Notes from a small island A weblog by Jonathan Ali |
Monday, July 07, 2003 “The Cuban economy, now incapable of selling sugar, tobacco or coffee at any reasonable price, now sells the nostalgia of the revolution, mixed into a cocktail of insulting clichés about sensuality and island ‘pleasures’. It is seen in all the morbid, anthropological clap-trap about Cuba being ‘a different community’ that resists the horrors of the consumption society. Cuba has become a mono-exporting backwater of tourist symbols that appeal to a certain sector of the western public… In their trips to Havana, travellers of that ilk seek, as Levi-Strauss says, to expiate the guilt they feel as ‘creatures of the consumption society’. The thing is they expiate their western guilt by compulsively devouring myths and nostalgia of a revolution that has burnt itself out.” - Owen Thompson, from an excellent essay entitled “Out of the labyrinth?” in this month’s Trinidad & Tobago Review, out today (and not available online). posted by Jonathan | 1:02 PM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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