Cuba, Freedom (and freedom)
In the third installment of Erroll Morris’s fascinating essay on the history and historical veracity of two photographs taken during the Crimean war, we find this wonderful quote from one of Morris’s interlocutors — “Certainly the more information we get, the higher the level of ignorance seems to be.” I couldn’t agree more. Beyond a certain point, the amount of information available to us becomes overwhelming. We cease to be able to discern what’s imporant.
It’s for this reason that I have a certain nostalgia for the idea of Cuba. I’ve never been there, but it seems that along with his willful limitation of personal and political freedoms Fidel has kept Cuba constrained in a bubble of simplicity. People have less to process. Life takes on an easier pace. People appreciate what they have all the more for what they don’t have. Now that Castro’s rein seems close to an end, and his brother Raul seems set to pick up where Fidel left off, but not exactly, we look on and wonder whether the bubble will burst.
My daughter has been writing a High School paper on whether and how the ideals of the enlightenment have been upheld or betrayed in Cuba over the past thirty years. It’s been fairly straightforward for her to research and list the various freedoms that have been withheld from the Cuban people. But it got me wondering about freedom. I asked her if the history teacher had assigned anyone the task of writing the same essay about the United States. He hadn’t.
Which of the ideals of the enlightenment have been upheld or betrayed in this country over the past thirty years? United States citizens and permanent residents (such as myself) do have certain important rights and freedoms (some of them that squeaked in quite close to that 30 year boundary!!) but in certain important and insidious ways I believe our freedoms are restricted.
If we sit back and think about how the forces of government and economics shape and constrain our lives, we start to feel somewhat less free. We elect a government, but the political parties are increasingly constrained by the forces of economics and political exigency… which are in turn constrained by economics. And we get to choose what we do with our lives, but unless those choices fall into some pretty neat buckets we’re going to have a hard time of it.
I’m not defending Castro’s abuses. But I’m just trying to get to the heart of the idea of freedom. Isn’t a large part of freedom the feeling of ease that one gets when one doesn’t feel beseiged? And in America today aren’t we beseiged by information, by images and expectations, by fears and constraints?
(And I’m not even touching on the encroachments on the right to privacy and right to liberty and right to fair treatment meted out by the Bush administration. Ironic for Bush to lecture Cuba on freedoms. But that’s another story.)
I watched The Age of Innocence last weekend — Martin Scorcese’s rendering of Edith Wharton’s novel of the constraining customs of New York society. As one character points out, she had thought that people came to New York to escape the restrictions of European society, and is surprised to find out that the restrictions, if anything, are subtler but more pronounced.
To sum it up, perhaps, the kind of freedom I’m talking about is that enjoyed at its fullest by the young child who knows nothing of expectations or correctness or obligation. It’s the freedom to take off all your clothes and play with your toy trains while the world around you teeters on in fear and uncertainty.
Tags: bush, castro, cuba, enlightenment, fidel-castro, freedom, philosophy, raul-castro, scorsese