The anti-leftist leftists on “travel snobs”

I just had another look at the notorious Harry’s Place after at least a week of not having much computer time and there having been not too many political issues to write about (except for my concern about “integration” about which I might write a bit later this weekend insha Allah). Harry’s Place, for anyone who hasn’t seen it before, is an ostensibly left-wing blog which shows a number of the same characteristics of the neo-con blogs, right down to the insults (the LGF favourite “moonbat” is one they use regularly). This week they’ve been having a go at what they call “travel snobs” (commenting on a post here), namely people who derive some pleasure from how different Cuba is for the lack of American influence, and miss that difference when it’s gone (as with eastern Europe).

Now, I don’t think I need to tell anyone I’m not a communist, and even some of those who are communists have noticeably gone off Castro in recent years due to the recent apparent downturn in the human rights situation there. (I say ‘apparent’ because the human rights situation has never been all that great.) But isn’t it understandable that people want to see it before it gets turned into yet another identikit Latin American cheap holiday resort? Or worse, into a disaster zone like Haiti?

I’ve always been puzzled by the malice Americans have towards Cuba. One would have thought that the USA could have effected “regime change” on the island at any time since 1989, but have chosen not to do so. Perhaps this is because they know they could expect a fight? Perhaps the Cubans don’t want their country turned into the Dominican Republic or Ecuador? Perhaps because the world would expect them to install a democracy, when all they would really want to to install is a puppet regime (possibly led by one of Batista’s family)? Perhaps the locals like the fact that, should they make it to Florida, they can stay – a privilege not extended to vastly poorer Haitians or other Latin Americans.

The “travel snobs”, Harry alleges, are just selfish. They want the people in those countries to live in a time warp just so that they can enjoy it. As an example, Harry mentions a poem lamenting the decline of langos (Hungarian junk food) and the upsurge of Burger Kings and McDonald’s in the same country. The young, he says, loved it, and so did many of the older generation – not because of the food so much as that this was part of “normal” life in Europe:

Kids in Frankfurt and Manchester could hang out at BK and now so could kids in Krakow or Bucharest. I remember when McDonalds came to Burnley in the early eighties and how we all simply had to go there and try out a shake and there certainly was something unexplicably exciting about it.

I remember when McDonald’s came to Aberystwyth in the mid-1990s and it caused a lot of local controversy. They opened up their joint out of town at the end of Boulevard St Brieuc, and people feared that it would suck the life out of the town. And as for black and white tellies in 1989, well, it was well into the 1980s that our family got a colour TV.

Of course, an inflow of foreign culture was inevitable, and perhaps the decline of langos was as welcome as the decline of McDonald’s or Burger King would be. I certainly wouldn’t miss the litter, the traffic jams caused whenver their articulated trucks stop outside a branch to drop off supplies (I’ve seen this more than once in New Malden), and the foul smell which follows whenever someone brings fast food onto a bus or train (the thought of this makes me queasy as I type this). Harry doesn’t tell us whether the langos-loving poet was Hungarian or foreign, but perhaps his real complaint was not just that a few McDonald’s joints opened, but so many, and the local food was getting pushed out.

And there were a few less welcome western imports as well, like fascism and racism, which in some (but not all) east European countries had had a lid kept on it under communism, and organised crime, which became a particular problem in Russia. I remember how much hope there was when communism collapsed across eastern Europe. Nobody expected that Russia would turn into the country it became under Yeltsin, with the corrupt utility sell-offs and organised crime, and the ongoing slide back to dictatorship under Putin. Neither did anyone expect the rise of dictatorships in central Asia. Turkmenistan was thought to be a likely site for an Islamic revival, rather than for a personality-cult dictatorship led by, as Haroon of avari/nameh put it, “perhaps the Muslim world’s most indefatigable retard”.

In any case, those countries which might have expected to become western democracies had it not been for the German and Russian occupations (or had already become such before 1938) have indeed become democracies. On the other hand, Belarus slid rapidly back into dictatorship, and Ukraine has narrowly avoided the same fate. One can’t expect that those with an interest in getting rid of Castro, and the ability to do it, have any interest in promoting real democracy there (particularly given the recent controversies in the US’s own elections). They will want to reverse the gains, not just the losses, made under Castro.

Besides which, Cuba is far from the only country whose economy is in a time warp. Never mind talk of Cubans buying Fords – they probably already do, but as in many third-world countries, they are old Fords. In capitalist third-world countries there are an awful lot of European and American hand-me-downs still in use. Tourist guides I read in the early 1990s mentioned that hand-cranked cars were still in use in Montevideo; Fiats from the 70s are still being made in Egypt, and the same with old Ford Cargo trucks in India (being made by Ashok Leyland, owned by Iveco). “Opening up” Cuba is likely to turn it into another third-world country with a “free market”; fair trade is really not on the agenda. However unpleasant Castro might be, you might ask who is going to benefit before cheering on any American effort to remove him.