Everywhere, everyone seems to have woken up to talk about the US and Cuba. Suddenly, national consensus on any number of issues that deeply divided the polity a generation or two ago now has shifted. Folk born after the 1980s seem to think significantly differently than folk before that time. Or could my earshot be limited? But everywhere I go, all of a sudden (well not really, it took a few decades) it’s the USA now the beast and Cuba the beauty. Actually many of the folk who have been voicing these opinions were very much alive in the 70’s and eighties and echoing very opposite opinions. This cannot be however, a gotchya moment. The stakes are too grave to accomodate anyone’s I-told-you-so’s.
These are the facts:
Trump is hungry for victories. Mid-terms are coming up. He does not have an appetite for losing. Iran has cost him. He was not pleased either on being rebuffed about Greenland.
Cuba is quite a meal. His constituents have considered Cuba an effontery from day 1. Cuba is red meat to a starving hyena.
Even if some are now waking up and discerning the times, it’s much too late in the day for full-blooded heroes. Jamaicans and the entire Caribbean have existed since independence by kissing the associated rings of Imperial America. It’s just that our leaders were allowed the dignity once of doing so behind closed doors and so preserved an outward posture of independence. Those quick to villify Mr Holeness for doing what every successive Jamaican prime minister who wanted to retain power has had to do are simply expressing their dismay that the illusion has now dissipated and the nakedness of our vulnerability been exposed.
There is no way that any amount of youthful activism, however strenuous and well intentioned, will move the realpolitik involved. We may be forced to watch the maneuvering of unbridled Imperialism up front and close and for many this, will be the first such show of their lifetime and it is bound to be unsettling.
I’m too old for romanticism. I need at this stage to accept life on its terms and make choices on mine. My interest is only this, so what will our leaders do now? when we all understand the new rules in this glaring reality. Are we ready yet to dispense with our idyllic geopolitical illusions and sober up for war time gravitas? It’s not a question of if but when.
War is a posture one can only assume when one is certain what is worth living and dying for. War is not necessarily about taking life or spilling blood. It understands it may come to that, but that is not the calculation. War is about understanding what boundaries are inviolable if life is to be worth living. War requires an honor code and a sacred set of values. Jamaicans who claim no appetite for war are hypocrites as we have been at war with ourselves for generations. We have been eager to kill or have people killed or see people killed in the name of green or orange, or middle class moralities which bless state murder with silence and complicity once committed by uniformed forces and sanctioned by courts however compromised or brazenly corrupt. We understand war well. Our honor code and set of values are just twisted. We shouldn’t pretend to be a peace-loving people. That would simply be delusional.
Here is the truth. If NATO, a US ally, barely was able to restrain the US from immediately devouring Greenland, there is simply no force in the Caribbean at present that will prevent a Cuba showdown.
You dont come to a gunfight with a slingshot, not unless you have some serious advantages of terrain and a raas of a well thought out strategy. (No time for niceties now). Such is not the case at present. So one does what one must. In wartime, ordinary judgment must be suspended. There are those who will seek to kill or to die and others who will seek to live and make every arrangement to facilitate that end.
No, it has not come to that yet for Jamaica. All we have to do now is to swallow spit and pucker up. But it does look like we will have to watch a show too close to home for comfort and that might trigger new political awareness in our leadership and in our land.
I look forward to that.
YeKengalé 