James Schipper writes:
Gusanos are only those Cubans who left shortly after 1959 and who just can’t forget their defeat. Cubans who emigrated in the last 3 decades are nearly all economic immigrants and not as fanatically anti-communist as the gusanos.
Nobody in his right mind disputes that the blockade hurts Cuba, but a lot of Cuba’s economic problems are indeed home-made. For instance, the fact that sugar production dropped from nearly 10 million tons to less than 2 million tons can’t really be blamed on the blockade.
Cuba was regularly harvesting 10 million tons/year for many years in the 1970′s and 1980′s. The price of sugar collapsed recently so Cuba shot down most of its sugar mills. The lying US capitalist media insanely gloated about this and wrote endless articles on this along the lines of the “failure of Cuban system” thesis. All that happened was the price of sugar collapsed so low that the Cubans just said screw it, we are going out of the sugar business, and closed most of their mills. It was a very painful decision, but it was the right thing to do. I don’t understand why closing the mills means “failure of Communism.”
Recently the price of sugar is back up, so the Cubans are reopening some of their old mills. A lot of workers are going back to work. There is a video on BBC about this. The Cuban state put all laid off sugar workers to work in other jobs or else sent them back to school. Wasn’t that great? You lose your job, and you automatically get another job or you can go to school for free and get paid to go? Wow, that really is a great system in some ways.
I would argue that almost all children of gusanos are also gusanos. Every Cuban I have met whose parents were Cuban refugees was fanatically, almost insanely anti-Communist.
I haven’t met any of the more sensible recent arrivals. In fact, I have never met a sane Cuban-American in my life. Every one I ever met was a raving anti-Communist nutcase. And they were all reactionaries too, every single one of them.
