1. Cuba and the political ecotourism

I left Cuba in 1993 after finishing my years at University as a philosophy student, together with Cuban intellectuals like, Rafael Rojas, Emilio Ichikawa and Alexis Jardines. Those were also the years of my active involvement in the famous literary gatherings organised by Paideia.

Something like a new cultural movement, a new seed of philosophical, political and poetic ideas seemed to grow in the island from a situation that was posing paradoxes rather than questions. We were faced, as never before, with an exceptional situation in Cuban history.

While the days of the Cold War were over and fighting the enemy from Washington or Moscow turned diffused and double-edged, due to the very nature of terrorism and ethnic conflicts, Cubans were still immersed in a fight against an enemy that has remained for decades static and with hard-line postures across both side of the political conflict. The small Cold War between the Cuban government, Washington and the political opposition in and out of the island has alienated Cubans from the rest of the world.

When Fidel Castro arrived to Havana with his tanks in 1959, the enemy was transparent, the victory masterly executed and the support overwhelming. Something very different happens with the current outcome of victory and the definition of the enemy in today’s world.

When Islamic fundamentalists strike against Americans or the British they can only afford to harm civilians. When Americans and the British government strike against Islamic fundamentalist o terrorist cells, they too do so at the price of inflicting large collateral damage over civilians. In that sense, even when the enemy is still transparent, the fight is elusive and produces many devastating side effects.

In the art of contemporary warfare every military attack is prophylactic, prosthetic and intrinsically a carrier of many boomerang effects. Iraq is very self-explanatory in that sense. How long the American military presence will remain in Iraq is to be seen, but the uncontrollable birth of terrorist cells in and out of American soil is something deeply rooted in Washington’s psyche. Something visceral forces the American government to perpetuate their military presence in Iraq. Their enemy seems to be everywhere, or worse, it can turn up at any time.

On the surface, the Cuban affair might look by comparison much easier. The primary enemy of Cuba would be the Bush Administration, or the Cuban Castrist government, or the opposition in and out of Cuba.

The exasperating and often frustrated reality of Cuba is that its current government will not be removed as it happened with Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia or Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The Cuban current government will die by natural causes, in the same way many animal species are getting extinct.

The Serengeti National Park in Tanzania has developed a conservation project for cheetahs. The cheetahs genetic pool has weaken as a result of insufficient crossbreeding with other cheetah population. Cuba, as a social structure, has many resemblances with the Serengeti National Park. The island is a natural reserve of the communist experiment, whose genetic pool has weaken and entered the last stage of becoming extinct due to the absence of global economical and political crossbreeding.

In South Africa there is a kind of tourism called Shark Tourism. It is a kind of ecotourism committed to the preservation of the Great White shark, one of the most vilified and hunted to extinction creatures of the sea. Of course, the interaction with the shark is under the safety of a large protected cage. Cuba as a tourist destination has become too a kind of political ecotourism to many travelers that visit the island under the safety cage of being foreigners and not having to live under the enormous pressure of the Cuban economical and political situation.

The image of Fidel Castro and his government are today a symbolic mix between the precarious situation of the cheetah in Serengeti and the caged human experience of the Great White in South Africa. The fundamental difference though is that many people at a global scale, including the tourists, would like to put an end to this situation for Cubans and stop that ill-suited political ecotourism which fascinate some and cause disgust in others.

Bringing to an end the Cuban misery however could mean simultaneously the loss of something deeply tattooed to Cuba cultural identity, namely, the condition of exceptional country in defiance of the legendary American Empire. If the peculiarity of the Cuban culture for over half century has been its political and social situation, to become natural part of the anonymous network of global media would be one of the biggest challenges for Cubans regardless of the wide spectrum of political positions.

Such was in fact my personal challenge after I left Cuba and came to live in London, where I currently have my permanent home since 15 year ago.

2. From uniqueness to anonymity.

Anonymity is something embedded to the daily life of Londoners. To be exceptional, maverick or bespoken in London is possible only if you are part of the micro-cell of your job or part of a hobbyist group. There is not much general ideology, politics or universal principle unless they are rooted at the heart of a local community or workplace.

Even celebrities are on the spotlight as part of the countless channel of screens that every event has become. Most people in London have mental control-remotes to flip from channel to channel of information or activities at the speed of light or in bullet-time motion. Nothing is universal in here, nothing reach a resting point of solid unanimity. Everything and everyone is forced, seduced to be global, but one manages to be so from a local standpoint that often ends up fragmented, broken or completely “autistic”.

The most interesting part of this process is that the centralization of the economic power and the networks of pure data continue to be a threat to the social equilibrium. Hence, the big financial conglomerates and corporations have the duty and the clever (and sometimes not so clever) system prognosis in place to foresee and induce in due time deregulation as much as centralization. Enron corporation scandal and now Obama, together put a balance into the equation, regardless of what might come with Omaba.

Technology and the media have absorbed and integrated within their networks the Castrist model as a fanciful glittering effect and as a simulation and social experiment to get out of the paradoxes of progress and the threats of stagnation. Communism or Castrism in the British society sometimes function as a prophylactic humanitarian or revolutionary gesture (A poster of Richard Branson “photoshopped” as Che Guevara), and other times as a reminder and warning about the basic violation of human rights.

Then, to those who are suspicious of Obama fundamentalism in any form or shape, (communism is as old as prostitution, or even older), there is not fundamental reason to be suspicious. Anything that will return will return differently. We should avoid and stop its return by mistake though. But again, in history the Same often returns by necessity, and also by desire.

Historical events are not longer “moody” but rather “mody” (modal), they keep switching on and off as a digital station. In a way, emotions tend to become modal, which doesn’t mean that they lose their moody edge, but rather that they switch on and off as a circuit board. Obama’s success is the result of having switched back on some American ideals and having switched back off many others. His future success will depend exactly on his skills as switcher.

Societies’ economical and political circuitries from time to time get broken and both, switches and switchers, become useless. Obama seems to have reestablished the switcher’s role. He will be Joe the switcher.

Thus, Castrism, Guevarism and Leninism have homeopathic values in the global scheme of economy and society. They can only be put into practice as ad hoc therapy. Like a placebo (Leninade Soda), it causes changes not because of its content but rather as a result of the mental skin-graft effects associated to it.

One might get a bit unsettled because of a simple idea dressing-up as a new idea, but in reality the charisma of simplicity wins over its heavyweight depth because content and surface come together. The magic of depth is turned into breadth in a society constantly driven by network of fast deliverance and consumption.

Everything should be ready and packaged to be consumed. The presidential campaign speech does not escape this race. The old fashion model is done and dusty, we need to move on quick. That is the motto of media, politics and businesses. We are over, and we have left behind all the “ism” of the past, or so it seems.

Fidel is done (no for many Cubans), Bush is done, Iraq is done (well, not quite), but Obama is new (is he?) Nike, with “Just do it” and Adidas with “Impossible is Nothing” campaigns, having Mohammed Ali as a masterful simulation, were already educating Obama. Recession is new (is it?), and the unibody enclosure of my latest MacBookPro too. The new MacBookPro is as beautiful internally as it is externally, exactly like Obama’s speeches. The advertising world is way ahead of politics.

No doubts, my communist upbringing is something that belongs to my adolescent years. During my first years at University my favorite philosophers were Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Marx and Lenin were secretly becoming decoration of my thought experiments. They remained as writers I have always respected, but with whom I didn’t want to engage any longer. Later on, as a result of my interest in Heidegger, I discovered Jacques Derrida, Jean Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard y Gilles Deleuze.

It was during this time that I met Ernesto Hernandez Busto, Radamés Molina, Jorge Ferrer, Iván de la Nuez, Rolando Sánchez Mejía, Reina Maria Rodríguez, Rolando Prats y Omar Pérez. Together with many other intellectuals that were not part of my close circle of friends, a novel way of thinking was gaining force in Havana, and not just in political terms, but also in philosophical and literary terms.

Tourists will look at it as mere tropical exoticism. Some Cubans looked at it as a complete disregard to the urgent matters of Cubans basic survival needs. The reality, however, was that debating intricate issues of Cuban culture was as much food for thought as for the stomach. Anorexia of the mind and of the body were hand in hand in Cuba and they were both part of our discussion on the empty tables of our daily survival.

After fifteen years I suddenly came across Ernesto in Facebook. His intellectual interests seemed to have shifted if only slightly. The French post structuralism is in the shelves of his past. But, how to translate such “past”? Did he mean in the same way, as structuralism is part of the archive of post structuralism or modernism of postmodernism’s? How to understand this logic of the past, if there is any logic at all?

No doubts, during my life in London many things have changed regarding the way I look at philosophy. However, Ernesto and I have shared so many common interests in regards to Derrida, Baudrillard and Deleuze, that I can’t possibly imagine how his way of thinking has evolved since then.

3. From post structuralism to post philosophy.

Since my arrival to London not only did I have the chance to meet Derrida and Baudrillard in person, but even to keep regular correspondence with the first one. My fundamental questions to the philosopher since my readings of Plato up to Heidegger were: What kind of service does a philosopher give to society beyond being just a philosopher professor?

What does the death of philosophy mean considering that it has been proclaimed since Hegel and handed over from head to head to Nietzsche under the death of God, to Marx under the resurrection of the working class, to Derrida under the academic exercises of deconstruction and finally to the media under the zero degree of wisdom as a result of the endless encapsulation process of all knowledge and its cliché-prepackaged deliverance over networks of infinite data?

Philosophy today has salivary glands and our brain is a soft palate. Wisdom has become a matter of taste, caviar too ready to be consumed, to be exhausted as soon as its aroma tantalizes our noses.

Such state of affairs in philosophy meant one thing to me. I was not willing to follow Derrida’s footsteps and become a philosophy professor. I chose to be software developer and do research on computers, technology and artificial intelligence.

Nonetheless, my debt to Derrida has not been paid, my homage to the ultimate consequences of his thought, in my view, remained unchallenged. Technology and software development is not the “post” or the occupation that shelved Derrida in “the archive of my past”, as in some way might have happened to Ernesto.

Derrida could have been a fashionable philosopher for many, but the philosopher does not belong to the “fifteen minutes” of fame trend that gets weary after an interim in the intellectual catwalk. Every philosopher is a monad, in Leibnizian terms. At the same time that his/her contribution is inscribed in the historical process. It sets the scores for a new historical event that remains in a way a-historical as a result of setting in motion history itself one more time.

The best possible outlet that I have found in my search for multiple answers to these philosophical dilemmas, since my readings of Heidegger and Derrida, has been to take philosophy as an extra curriculum activity, as a passion. That passion, even when being legitimate as a profession, in my case, makes resistance to such practice and keeps searching for ways to create ideas outside working hour. There are ideas that can only be created when you force the limited time you got to a different logistic.

I always respected Derrida as an academic and the fact that he was making a living of it. However, it would not be my future, no at least so far. Ironically, such posture has been part of his own heritage. Of course, that was not only part of my controversy with him, but it was also something that troubled him too.

The status, if such is a status, of philosopher without professor’s credentials, which I believe to have, does not describe the “post” of philosophy. If there is a post is because there are many outcomes to draw out of it. My viewpoint on this matter is just one of them.

Unfortunately, when I finished my book, Lady Morphing Genius, and handed out to Derrida he was already in silence suffering from an illness. Somehow, he managed to read the book. Three months later he posted me a letter saying that he found it quite interesting, but that he did not have enough time to read it thoroughly as a result of having too many commitments. In reality, his health was deteriorating. On October the 10, 2004 the New York Time published what I considered as an undeserved obituary to him (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/obituaries/10derrida.html).

Lady Morphing Genius is not just a fiction book. It contains step-by-step instructions for an Art installation, also the script for a film adaptation and Internet broadcasting. To have the chance of making this project a reality will be a tribute to Heidegger, Derrida and Baudrillard.

It will represent my retribution to them as a sort of potlatch, the festival ceremony practice by indigenous people in North America. Or perhaps, in a more updated version, it would be like the annual Burningman gathering in the Nevada desert. Aiming to burn thoughts alive as an expression of joy for a world over-saturated with it. We should from time to time squander great ideas with no chance for negotiation, for exchanges or consolidation of a market of ideas.

Paideia could happen again one day. Right there, in Cuba, in Parque Almendares, where our gathering took place in many occasions. Or perhaps, in the desert, no precisely Nevada. Maybe, Patagonia. There, were civilization is lacking. It will have another name, another logistic.

To celebrate thought as potlatch, as Bataille’s accursed share, that is the driving force of Lady Morphing Genius. In that sense, my debt to Derrida is unpayable, non-interchangeable. I will burn it at the stake of my own “anti-Christ”. One day, right there, in Parque Almendares or Patagonia desert.

4. An ecumenopolitan experience.

I am still unclear about Penultimos Dias objectives, but I will gain more inside into it as I read more articles by others contributors. There is something, however, with which I have not yet come to terms as an immigrant. I am not referring to Cuban people in particular, but rather to all those people having their permanent home in foreign countries.

Many immigrants have the tendency no only to put too much emphasis on their cultural identities, but to create their own cultural ghettos at the heart of the city in which they have remained foreigners. This cultural insularism, which I have never shared, has brought me misunderstandings with some immigrants. My view is associated with all sort of ill-suited symptomatologies, from Ulysses’ syndrome to the renegade immigrant who has grown with apathy and coldness towards his own culture.

The misunderstanding here is double. On the one hand, even when it is true that most immigrants undergo a tough process of readjustment, the outcome of it doesn’t have to be cultural rooting out as a result of becoming multicultural. On the other hand, the debt with my birthplace, if there is any, doesn’t have to be more political than natural.

My belonging to my homeland is natural, and the fact that it looks to many immigrants as if it ought to be political is because most of them have left their countries for political reasons. Politics was imposed to me in Cuba, yet I have not let myself fall trapped of that heritage.

I have been speaking and writing exclusively in English in London for over ten years. My mother tongue almost reached the status of a dead language. However, I am still Cuban and will remain Cuban. I am also Londoner, but more than that, I am someone who do, think and is into certain things and not others, regardless of whether I am Cuban or British.

Precisely, these were the very issues brought to the discussion table in many occasions by Paideia’s gatherings in Havana. In those occasions, under the theme of cosmopolitanism. I remember the ongoing debates about origins and cultural identity as a global-local experience. I also remember the Derridian buzzword, “differance” as something which connects us all as individuals as it constantly postpones the meaning of things and words and simultaneously bring us apart creating contiguous cracks, hatches between things, between meanings and between people.

The tension of Derrida’s thought in relation to cosmopolitanism drew two extreme consequences. On the one hand, religious fundamentalism, ethnic hatred and bitterness, which put emphasis on differences and impossible reconciliation of opposing elements. On the other hand, the media machine, the over-saturated network of meaning and data, which put emphasis on differing, postponing meaning and connecting, hooking up everything to the network of a pataphysic absolute free society. Thus, democracy and liberalism face their tragic-comical cycles of falling apart and re-building themselves. Derrida would call it, deconstruction. Such conflict is still alive today, but no longer as a hot media debate, but as a cool media interface in McLuhan terms. Hot media seems today to be reduced exclusively to terrorist-cells homemade videotapes or Bin Laden mushroom sprouting speeches.

I started with Facebook a few days ago. Obviously, I did know about it, but I have never felt much enthusiastic with the whole idea of blogs and Internet communities. I have always preferred the real communities, the real gatherings. Getting both wouldn’t be too much to ask though. However, I see an organic connection between Facebook as a software framework and what we as a freshman group of intellectuals tried to create in Havana at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s.

As a software framework Facebook is accessible to the entire world and gather countless of interests and walk of life, yet it has its rules, terms and conditions. It is the ideal platform for connecting, disconnecting and creating all sorts of interactions. Such was the freedom we wanted to achieve back in Cuba, but not within the cool media of the web, but in the hot media of reality.

The gatherings organised by Paideia were diverse and eclectic. However, such diversity had as its cornerstone the Derridian “differance”, as a result first of the urgent desire of political freedom, and second of freethinking. Such was the state of affairs we wanted to promote among participants.

Nowadays, as Baudrillard often remarked, we live in a world that while in some places people still fight for all sorts of freedom, in other places people has already freed themselves of the pressures of any kind of freedom and turned indifferent due to the over-saturation of choices, which simultaneously they keep craving and abhorring.

Most people in those places (London, for instance) don’t want the burden of having to choose. They lottery their way into most decisions. They exchange their freedom for security and control. In the spirit of the film, The Matrix, there are fields, endless fields, where ideas are no longer born. They are grown; but they are not underground, as the film would have it.

They are invisible threat of morphine-shots permanently embedded to our brain and coming straight on from the billboard adverts and the countless screens of the cities. From our TVs at home, from our iPod, iPhone and iSleep. Feeding all of us, making of us comatose zombies.

These “magnetic” fields of data, as networks of information, liquefy the vitality of any new idea so that it could be fed intravenously to the living. This is freedom in a face-off match with security and control. It is a win-win situation, but in the middle of it, out of nowhere, a suicide-bomber just drops by. Welcome to the party! Was him invited? Let’s get back to cutting off freedom. Cute paradoxes of freedom.

As part of the rhythmical cycles of the network of data, the indifference towards freedom gets to be shaken no less than the security and control that societies impose over their citizens. Everything seems regulated and part of the big scheme of things, even deregulation itself. Darwin seemed to insinuate that nature has its own trick under its sleeves, well our global economy too.

Nothing seems to be left outside of this pac-man greedy machinery called civilization whose double is its very anorexic condition, paired as a binary tweedledum-tweedledee digit, on and off, dancing in rhythmical interval from its own iPod station.

Those are too the challenges of Cuba’s future. Those challenges can be dealt with, right today, as we make the most of now. Cuba has to welcome itself to the party of this global disaster we are struggling to drive off shore and find answers together with the rest of the world.

Aren’t Obama and his election plugged to this iPod station too? We citizens of the world need him, desire him, created him. It is part of the cycle, the Nietzschean eternal return at its best. I would have voted for him full of joy, irony apart, but with my humor very present. It is, however, a serious matter to vote for him. Still, my humor will shake hands with him.

We should marvel at this truly amazing machine that we are! But such marvel is precisely what urge for a call, for a careful attention and responsibility. Otherwise, we will get back to stardust and start all over again. Because, maybe one day whether by accident or not, our disappearance from the planet might be programmed, and nobody will object to it, be it because of a basic misunderstanding between what is real and what is virtual or because nobody will care any longer even for life. In which case, our gene pool would have vanished by its own accord, by natural exhaustion like it had happened to other species.

The gatherings organised by Paidiea promoted freedom, but at the same time open a Pandora box of debates about the naive assumption of freedom. To be free is not a universal human condition, as many people might believe. If Cubans have wanted economical and political freedom it is not precisely because it is an abstract condition of humanity that should be granted and implemented across the planet as the French, the Russian Revolution and now the current American government would have it.

There are today societies, and not just in the Middle East, that do not understand, are not ready and unwilling to implement the democratic and liberal values that the leaders of our global economy are so much devoted to. We, Cubans have wanted freedom because we rather make mistake trying to achieve it than to carry on being submitted and told how to achieve it. Cubans are not exceptional as a result of the revolution but due to the unique potential every nation has to generate individuals and societies that are caught in exceptional circumstances. There is nothing exceptional in being Cuban, no more than the names our passports have stamped.

In the same cord, I do not share the parochial-partisan position that has become a natural trend among not only immigrants, but also “nationals”. It doesn’t really awaken the local in its connection with the global, but the purely ethnic against the ecumenopolitan as defined by Constantino Doxiadis.

In architectonic terms to have an ekistic mentality in a world where the internet and screens are pervasive, specially with platforms like Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Delicious and Flickr (Web 2.0 phenomenon, AJAX evangelists and Rich Desktop Applications), is to share your ethnicity in quite a different way, or rather in an ecumenopolitan way.

Such ecumenopolitan experience is precisely what makes me feel post Cuban without actually stopping being Cuban. In other words, I have left behind (if that seemed to be the case) the poststructuralist thinkers no less than having left behind my insular condition as Cuban.

Ulysses Alvarez
London