[LINK] Cuba and Canada

[rfmcdonald]

The October 2005 issue of the Literary Review of Canada features three essays describing Cuba's engagement with Canada in specific and the wider world in general: John M. Kirk and Peter McKenna's "A Special Relationship," Juan Antonio Blanco's "Demanding Decency," and Paul Knox' "A Sumptuous Cultural Past." Kirk and McKenna note that Canada and Cuba have had an intimate trading relationship dating to the 18th century, and that Canadian realpolitik since the 1960s has consistently supported the continued independence and peaceful reform of Cuba. Blanco, for his part, argues that the pervasive human rights violations suffered by Cubans, especially but not only open dissidents, under the Castro regime requires Canada to criticize these human rights violations, to demand that the Cuban state treat its citizens with a certain amount of basic decency. Knox, writing the final essay of the Literary Review's triptych, outdoes the rest with his description of a Cuba with a rich cultural heritage profoundly divided on their country's response to the United States (emulative and friendly, autonomous and hostile, elements of both attitudes). Knox's Cuba is a Cuba profoundly divided about its identity at the most profound levels. It may yet muddle through, granted, but muddling's hardly ideal.