George Rebane

I recently finished reading two important essays.  The first was “America’s Ruling Class—And the Perils of Revolution,” by Angelo M. Codevilla.  This essay was an eye-opener in how it summarized and knit together the things that we have all witnessed happening to our country over the last several decades.  I filled the margins of this piece with notes and links to happenings and experiences.  I was going to post on Codevilla’s piece, but Martin Light on the CABPRO Report beat me to it.  Please take the time to go there and read his excellent introduction (here), and then download the pdf itself to see to which American class you belong.  I found myself firmly in the ‘country class’.

“Know this well: our ignorance, our underdevelopment, is paid for with freedom.”  – Fidel Castro, speaking with students at the University of Havana, September 1970.   Compare this with Jefferson’s ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’

The second essay I read motivates the title of this post.  ‘Freedom and Exchange in Communist Cuba’ is written by Yoani Sanchez who lives in Cuba where she maintains what must be a surreptitious blog called Generación Y.   The essay outlines the political and social history of Cuba from 1959, when Fidel and the boys came down from the mountains and threw out Batista.  She goes into lucid detail to show how bit by piece the Cuban people, over a two year span, traded their freedoms promised by the revolution for a new and irrevocable form of dictatorship.

Her writing is eloquent, every other paragraph contains a profundity suitable for the marble cornerstone of a public building or monument – ‘… it is much easier to redistribute wealth than to create it …”, “To demand individual freedoms was to loudly declare one’s selfishness.”.

What struck me most was her analysis of how the socialist system proceeded rapidly into communism, and how that system then subverted the best intentions and abilities of people to recoup their freedoms and society.  This type of subversion is intrinsic to all forms of collectivism and rises in and of itself.  It is self-starting, self-promoting, and self-maintaining, even within such an inefficient system of governance.  All it requires is ignorant people to trade in their freedoms in advance for a promise of future utopia.

And as you read Sanchez’s words, you cannot help but start drawing the analogs to what is happening around us.  The one-to-one correspondence of the path we are on is striking.  The Cato Institute makes this essay available in monograph form and online here.

Finally, what conclusion can we draw from the dribs and drabs the ruling class sprinkles over an unreliably liberal Nevada County?