Otherjones.com: Thom Hartmann on Russian TV and Fidel Castro’s Childhood Memoir

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Thom Hartmann on Russian TV and Fidel Castro’s Childhood Memoir

A faithful listener to public television, I only recently discovered where MIND TV’s Russian channel, RT, is located. I noticed the native English language news anchors, but one thing I didn’t expect to find on RT was our own Thom Hartmann. He hosts an hour-long program called - hallelujah! - ‘The Big Picture’!

My congratulations to Thom, who deserves a real life tv studio all to himself. But I find it of even greater interest that it is the Russians who have given it to him. Is there a faction in Russia’s TV world that supports the opposition by giving a platform to an American who is against the economic and social policies that Putin has imported?

But there could be something else going on here. I’ve often mentioned that the Russians and the Chinese, due to their long communal tradition, are much more interested in seeing a world government , while American leaders fear it. Perhaps Thom has been given an impressive pulpit in order to also further the cause of American voters desperate to see their government cease being the world’s policeman in a world where humans have become the tools of money. What a twofer!

The second part of my story is culled from the BBC news. Starting yesterday, they have reported that the eighty-five year old father of the Cuban Revolution presented a thousand-page memoir ranging from his childhood and youth to 1958, the year before he ousted the American-backed dictator Batista. Yet neither yesterday nor today did the BBC note that the 21st International Cuban Book Fair starts in a few days, and is devoted to the countries of the Caribbean. Knowing how the Cubans do things (I was present at last year’s book fair) I can well imagine that the writers and other cultural figures invited to the fair will have been on hand for the launch of Fidel’s memoir.

Apparently, that’s not news. Anymore than the Puerto Rican independence movement, or the fact that the PLO has an ambassador, whom I met last year, and who divides his time between several Caribbean islands, including the one we own.

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The alternative press is replete with despair and ‘hope’, neither of which is helpful. ‘Squawking’ may alleviate some of the pain Americans experience at being identified with a government that brutalizes Others at will, but it doesn’t change the ‘facts on the ground’. As for hope, it is an easy cop-out: in the present state of the world, we can never be certain that tomorrow will come. Whether a barefoot child in Africa or a hedge-fund manager, all of us are the potential victims of hubris.

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Born in Philadelphia, I studied in Paris, became a French citizen by marriage, debuted at Agence France Presse in Rome, then, as Deena Boyer, followed Fellini’s creative process for The Two Hundred Days of ’81/2’. The proceeds from this book enabled me travel to Cuba to to interview Fidel Castro for a major French weekly, meeting with him again a week after the Kennedy assassination and several times in 1964 for a book, Cuba 1964: When the Revolution was Young, in which the other members of the government (including Che Guevara, Raul Castro and Celia Sanchez), tell in their own words why they made the revolution. My Cuba archive is on-line at Duke University.

In the seventies, I did graduate work in Global Survival, taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and was a speech writer in the Carter State Department, publishing an article on U.S.-Soviet relations in the in-house journal in 1976.

Returning to Paris in 1981, with assistance from the Centre National du Livre, I published Une autre Europe, un autre Monde, the only book that foresaw the reunification of Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union. I returned to Philadel-phia in 2000, and have been a contributor and senior editor at various on-line journals.

A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness hopes to change the way both seekers and skeptics look at good and evil - -and at the daunting problems of the 21st century. It shows that religious belief is not necessary to achieve serenity, but that awareness of the sacred as confirmed by modern science, is. It does this by viewing the world as a system and exploring what that means for the role of politics.

America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World is a primer for Americans and others who find the policies of successive US governments difficult to square with their image of the country and its founding documents. The decades I spent living on both sides of the Iron Curtain provided me with a unique awareness of America’s image abroad and of the mainstream media’s failure to convey news and ideas to the voters in whose name policies are carried out. References to work by other political writers illustrate little-known or forgotten features of American history that have contributed to the tragic face the country presents today.

Cuba 1964 provides the definitive answer to the question: “Was Fidel Castro a Communist before he carried out the revolution, or did he become one because of the way the United States reacted when he ousted pro-US dictator Fulgencio Batista? While following day by day events, I had extensive conversations with the men and women who had joined the Castro brothers as early as 1953 and were now members of the revolutionary government. Together with Fidel, Raul, Che and Celia Sanchez, they told me in their own words why and now they made the Revolution hat continues to inspire countries in Latin America and around the world. The text is illustrated with photographs from my black and white archive which can be seen on-line at Duke University.

Lunch with Fellini Dinner with Fidel: How did it happen that a fourteen year old American girl found herself living among the French in post-war Paris? The answer to that question also explains why I went on to live in half a dozen countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, becoming mutti-lingual, writing first about the cinema, then about ‘the big picture’ while raising two children, mostly on my own. A religious grandmother and a hedonistic lover accompanied me on a journal which has been both spiritual and political, and is illustrated by many photographs from my personal album.

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Thom Hartmann on Russian TV and Fidel Castro’s Childhood Memoir

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