A Quote by Ben Rhodes
To the developing world, Cuba has been a symbol of sovereignty and resistance and a supporter of revolution - for good or bad. From the Missile Crisis to the anti-apartheid movement, from the Kennedys to Obama era, this small island has put itself at the center of world events.
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I'm thinking about some developments say in the 80s when the anti-apartheid movement began to claim more support and strength within the US. Black trade unionists played a really important role in developing this US anti-apartheid movement.
Cuba has become a symbol of courageous resistance to attack. Since 1959, Cuba has been under attack from the hemispheric superpower.
Cuba continues to be a source of instability in the region. For example, historic numbers of people are fleeing the island of Cuba, putting migratory pressure on the United States. Number two, this Cuban government is anti-American. They sponsor - they allow the Chinese and the Russians to conduct espionage, electronic espionage and others from the island of Cuba.
You have 60 countries in the world with a terrorist problem. That's two-thirds of the world. We have this group in Basilan, which is a small island in the far south of the Philippines, and the island itself has a population of - what? - 300,000.
Works like 'Brave New World' and 'The Handmaiden's Tale' develop their atmosphere from a movement or a revolution, as if the world has ended and has come out to this other side. When I wrote 'The Bad Batch,' I thought that the world outside the gates that confine the 'bad' characters is simply our world today.
An Old World revolution is only a movement around a motionless center; it never breaks out of the circle. Firm in the center is belief in Authority.
First as a peace activist in the late '60s, then as a political activist in the '70s, and then in joining the armed clandestine resistance movement that was developing in the '80s, I am guilty of revolutionary and anti-imperialist resistance.
It is popular to call it a crisis of the Western world. It is in fact a crisis of the whole world. Communism, which claims to be a solution of the crisis, is itself a symptom and an irritant of the crisis.
There is a reason why Nelson Mandela went to Cuba to praise Castro and thank the Cuban people almost as soon as he got out of jail. That's a third world reaction and they understand it. Cuba played an enormous role in the liberation of Africa and the overthrow of Apartheid, sending doctors and teachers to the poorest places in the world, to Haiti, to Pakistan after the earthquake, almost everywhere. The internationalism is just astonishing. I don't think there has been anything like it in history.
In some ways, [the student anti-sweatshop movement] is like the anti-apartheid movement, except that in this case its striking at the core of the relations of exploitation. Much of this was initiated by Charlie Kernaghan of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights.
I have a personal staff that helps me scour the internet and other media for the latest scientific peer-reviewed findings, the latest examples of climate-related extreme weather events, and the latest examples of progress. The world is in the midst of a sustainability revolution that has the scope of the industrial revolution, but with the speed of the digital revolution. That's not enough without new laws and the right kind of political leadership. But it does give us a base from which to build a movement that will save us from the most catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis.
I've seen terrorism close up, but I don't live in a state of terror at all. I'm comfortable going to the Manhattan Thanksgiving Day Parade, the tree lighting at Rockefeller Center, Times Square on New Years Eve. For perspective, the world today is a safer place than it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Berlin Airlift, World War II.
The gay rights movement of recent years has been an inspiring victory for humanity and it is in the tradition of the civil rights movement when I was a young boy in the South, the women's suffrage movement when my mother was a young woman in Tennessee, the abolition movement much farther back, and the anti-apartheid movement when I was in the House of Representatives. All of these movements have one thing in common: the opposition to progress was rooted in an outdated understanding of morality.
A missile is a missile. It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a missile fired from the Soviet Union or from Cuba.
It's nice to know there's a big world with many perspectives. I tend to get so stuck in my own small world easily, and going out into the world reminds me that I'm not the center of the world - in a good way.
Most people give Kennedy a passing grade, a good grade on the Cuban Missile Crisis handling, but what they don't realize, if he had had strength, if he had showed strength before, there would never have been a Cuban Missile Crisis.
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