Obama and the Empire: Fidel Castro

 
Obama and the Empire
Fidel Castro
Publisher’s Note
The main lines of US politics never change abruptly, not even when control of the presidency and the two chambers of Congress moves from one party to the other. This fact has been proven historically. But there has never been an opportunity to see how another type of politician—one who doesn’t fit the traditional male, white, Anglo- Saxon and generally Protestant model—would adapt himself or herself to fill that role. This opportunity has arisen with the election to the US presidency of Barack Obama.
Due to the racial and gender discrimination that exists in US society, the possibility of an African American or a woman being elected to the presidency could only be imagined after the extraordinary decade of social struggles of the 1960s: a decade of struggles for civil rights of African Americans, for women’s liberation, for the social acceptance of the counterculture, against the Vietnam War and many other social movements. That is why there has been a tendency to consider the election of an African American or a woman as president as something progressive in itself. This notion was reinforced by symbolic presidential campaigns, such as those of Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, that were initiated largely for mass education and mobilization purposes.
The deepening of the economic, social and moral crisis of the United States turned the miracle into reality. So much damage to the credibility of the political system was inherited from the presidencies of Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) to George W. Bush (2001-2009) that, since it was impossible to change the politics of the system, it became necessary to change the type—or stereotype—of the person in charge of carrying out that policy. Therefore, for the first time in history, in the 2008 presidential campaign, the real possibility emerged of an African American (Barack Obama) or a white woman (Hillary Clinton) being elected to the highest office in the United States. So it was that Obama was elected as the Democratic presidential candidate and then as president, but it could have been Hillary Clinton. S it turned out, the miracle became reality, but not how the sixties generation dreamed of it.
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