t like backpackers, those who leave the lightest footprint in the countries they visit. Almost everything you write about them is more applicable to American tourists in general than it is to backpackers however.
Maybe you’re too old and fat to backpack, I can’t say. But we get that you’re good with putting up corporate logos in the commerce centers of foreign venues. I guess you wouldn’t be comfortable travelling unless you could get a big mac or double half caf latte whenever you feel the need.
I’m sure that you’ll say that you’ve intently studied the wage scales of foreign franchises and their overall impact on local economies. I’m also pretty sure that Pizza Hut and others pay employees just as poorly abroad as they do in the United States.
10 companies with the least valuable workers.
But a job is a job…right? Better to have one and starve as to not have one and starve.
I’m ok with corporations providing a decent wage in return for having a presence in foreign countries. Fast food franchisees don’t do that. They’re just as predatory abroad as they are at home, perhaps even more so.
But my wife and I are sure as shit not going to patronize them.
Ohhh…I was unable to backpack around the world in my youth, I was “backpacking” in Vietnam while working for our dear Uncle. But I’ve returned several times to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand since 1972. I do what ever I can to support locals, their local economies and culture…
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There’s also brothels servicing the locals, particularly in the rural areas that only service locals. That’s worse than the tourist red light districts, because they’re paid a fraction as much.
Smog is unpleasant … but when you’re just a generation or so removed from something like the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961 where an estimated 45 million people starved to death, and tousands of people resorted to cannibalism to survive … it might be an acceptable tradeoff to having food on the table. But it’s not for you and I to decide, it’s for the Chinese people to decide … and so far they seem to be in the anti-famine camp.
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Could be delicate. I have always liked your posts.
Sensitivity to others shouldn’t be a problem. Good Luck.
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Applauding the Beijing smog is not a necessary adjunct to the survival of the Chinese people. I fail to see why so many developing countries act as though they had both a right and a duty to repeat our worst mistakes. I can’t see the Beijing Smog without thinking about the infamous London Fogs as Britain first industrialized.
I don’t pretend to control the Chinese people and I suspect that they are strong enough to deal with any criticism or praise that I might dole out.
Even better, when I first read it the phrase “nostalgia tour” wasn’t in the headline, instead it was “your vacation.”
On the other had, I have even LESS of a chance of taking a nostalgia tour of Cuba than a vacation there since neither I nor anyone I know of in my family since a foot soldier in Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders has ever been there. The edited headline is even less about me than the original.
Just leave “you” out of headlines and it solves the problem. Using “you” makes it a challenge to the reader, and not a pleasant one. Instead, how about, “Why I Don’t Want to Hear About Nostalgia Tours Through Cuba” gives the same information without being challenging clickbait and insulting its readers.
At least the fat American tourists have the common decency to quarantine their ugliness in the inclusive resorts and pay well for their stays . They’re not out haggling with the locals for a few dollars worth of baht for a t-shirt or a tuk-tuk ride, or “having an authentic local experience” by drinking buckets and vomiting all over the beaches at the Full Moon parties. And above all, they don’t enshroud their vacation decisions around some cloak of ridiculously manufacture neo-hippie self congratulatory ethos to help themselves sleep at night.
I’m not like your gullible and naive friends at home, I’ve seen Khao Sahn Road and Vang Vieng, so please spare me the Lonely Planet “small footprint” manufactured marketing bullcrap. It doesn’t sell here. You’re just another bourgeious spoiled child from a rich country on holiday treating another culture as your people zoo, exploiting their poverty for a cheap travel destination . At least have the decency to own up to it.
Randy Newman is nice, but I’m more of a Dead Kennedy kinda a guy. “Holiday In Cambodia” in particular always struck me as particularly poignant.
Even the Vietnamese want Louis Vuitton.
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Look at you, making assumptions and generalizations about me and others who you know nothing about. But thanks for assigning me, the son of a lower middle class (in the day) farmer membership in the bourgeoisie! LOL!! And most of my gullible and naive friends visited exotic locales while serving our country, not too many cared to leave again after making it home.
Guess you’re just pissed that backpackers won’t pay to stay in your Inn.
I wish I was a child again n00b! Looking at sixty nine next year is a real drag.
Making those ***ASS***umptions and ***ASS***ignations only serves to highlight guess what about you?
Did someone step on your wee wee Inman?
WOW! Is that a genuine Lois Vuitton Yoke that person is carrying?
He/She must have worked double shifts for years at the Ho Chi Minh Starbucks and Pizza Hooch to afford such splendor.
Long Live trickle down!!!
I wonder where she got the idea that people were clamoring to tell her about their vacation to Cuba? Someone should write an article explaining why they don’t want to hear about “the emotions pouring through” a second-generation Cuban who has never bothered to visit the country she claims to be so emotional about.
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