Bruce Douglas Reeves, Author

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Cuba, Sartre, and Justice

2/18/2015

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Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader, former Speaker of the House, is leading a Congressional delegation to Cuba.  It’s about time, after more than sixty years, that the leaders of our two nations communicated face to face.  It’s not enough, but it’s a start.  Other countries have not been so hostile to post-revolution Cuba.

            Soon after the Cuban revolution against the dictator Fulgencio Baptista, Jean-Paul Sartre visited Cuba.  The French author was eager to meet Castro and to see for himself what was happening in the country.

            “I can’t stand injustice,” Castro told him, when asked about what pushed him to revolution.

            This may be the best explanation for many, or even most, revolutions around the world.  Certainly, it is said to have been the rationale for our own revolution.  We remember “no taxation without representation” and similar cries from our history books, but seem unable to accept the same idea in other countries.  As Sartre pointed out after his visit, under Baptista and his American Mafia cronies, Cuba was ruled by corruption.  Today, a room in the famous Hotel Nacional in Havana is full of mementos from this era.  It may be a curiosity to today’s tourists, but it was hard reality to the Cubans of the nineteen-fifties.

In Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had been legitimately elected Prime Minister in 1951, was deposed in a 1953 coup engineered by the United States and Britain to protect the oil interests.  The new Shah that they installed quickly became a dictator.  The corruption of the Shah and the Pahlavi family and the resulting widespread poverty drove the people toward revolution.  The religious leaders seemed to be the only ones capable of unifying the country enough to overthrow the Shah and his ruthless regime. 

The results of both revolutions were not ideal, but with understanding and support from the West they might have worked out differently—for the peoples of those countries and for the world.  However, the Western leaders of the time had other ideas. 

In India, as Sartre also pointed out, Gandhi originally wanted to get rid of the caste system.  This eventually led to an effort to escape from the grip of the British Empire.  No longer was India content to be “the jewel in the crown,” funneling its riches to Great Britain. The famous nonviolent revolution led to the partition between India and Pakistan and the resulting violence between Hindus and Muslims.  India since then has been muddling along, part of it gradually prospering, much of it still plagued by great poverty, while continuing poverty has largely turned Pakistan into an armed camp of angry men unable to care for their families.  Increasingly, they blamed the West for their miseries, with the horrors of violence again a result. 

The recent television mini-series, “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” makes dramatically clear how the economic injustice that led to the Great Depression almost took this country into another revolution.  Only Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts to get people back to work and redistribute the wealth of the nation prevented the millions of suffering Americans from turning to violence.

Now, we may be at another such turning point.  Recent statistics show that more half of the children in the United States attending public schools live in poverty and don’t get enough to eat.  Some of our leaders are trying to guide the country toward economic justice for everyone, but others seem to be committed to preserving the rights of the rich and powerful.  What would Gandhi, Roosevelt, Castro, or Sartre say to this?  And what will be the outcome?

 


Bruce Douglas Reeves, author of DELPHINE, link HERE
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Travel, War, and Violence

2/5/2015

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Travel these days often brings us up against the violence that’s such a part of the human story.  We may start out admiring scenery, cathedrals and mosques, palaces and treasure-filled museums, and ancient stones that speak of long ago lives, but inevitably we’re confronted with the facts of violence and war. 

The violence may have been in the distant past or very recent.  When my wife and I first visited London, the city still showed scars from World War II.  Walking out the Strand, we passed two of Christopher Wren’s little churches that were still empty black shells from the Blitz.  Farther afield, we saw the remains of factories and warehouses bombed during the war.  Today, the East End and Docklands are London’s hot new districts, spectacular modern structures rising where  bombed docks and warehouses stood as reminders of the most horrible war in history.

When we visited divided Berlin a few years later, we knew that the shiny modern buildings of the western sector stood where the old city had been bombed.  On the main drag of Kurfurstendamm, the blackened central tower of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, destroyed in 1943, still stands as a reminder of the war.  On the other side of Checkpoint Charlie, when we explored East Berlin and Museum Island, we saw countless bullet scars on the old stone buildings.  The great empty square of Alexanderplatz, once the busy heart of prewar Berlin, told its own story of total war.

All across the Soviet Union, we encountered memorials to The Great Patriotic War, as the Russians still call World War II.  It’s almost impossible for us to grasp the carnage the USSR suffered.  The 872 day siege of Leningrad killed some 1.2 million people, the siege of Stalingrad at least 1.4 million.  Huge areas of those cities are filled with Soviet-era apartment blocks, hideous but necessary to house the homeless millions after the war.  When we visited Minsk, now the capital of Belarus, we saw almost no buildings from before the war.  The USSR as a whole lost at least 20,000,000 people.    

Warsaw and Gdansk in Poland also were flattened during the war, although both cities have been rebuilt, sometimes superficially reproducing the outward appearance of the old cities.  The facades, we discovered, may be copied from old photographs, but step through the door and you’re in a modern building. 

When we visited Egypt in1997, we stopped to look at the temple of the great female pharaoh, Hatshepsut.  The next day, a group of Egyptian militants massacred 58 foreign tourists and several others trapped in the same temple.  The attack was carried out by a group that hoped to destroy the tourism-based economy and build anti-government feeling.  We were accompanied by armed soldiers for the rest of the trip. 

Back in Cairo, I ventured out on my own, exploring the narrow streets of the old city, leaving behind my camera and trying to blend in with everyone else.  I felt quite safe, wandering among the neighborhood people, street vendors, and shops.  The holes in the pavement seemed more dangerous than any human beings.  During the years since then, the Egyptian tourist industry has been devastated, contributing to increasingly violent social and political unrest and aggravating the conflict between religious conservatives and more liberal secularists. 

During the weeks we spent exploring Syria a few years ago, we fell in love with the people and country.  Although huge menacing posters of the president loomed everywhere, the people we met were welcoming, generous, and honest about their lives.  When we visited the once beautiful city of Hama, we saw lingering evidence of the massacre of 1981, when 25,000 died when Hafez-al-Assad put down an uprising.  Since the recent rebellion against his son began in 2011, many of the historic and cultural treasures we visited have been destroyed or badly damaged, including UNESCO World Heritage Sites such as ancient Palmyra and Aleppo’s vast covered souk and great Citadel, and countless human lives lost and ruined. 

While visiting eastern Turkey, we met Kurd refugees who had fled Iraq just to the south.  They and their children didn’t mix with the Turkish Kurds and the children weren’t allowed into the schools because they didn’t speak Turkish.  Several times a day, groups of low-flying planes roared past overhead.

“They’re going to Iraq,” we were told.  “From a U.S. airbase near here.”

What could we say? 

When we spent three weeks in Ukraine in October 1913, we heard many times that people were unhappy about the widespread corruption and the income gap between those in power and everyone else.  We certainly saw evidence of both, but didn’t expect the dramatic protests that soon erupted.  Now, the Crimea has been wrenched away from Ukraine and pro-Russian rebels are trying to rip apart the country further.

Today, there are no guarantees anywhere.  In our time, almost every city we’ve visited – from Mumbai to London to New York City, to Damascus and Rangoon and most recently Paris -- has experienced violence, ranging from bombs in subways to attacks on hotels to random shootings. 

Exploring the world is becoming a series of close calls, but maybe if people continue traveling and meeting each other and communicating, and then go home and tell what they’ve seen and learned, these exchanges can help bring understanding and eventually peace.

 
 

"Delphine," set in the war-torn Middle East
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    Author


          I've been writing at least since age seven, making up stories before that, and exploring the world almost as long as I can remember.  This blog is mostly about writing and traveling -- for me the perfect life. 
          Please Bookmark my blog, so you won't miss any posts.
          My most recent book is DELPHINE, winner of the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize.        Recently, my first novel, THE NIGHT ACTION, has been republished by Automat Press as an e-book, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other sources.  CLICK here to buy THE NIGHT ACTION e-book.

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