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Ricardo Alarcón
“What planet are you from, anyway?” responded the Guantanamero to the insistent question posed by someone who apparently did not believe there were schools, libraries, teachers, doctors, and nurses there who offered their services to everyone free of charge, as they have been doing for several decades in Cuba. This anecdote, mentioned in Sicko, Michael Moore’s latest documentary, describes what many, in one way or another, have experienced in the course of nearly half a century of encounters—positive and not—between beings that inhabit worlds that are at once close to and cut off from one another. In 1960, hoping to bridge the enormous gap through the noble and generous voice of C. Wright Mills, Cubans had noted: “We are so far apart that there are two Cubas—ours, and the one you picture to yourselves.” By the way, Cuba is not a nation about which few things have been written or published. Ricardo Alarcón is president of the National Assembly of People’s Power of the Republic of Cuba. This is the text of a lecture delivered at the Workshop “Dialogos Políticos,” the Twenty-seventh International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, 2007, Montréal, Canada, 7 September 2007. Critical Inquiry Volume 34, Number 2, Winter© 2008 by The University of Chicago.
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