Fidel[ity]
There was a picture in the paper about a week ago. Fidel Castro and a man named Nong Duc Manh locked in a passionate embrace
Castro Meets Vietnamese Official - washingtonpost.com. I saw a couple of versions of this picture, some were simply standard pose'n shakes, but I do like the one where they are hugging. Truly a picture is worth a thousand words. It's often better that way. Nong Duc Manh is the communist party chief of Vietnam and was in havana not only to express communist comradeship, but to work out the details of an oil field exploration and management deal. Co-incidently a few days after reading that article and while that image still hung before my eyes I read a short story (very short) by Andrew Pham Gift's which relates two brief narrated intervals one in Saigon one in Havana
WorldCat: Gifts (if you have any sort of access to ebsco host or the like you should be able to drill through this to a pdf otherwise: Pham, Andrew X. "Gifts." The American Scholar. 71.3 (2002): 93.
). In this story, for people who already know of his superb travelogue memoir Catfish and Mandala, you learn that he eventually does find his childhood friend Hoa. The significance here is the implicit comparison of Cuba with Vietnam. At some point I will have to go back and dedicate a post here on Atomized Jr. to Catfish and Mandala, which was a tremendous book. I read that book in a strange fashion; sections in quick bursts, then I would set it down and think about things for a while. Because there was thinking to be done. Soon after I read another piece not disimilar to the portrait Pham painted of Cuba, this one in Prospect
Witness: 'A Cuban death rehearsal' by Bella Thomas. The main point of that piece is that Castro's extended and probably exaggerated illness is simply a way of testing his ability to pull off an ordered regime turnover to his brother. Which is proof if needed that all he ever accomplished is to set up a rundown kingdom or chieftency not a revolution. For that matter I've read that most of the characters in the Vietnamese communist politburo are children or other relatives of the folk which have been there since '75 if not '54. Thomas' piece was also billed as a cautionary tale for those inspired to view Cuba through a soft focus romantic lens either as a socialist paradise or an eden untouched by globalism. Besides Venezualia is the New Cuba anyway. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the time of communist governments was supposed to be winding down not adjusting and winding up. Communist regimes are bad, this is the word on Bush's say so in a speech at a world leaders summit
Bush honors victims of communist regimes - Yahoo! News. There are others cynics, and doubters who debate this now
Bush Is Losing Credibility On Democracy, Activists Say - washingtonpost.com. Not only U S's continuing use of that bully pulpit, but even the free market as the road to freedom
An Unexpected Odd Couple: Free Markets and Freedom - New York Times. Lost in the tideless wash of an exhausted neo-Wilsonian world view. I make a distinction between the realm of the politicaly feasable, the realm of moral imperative. Viewing them as reasonably separate and distinct. In a way that my friend Tran does not. Specifically to what we were and were not prepared to do in Vietnam. Hold a line with 500,000 troops at the DMZ in misguided hope that a stable functioning government would form in the south behind us? While we were simultaniously withdrawing all decision making potential and authority from them into our own monolith embassy. Leaving them dependent with little or no ability to take or effect responsibilty for their own affairs, driving them to the margins of their own society. Or invade the north, either taking Hanoi or breaking the NVA in a set-piece campaign. The realities of the cold war probably precluded the former and experience and ability of the NVA likely the latter. If I try to tell her that by 1969 few in positions of authority in this country, now her country also, thought that war was "winnable". She becomes upset and waves her hand and tells me "that's just politics." That I ought to know better - things in that realm are suborned to the good, to what is right. In the days after the fall of SaiGon, I probably just got on the bus and put in another day in school, zeroed out another algebra quiz. Tran and her whole family were put in prison, her father for the next six years. Enemies of the state. She, her mother, sister and brother during that time subsisting on millet rice without a formal place to live, formal license to work for their living, or schooling. Tran's father has been writing out a memoir of sorts, so she has been talking to him about those years. The ordeal of the end of the Vietnamese war has not been commented about much. In the Vietnamese community within the family, within organizations dedicated to social work of those left behind, the struggle left behind. Other than that, well, there were lives to rebuild work to be done, and it didn't seem as though anyone else cared to hear of troubles they preferred to forget. When I first came to the University of Maryland there was a Vietnamese groundskeeper who wore a hat of a type I recalled as being an ARVN campaign hat. He wore it while he rode a lawnmower up and down the length of McKeldin mall. He was cheerful and always said hello to passing students, but if he had a story to tell I never asked to hear it. I saw a small article in the Washington Post a few weeks ago folded deep inside the metro section
Conference Explores Needs of Seniors Haunted by Past - washingtonpost.com. George Mason University in Fairfax Virginia held a conference out of their Center for the Advancement of Public Health together with Boat People SOS, a Falls Church-based advocacy group for Vietnamese immigrants which focuses on the lives and hardships of the now aging generation of those who fled after the fall. To put together stories and account for the costs.
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