![](https://i.imgur.com/CLvY2jA.png")
13-05-2022, 02:15 PM
Belen Fernandez
8 May 2022
While in Havana this past February, I made the acquaintance of a man in his mid-fifties, who hailed from the eastern Cuban province of Guantánamo and who in 1986 had endeavoured unsuccessfully to sail on a makeshift boat from Cuba to the so-called “land of the free”: my own homeland, the United States.
......
In spite of his own attempted abandonment of the country in favour of the epicentre of global capitalism, he maintained that there were certain priceless perks that corresponded to life in Cuba, including free healthcare and the freedom to go to school or walk down the street without the fear of being shot.
To be sure, US politicians and other concerned citizens have expended significant energy over the years neurotically portraying Cuba as a uniquely oppressive nation and a threat to international security. The diminutive island even occupies one out of only four spots on the official US list of State Sponsors of Terrorism – even though Cuba has never, say, bombed the hell out of civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan, and even though Guantánamo constitutes a form of terror in its own right.
But while the US government casts almost everything the US itself does as being in the name of “freedom” and “security”, the fact of the matter is that Cubans have access to a literal security that is unavailable to residents of the imperial superpower. When I googled “mass shootings in Cuba”, for example, the top result was an April 2020 Associated Press article about 42-year-old Alexander Alazo of Aubrey, Texas, who, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, had opened fire on the Cuban Embassy in Washington, DC.
......
Over Easter weekend this April, CNN reported “at least 10 mass shootings” across the country – with the term “mass shooting” referring to an “incident in which four or more people are shot, not including the shooter”.
......
This particularly bloody weekend came just days after 10 people were shot in the subway in Brooklyn on April 12. Rewind a few weeks to CNN headlines from March – eg, “At least 8 people were killed and more than 60 hurt in mass shootings across the US this weekend”, published March 21 – and there does indeed appear to be a trend. Fast forward again to May, and the Washington, DC-based Gun Violence Archive had already recorded no fewer than 173 mass shootings this year as of May 2.
......
According to the US government’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the country registered 45,222 “firearm deaths” in 2020 – even more than the 40,698 “motor vehicle traffic deaths”. This was the highest number of gun-related deaths on record for any single year thus far, and represented a 43 percent increase from 2010.
......
How’s that for “security”?
......
BBC News ...... reminisces ironically: “It was over 50 years ago when the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared that ‘firearms are a primary instrument of death in American crime’ and that it was ‘primarily the result of our culture’s casual attitude towards firearms and its heritage of the armed, self-reliant citizen’.” In reality, the quote – which actually describes firearms as an “instrument of injury and death”, not just death – occurred in the context of a 1969 congressional subcommittee hearing on firearms legislation under Johnson’s successor Richard Nixon.
Media fact-checking incompetence aside, the quote remains valid – and the whole “casual attitude” has no doubt proved helpful over the course of contemporary US history in justifying massacres of civilians from Vietnam to Iraq and beyond. Naturally, however, the US political establishment has little interest in connecting the dots – or the bullet holes, as the case may be – between militarised sociopathy abroad and at home.
......
As of 2017, there were already “more guns than people” in the US
......
how much more preferable it would be – in terms of, you know, human life – for the US state to invest in the mental and physical wellbeing of its population rather than cultivating a cutthroat capitalist landscape that makes folks go ballistic.
Of course, a sick society is ultimately more profitable for such pillars of US capitalism as the arms and pharmaceutical industries, whose own security definitively trumps the sort of security described by my Cuban interlocutor – like the freedom to not be shot while going about your daily business.
I experienced an inkling of this sickness firsthand growing up in the US, where I was taught that life was a competition as opposed to a communal collaboration – a dog-eat-dog arrangement that intermittently spawned in me feelings of anxiety, isolation, impotence, and directionless rage. Decades before the pandemic exacerbated matters, I disentangled myself from the hostile environment by simply abandoning the country – and yet it is not difficult to see how a violent and thoroughly alienating system might also elicit more violent individual responses.
Full article here: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/...n-epidemic
8 May 2022
While in Havana this past February, I made the acquaintance of a man in his mid-fifties, who hailed from the eastern Cuban province of Guantánamo and who in 1986 had endeavoured unsuccessfully to sail on a makeshift boat from Cuba to the so-called “land of the free”: my own homeland, the United States.
......
In spite of his own attempted abandonment of the country in favour of the epicentre of global capitalism, he maintained that there were certain priceless perks that corresponded to life in Cuba, including free healthcare and the freedom to go to school or walk down the street without the fear of being shot.
To be sure, US politicians and other concerned citizens have expended significant energy over the years neurotically portraying Cuba as a uniquely oppressive nation and a threat to international security. The diminutive island even occupies one out of only four spots on the official US list of State Sponsors of Terrorism – even though Cuba has never, say, bombed the hell out of civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan, and even though Guantánamo constitutes a form of terror in its own right.
But while the US government casts almost everything the US itself does as being in the name of “freedom” and “security”, the fact of the matter is that Cubans have access to a literal security that is unavailable to residents of the imperial superpower. When I googled “mass shootings in Cuba”, for example, the top result was an April 2020 Associated Press article about 42-year-old Alexander Alazo of Aubrey, Texas, who, armed with an AK-47 assault rifle, had opened fire on the Cuban Embassy in Washington, DC.
......
Over Easter weekend this April, CNN reported “at least 10 mass shootings” across the country – with the term “mass shooting” referring to an “incident in which four or more people are shot, not including the shooter”.
......
This particularly bloody weekend came just days after 10 people were shot in the subway in Brooklyn on April 12. Rewind a few weeks to CNN headlines from March – eg, “At least 8 people were killed and more than 60 hurt in mass shootings across the US this weekend”, published March 21 – and there does indeed appear to be a trend. Fast forward again to May, and the Washington, DC-based Gun Violence Archive had already recorded no fewer than 173 mass shootings this year as of May 2.
......
According to the US government’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the country registered 45,222 “firearm deaths” in 2020 – even more than the 40,698 “motor vehicle traffic deaths”. This was the highest number of gun-related deaths on record for any single year thus far, and represented a 43 percent increase from 2010.
......
How’s that for “security”?
......
BBC News ...... reminisces ironically: “It was over 50 years ago when the administration of President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared that ‘firearms are a primary instrument of death in American crime’ and that it was ‘primarily the result of our culture’s casual attitude towards firearms and its heritage of the armed, self-reliant citizen’.” In reality, the quote – which actually describes firearms as an “instrument of injury and death”, not just death – occurred in the context of a 1969 congressional subcommittee hearing on firearms legislation under Johnson’s successor Richard Nixon.
Media fact-checking incompetence aside, the quote remains valid – and the whole “casual attitude” has no doubt proved helpful over the course of contemporary US history in justifying massacres of civilians from Vietnam to Iraq and beyond. Naturally, however, the US political establishment has little interest in connecting the dots – or the bullet holes, as the case may be – between militarised sociopathy abroad and at home.
......
As of 2017, there were already “more guns than people” in the US
......
how much more preferable it would be – in terms of, you know, human life – for the US state to invest in the mental and physical wellbeing of its population rather than cultivating a cutthroat capitalist landscape that makes folks go ballistic.
Of course, a sick society is ultimately more profitable for such pillars of US capitalism as the arms and pharmaceutical industries, whose own security definitively trumps the sort of security described by my Cuban interlocutor – like the freedom to not be shot while going about your daily business.
I experienced an inkling of this sickness firsthand growing up in the US, where I was taught that life was a competition as opposed to a communal collaboration – a dog-eat-dog arrangement that intermittently spawned in me feelings of anxiety, isolation, impotence, and directionless rage. Decades before the pandemic exacerbated matters, I disentangled myself from the hostile environment by simply abandoning the country – and yet it is not difficult to see how a violent and thoroughly alienating system might also elicit more violent individual responses.
Full article here: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/...n-epidemic
