While it’s true that California has essentially become a single party state in Sacramento, there are still plenty of Republicans scattered around (particularly inland). They don’t get much love and don’t have all that much influence on state government, but they do have representation in Congress (and just as with the coastal Democrats, the state’s top-two election runoff system helps entrench single party domination in those areas).
Because the Republican Party’s primaries are such a huge fight this election, it means that California’s vote in June actually matters. The way the delegate math works out could hand Donald Trump the delegates he needs, or it could guarantee a contested Republican convention. From the Associated Press:
California’s primary amounts to 54 separate races on a single day—one in every congressional district across the sprawling, diverse state, and one statewide. The winner in each district collects three delegates; then, the candidate who gets the largest number of votes statewide claims a bonus of 13 more.
That means a solidly Democratic district covering the heavily Hispanic neighborhoods east of downtown Los Angeles has the same importance as one in the traditional Republican heartland of Orange County, once the home of Richard Nixon.
Republicans account for a paltry 7 percent of the voters in the 13th Congressional District, which includes Oakland. But it awards three delegates to the winner, just like the 22nd District, a Republican fortress in the state’s farm belt.
Polls have Trump ahead of Ted Cruz at the moment in California, but there are some factors in the state working against Trump. First, in California, the political parties get to decide whether or not to have open primaries. The Democratic Party primaries are open, but the Republican Party primaries are closed. You have to register as a Republican in order to vote for their candidates, denying Trump some possible cross-over or independent voters. There’s also, beyond the typical Republican Party establishment loyalists, a significant number of Mormon and evangelical conservatives in the inland parts of the states. The percentages may be low compared to other states, but since we’re talking about California, the flat numbers add up.
But working in Trump’s favor, there areas where the population demographics fit right into the wheelhouse of his voters. California was hit extremely hard by the recession and collapse of the housing bubble and some areas have not recovered. As Ron Bailey noted after Super Tuesday, Trump tends to win among Republican voters in those areas. If you check out the map Bailey references in his piece, once you look away from the coastal communities, California’s inland looks as distressed as parts of the south (as does Arizona, which Trump won handily).
There is a lot of room for Cruz to maneuver in California and get those poll numbers up, but given that it’s not a “winner-takes-all” state, the most likely end scenario is that nobody will run away with all the delegates. California won’t stop Trump’s march, but Cruz and even John Kasich can use the state to keep Trump from hitting the delegate threshold.
So California Republicans can look forward to actually being courted for their votes. The last time this happened was back in 2008 when California moved its primaries earlier to Super Tuesday. California helped Sen. John McCain secure the Republican nomination.
And then they can “look forward” to their votes completely not mattering in November when the state overwhelmingly votes for whomever the Democratic nominee is. Though it’s interesting to note that while the state’s Republican Party has been losing membership, they’re not trading sides and joining the Democrats. They’re declaring their independence from party membership entirely, making it harder to predict where they might go in the fall. Those are the kind of voters Trump lives for.
Just a week after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ordered Amazon to let shareholders vote on “gender pay gap” disclosure, the company reports that its female employees earn 99.9 cents for every dollar that male employees in the same job do.
“Our recent review of the compensation we awarded last year at Amazon–including both base and stock–resulted in women earning 99.9 cents for every dollar that men earn in the same jobs, and minorities earning 100.1 cents for every dollar that white employees earn in the same jobs,” the company said in an email statement Wednesday. “There will naturally be slight fluctuations from year to year, but at Amazon we are committed to keeping compensation fair and equitable.”
Amazon is not releasing more info at this time about the methods it used to come to these conclusions, but according to VentureBeat the survey “was conducted by an external labor economist” and “covered Amazon workers at various levels of the company’s organization in the United States.” As of last summer, Amazon estimated that 39 percent of its global workforce was female and women held about a quarter of management positions.
Earlier this month, the SEC rejected a request from Amazon to forego shareholder voting on a pay-gap proposal submitted by two shareholders and an activist investment firm, Arjuna Capital. The proposal, submitted to Amazon and eight other tech companies, said that shareholders should get to vote on whether companies included data on “the percentage pay gap between male and female employees, policies to address that gap, and quantitative reduction targets” in their annual reports.
In a letter to the SEC, Amazon complained that the proposal “gives no indication of how earnings should be calculated for purposes of the requested report… makes no mention of whether the gender pay gap is calculated based on median earnings or mean average earnings, whether earnings are calculated based only on full-time employees or full-time/full year employees, or whether part-time employees should be included (and if so, whether their earnings should be converted to a full-time equivalent basis)… (and) gives no indication of which of the various definitions of earnings used … is to be applied.”
“Different calculation methods for determining ‘earnings’ could show significantly different results,” Amazon continued, and “failing to adequately describe the standard, and in fact misleadingly suggesting that there is a single, clearly understood [standard] is impermissibly vague and misleading.”
But some have accused Amazon of being misleading itself with the new pay data. “When the most senior, well-paid people at your company are almost exclusively male, is it really accurate to say your business pays men and women about the same amounts?” writes Emily Peck at the Huffington Post.
And here we go again… Whether to measure gender pay differences based on people in the same (or “substantially similar”) jobs or as cross-company or country averages has been and continues to be a subject of fierce debate. I tend to think the former information is more useful, but the latter is better for propaganda and goal-post shifting purposes.
In a speech at Stanford University yesterday, Hillary Clinton warned that Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who are vying to run against her in this year’s presidential election, are risky choices because they’re apt to get the United States involved in another war. That is pretty rich coming from a politician who has supported every war America has waged since the last time she lived in the White House, plus at least one that it didn’t.
“It would be a serious mistake to stumble into another costly ground war in the Middle East,” Clinton said. “If we’ve learned anything from Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s that people and nations have to secure their own communities.” It is doubtful that the former secretary of state has learned anything from Iraq or Afghanistan. She certainly did not learn anything from Libya. But maybe her point is that the United States should run headlong into another costly ground war in the Middle East, as opposed to stumbling into it.
For the record, Trump and Cruz also say they want to depend on local proxies for ground troops in the war against ISIS. Cruz is big on bombs but not keen on sending U.S. troops, which he says “should always be the last step.” During the March 10 Republican presidential debate, Trump seemed to indicate that he could imagine sending “20,000 or 30,000” American soldiers to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria if that is what it takes. But Trump retreated from that suggestion in an exchange with Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl during a visit to the paper on Monday:
Diehl: And could I ask you about ISIS, speaking of making commitments, because you talked recently about possibly sending 20 or 30,000 troops and—
Trump: No I didn’t, oh no no no. OK, I know what you’re saying.
There was a question asked to me. I said that the military, the generals have said that 20- to 30,000. They said, would you send troops? I didn’t say send 20,000. I said, well the generals are saying you’d need because they, what would it take to wipe out ISIS, I said pretty much exactly this, I said the generals, the military is saying you would need 20- to 30,000 troops, but I didn’t say that I would send them.
Diehl: If they said that, would you go along with that and send the troops?
Trump: I find it hard to go along with—I mention that as an example because it’s so much. That’s why I brought that up. But a couple of people have said the same thing as you, where they said did I say that and I said that that’s a number that I heard would be needed. I would find it very, very hard to send that many troops to take care of it. I would say this: I would put tremendous pressure on other countries that are over there to use their troops, and I’d give them tremendous air supporters and support, because we have to get rid of ISIS, OK, just so—we have to get rid of ISIS. I would get other countries to become very much involved.
Based on exchanges like this, I can totally picture Trump stumbling into another costly ground war in the Middle East. But the same goes for Clinton, Cruz, and anyone else who tries to “destroy” ISIS, only to find that bombs and proxy soldiers will not do the trick. The fact remains that Trump has been notably more skeptical of foreign entanglememts than Clinton or Cruz. That skepticism extends not only to deposing Middle Eastern dictators but to participating in obsolete alliances and defending rich countries that are perfectly capable of defending themselves.
Clinton sees the latter criticism as a sign of Trump’s naiveté. In her speech Clinton rebuked Trump for questioning the value of NATO, which she called “the most successful alliance in history” and “one of the best investments America has ever made.” Even while suggesting that European countries should spend more on their own defense, she criticized Trump for suggesting that they could at least pay the U.S. for services rendered. “Turning our back on our alliances or turning our alliance into a protection racket would reverse decades of bipartisan American leadership and send a dangerous signal to friend and foe alike,” she said.
But what Trump is suggesting, in his own inconsistent, semi-articulate way, is that “bipartisan American leadership,” which is code for trying to run the world, is part of the problem. Both Ron and (to a lesser extent) Rand Paul have made the same point about the perils of policing the planet. When a reporter asked Cruz about that yesterday, he drew a distinction that was accurate but irrelevant. “Ron Paul and Rand Paul both are informed and have a well-thought-out foreign policy position,” he said. “I disagree with many aspects of that position, but they actually know what they’re talking about.”
Yet Cruz had just cited Trump’s criticism of NATO as evidence of his cluelessness, saying it illustrated the Republican front-runner’s “weakness and a dangerous isolationism.” The sanctity of current military commitments—like Cruz’s (and Trump’s!) insistence that the U.S. must spend more on the military, even though it already devotes more resources to so-called defense than the next seven biggest spenders combined—cries out for questioning. The fact that the questions come from Trump does not make them any less valid.
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal readers Thursday were greeted with a full-page ad calling for “compassion, respect, shared responsibility,” and other high-minded virtues from Americans as we slog though the 2016 election season. “When you read the headlines… scroll through your social media feed,” or “listen to the candidates,” it’s easy to mistake America as being “lost,” the ad laments. But today, we must “go beyond the hatred and vitriol, and see a different story of America.”
A “story that is not bound by party affiliations or religious beliefs.”
A story that is neither “left-leaning or right-leaning.”
A story about how some corporate-social-responsibility hack convinced the Starbucks leadership that this preening, saccharine call for unity was worthwhile…
“This is not about the choice we make every four years,” the new Starbucks ad concludes. “This is about the choices we make every single day.” And then comes the Starbucks logo, reminding you to choose your coffee wisely today.
Of course, Starbucks has a history of silly kumbaya messaging and stunts. In 2015, the company embarked on an awkward mission to have baristas “start a dialogue about race” with customers by penning slogans on their coffee cups. If there’s anything to be gleaned from this other than a good eyeroll opportunity, it’s the way much of it could be read as an implicit criticism of Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. There are lines condemning the “hatred and vitriol” you see in the news and on social media and celebrating the virtues of “those who work to include, rather than discriminate.”
Then again, that’s pretty standard stuff for Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz, who may be a good businessman but talks about culture and society like someone you would try to avoid late-night in the college dormitory. At Starbucks annual shareholders meeting in Seattle Wednesday, Schultz praised John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. and asked the assembled to “fill our reservoir back up with the true promise of our country and once again embrace what it means to be Americans.”
Update: Here’s page two of the Starbucks ad that ran in the Times and Journal today.
If you’re in a car accident that’s not your fault, you’d expect the other driver to pay for the damages. If you have an accident with someone driving a state-owned vehicle and the state hasn’t passed a budget in nine months, you might be waiting a while.
That is the current situation in Illinois. Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner has been in a stalemate with a Democratic supermajority in the legislature since July 1. While the governor did sign one bill to fund primary and secondary education, he’s vetoed all other spending bills.
That includes the bill that would have paid for auto insurance claims against the state, which is self-insured. The Department of Central Management Services (CMS) is responsible for such payouts. Mark Fitton of Illinois News Network reports that around 200 claims totaling $560,000 have gone unpaid since July. That number includes reimbursement for medical costs and for other claim-related services, not just damage to cars. CMS is still investigating or negotiating other claims not included in those numbers.
Technically, Illinois has a balanced budget provision in its constitution that should prevent the state from spending money on anything that hasn’t been passed by the General Assembly. In actuality, the judicial branch has taken over and issued court orders mandating that state employees still be paid on time.
Good-government group Reboot Illinois estimates that despite having no budget, the Prairie State will spend around 90 percent of what it did in Fiscal Year 2015, outpacing its revenues by $4.6 billion.
Belgian authorities are reportedly hunting for a second terrorist they believe was involved in the Brussels subway attack.
“The announcement by the Belgian authorities that they had confiscated more than 30 pounds of the explosive TATP from a dwelling used by the attackers in Brussels was, in some ways, an expected development. But it contained one detail that bomb-disposal technicians and security officials regarded with surprise: the quantity of the particular explosive involved.”
Iraqi forces have launched an offensive to retake Mosul from ISIS.
Syrian forces are currently battling ISIS for control of the ancient city of Palmyra.
Ted Cruz vs. Donald Trump: “An increasingly ugly battle that will now likely drag through the final primary in California, if not beyond.”
Donald Trump is currently “the only political entity less popular than Congress and the GOP.”
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What do Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., President Barack Obama and all the Republican presidential candidates have in common? They all want to fundamentally reform the corporate income tax. President Obama proposed cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 28 percent. Sen. Schumer wants a major reduction to taxation of corporate income abroad. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, says he would abolish the tax altogether as president—replacing it with a 16 percent business flat tax—and Donald Trump would reduce the corporate tax rate to 15 percent.
Unfortunately, nothing is happening, writes Veronique de Rugy.
When the Rolling Stones make history on Good Friday by playing a free concert in Havana, I hope Mick and Keith & the gang take a stroll from their hotel to a little park in the leafy diplomatic neighborhood of Vedado, a handful of streets uphill from the famous Malecón. There they will find an unwitting monument to the ultimate futility of censorship: a statue of their old mate John Lennon, sitting on a park bench, in a square that was re-christened “Parque Lennon” in December 2000 by El Jefe himself.
“What makes him great in my eyes is his thinking, his ideas,” Fidel Castro said, obscenely, at the unveiling ceremony. “I share his dreams completely. I too am a dreamer who has seen his dreams turn into reality.”
Unsurprisingly for a caudillo whose misgovernance has transformed the onetime capital of the Caribbean into an open-air ruin, Castro left out a few pertinent details. Most notably that he banned the freaking Beatles.
Not far from that park, in February 1998, I attended a hush-hush gathering in a private home with a handful of Cuban longhairs and a middle-aged American lefty who spent her time shuttling between Havana (where she considered herself a constructive critic of the regime) and America (where I once saw her, with a straight face, defend Castro’s freedom of the press). What was this semi-clandestine group doing? Listening to, talking about, and singing along with, the Beatles.
The 1960s as we know them did not take place in Cuba, no matter how much western cultural renegades may have fashioned themselves as fellow travelers with Che et al. The Beatles and other globally popular rock acts were banned in the name of defending the Revolution against cultural imperialism. Men daring to show their long hair in public were beaten by cops, shorn of their locks, and thrown in jail. Homosexuals were herded into camps.
This was, to put it mildly, an ahistorical approach to Havana’s rich tradition of cultural and artistic exchange. With one of the world’s better natural harbors and geographical pole position within the Americas, this port town dominated the commerce and culture of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico for centuries after its founding in 1515. Miami was a backwater in comparison until the 1950s. Cuba was the Johnny Appleseed of baseball throughout the Caribbean basin; its writers dominated Latin American literature, and above all, there was the music.
To this day, even after decades of state meddling and economic distress, Havana’s musical culture leaves visitors grasping for superlatives. The only place I’ve ever seen come close is that other Gulf of Mexico-adjacent port town and cultural crossroads, New Orleans. After World War II, as Chris Kjorness pointed out in a terrific 2013 Reason feature, Cuban musical culture was busy taking over the U.S.:
Havana’s mambo craze leapt back across the Florida Straits to a willing United States. New York Jazz musicians began incorporating Cuban elements into their music. Pop singers such as Nat “King” Cole began recording with musicians in Cuba and singing in Spanish. Cuban artists such as Beny Moré and Celia Cruz found themselves at the fore of a new, syncretic movement in pan-American popular music.
And decades before cultural observers would enthuse over the “crossover” appeal of Jennifer Lopez and Shakira, Yankee audiences threw their arms around Cuban percussionist Desi Arnaz, whose mambo band-leader character Ricky Ricardo co-anchored the most popular show on American television, I Love Lucy.
At the height of ’50s mambo fever, you would have been laughed out of the room had you predicted that comparatively tiny and impoverished Jamaica would soon become a dominant force in global music, while the Caribbean’s longstanding cultural capital of Havana fell into irrelevance and decay. But the rise of communism and its attendant cultural protectionism soon choked off mambo and Cuban creativity at the source, while Jamaica’s economic boom and unfettered recording industry uncorked a revolutionary new music called reggae.
Fidel Castro, with his strict rules about how art could be produced and consumed, was effectively standing athwart centuries of cultural history yelling “No más!” But even one of the world’s most long-lasting dictatorships eventually proved unable to stand between the people and the music they want. So why did that slowly change?
Competition certainly helped. With musical legends such as Celia Cruz cut off from their homeland (the regime’s broadcast ban on Cruz wasn’t lifted until 2012), and musicians on the island mostly blocked from travel, Cuban exiles and performers from other Caribbean ports of call popularized a catch-all musical genre that came to be known in the 1970s as salsa. Led by such groups as the Fania All-Stars, salsa demonstrated that the types of music and rhythms and dance still played and enjoyed in Cuba had worldwide appeal.
The Fania All-Stars in 1979 contributed to one of the more bizarre and mostly forgotten musical episodes in modern rock history: the three-day “Havana Jam” at Karl Marx Theater, where officially sanctioned Cuban musicians, top American jazzmen (such as Dexter Gordon, Stan Getz, and Jaco Pastorius), and a who’s who of late-’70s American burnouts (Stephen Stills, Kris Kristofferson, Billy Joel) performed for an audience largely composed of apparatchiks and their families.
Chet Flippo’s contemporaneous account of Havana Jam for Rolling Stone is an amusing snapshot of a centrally planned–and therefore largely botched–cultural exchange, filled with such wince-inducing anecdotes as Kristofferson dedicating “Living Legend” to “your commander in chief, Fidel”; Americans bitterly complaining that they didn’t get to jam with the natives, and the pilot on the outbound flight urging the musicians to “spit on Havana.” The audience walked out en masse at the Fania All-Stars (possibly because western salsa music was still banned, and Fania was known to consort in the U.S. with Cuban exiles such as Cruz), and non-Party Cubans rolled their eyes at their own side’s contributions. “All Cuban music is old people’s music,” one local told Flippo. “[I]t is the music of the 1950s. It is as if there is no now. Musically in this country, it is always yesterday.”
And yet, as these interviews assembled by the Cuban rock journalist Ernesto Juan Castellanos (who now lives in Florida) attest, Havana Jam was still galvanizing and inspirational for the local musicians lucky enough to attend:
And even with the event’s emphasis on old-people music, rock & roll finally did break through, thanks to the perhaps unlikely figure of Billy Joel. More Flippo:
[Joel] closed out the festival with a bang. When he jumped on his piano, the kids in the crowd surged past the guards and really tried to get down. If the Cuban government thought they were keeping rock & roll out of their country, Joel proved them wrong, prompting the American press to dutifully record that he had proved rock & roll can still be subversive.
Communism, like all totalizing political systems, is by definition censorious, often brutally so. When the state owns the means of production, the result is that record companies, radio stations, concert venues, promotional agencies, T-shirt manufacturers, and every last link in the musical economy is controlled by government, which not only has to divvy out goods and access from artificially created scarcity, but also pursue ideological and political aims that are usually at odds with youth culture. And yet music remains a universal human impulse, particularly in traditionally cosmopolitan cities. It is no accident that the simple desire to play and consume the stuff has spurred anti-totalitarian revolts from Prague to Cairo, or that newly freed populations around the globe celebrated their liberation by gorging on such once-verboten western culture as, yes, the Beatles.
In the waning days of the Soviet Union, as the one-sided subsidies to its tropical client state were choked off to a trickle, a Cuban population that had been brought up on fraternal relations with various faraway Slavs begain to strain at Castro’s cultural leash. In 1990, while Czechs were celebrating their independence from the Evil Empire by singing and writing graffiti at the now-tolerated Lennon Wall, a group of well-known Cuban musicians attempted to mimic the Beatles’ famous “Let it Be” rooftop concert at the Havana Libre Hotel, at which they would play a bunch of Beatles covers. Amazingly, the organizers managed to obtain permissions from several of the necessary bureaucracies, before finally running afoul of the National Committee of the Young Communists League, which deemed the idea “inappropriate.”
With the project unraveling, the remaining musicians instead decamped to the very park where you can now visit a bronzed John Lennon. Here’s an account of that day from one protagonist:
Early in the afternoon, the park was already full of people, mostly young. You couldn’t fit another soul there when the concert began in an almost improvised way. It was one of the most stirring musical events I ever took part in; one of those I recall and love most.
We didn’t have much at our disposal in terms of sound equipment. We got our electricity directly from streetlamps and people’s houses. We barely had time to rehearse (though, in my opinion, Cuban musicians don’t need to rehearse that much for things to work out – and that’s exactly what happened). Everything turned out better than we expected. The park was also surrounded by a long cordon of police officers, who ended up singing Yesterday, A Hard Day’s Night, Come Together and Let It Be along with us.
Most of the people gathered there belonged to the generation that called itself “the children of Wilhelm Tell.” Carlos Varela, accompanied by the rock band Gens, made the gathering even more moving by playing his piece Guillermo Tell, which was almost like a personal anthem for us. The crowds were touched like never before. Once he had finishing singing the famous piece, Varela took the microphone and proposed baptizing the park with the name of John Lennon (its name to this day). Suddenly, the band started playing Hey Jude and the unforgettable concert closed with everyone singing the piece along.
The park and surrounding neighborhood became the focal point for an increasingly assertive Beatle fan base, who would trade memorabilia on the grass and hold impromptu jam sessions. Meanwhile, the 1990s brought two new factors that cracked the pop-culture door open still further: The “Special Period,” and rap.
Cuba’s Período especial came, not coincidentally, in the same decade that saw a wave of unprecedented peace and prosperity around the rest of the world. What the rest of the international community celebrated as the liberation of imperial withdrawal and cessation of proxy conflict, the Castro regime experienced as the sudden death of its sugar daddy. Clawing desperately at any potential economic green shoot, the Revolution began embracing U.S. dollars, courting overseas investment (particularly in the tourism industry), and allowing (if haphazardly) such non-governmental phenomena as farmer’s markets, private restaurants, and rooms for let.
The new throngs of Western tourists (including illegally vacationing Americans, whose passports the Cuban customs officials helpfully declined to stamp) expected to hear their own favorite music, and the government began relaxing its formal and informal bans on various artists and genres. The 1997 appointment of Beatles freak Abriel Prieto as minister of culture sped up the rock reconciliation process.
Meanwhile, the smashing international success of Ry Cooder’s Buena Vista Social Club—the ultimate tribute to Cuban old-people music—led the government to view home-grown talent as a valuable cash crop, rather than a pre-Revolution curio to be shoved gently aside.
But the local kids weren’t clamoring for more mambo. Like angsty n’er-do-wells the world over, they wanted their metal, their punk, and above all, their rap. Starting in 1995, the Cuban government began a long love-hate relationship with hip-hop, by sponsoring an international festival in a Havana barrio. Requiring no more equipment than a human voice, Cuban rap has been a rich source of creativity, overt sexuality, anti-regime metaphor, and the embrace of material aspirations far out of reach of most Cubans. High among the many questions I heard from information-starved locals during my stay in 1998 was, “So, who reallykilled Tupac?” So integral is hip-hop to contemporary culture that the United States ham-handedly tried to co-opt the genre to spark an anti-Castro movement.
One of the most radical aspects about rock music and its youth-culture offshoots is that it resists all attempts at being manipulated by those who would have it serve instrumental, ideological ends. The individual consumer, not distributor, is the master of interpretation. That unhappy inability to shape consumption is true not just for the censor, but for the creator of the music itself. Nowhere have I seen this paradox plainer than in Havana.
Rage Against the Machine was a rap/metal act that was arguably the most stridently leftist of the popular 1990s alternative bands (they were the lead example of Brian Doherty’s 2000 Reason feature on “The strange politics of millionaire rock stars“). Guitarist Tom Morello is a May Day/Occupy Wall Street type who says stuff about murderous Cuban revolutionaries like, “We’ve considered Che a fifth band member for a long time now, for the simple reason that he exemplifies the integrity and revolutionary ideals to which we aspire.” Che is the cover boy of one of Rage’s first singles, “Bombtrack.” (And lest libertarian music fans prematurely consign Tom Morello to the ideological dustbin of musical history, note that he was one of the key figures lobbying for Rush to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.)
I can’t think of a less pro-revolutionary human being I’ve ever met than a teenage kid I spent a lot of time with in Havana 18 years ago. He was a pent-up but ultimately genial type who was always getting into trouble with the law for going to rock shows, slam dancing, and hanging out with the wrong crowd. And the one single thing he wanted most from his new Yanqui friend was a direct transcription of the lyrics to Rage Against the Machine’s signature song, the great “Fuck You, I Won’t Do What You Tell Me.” As I recounted here,
We got stuck on some of the indecipherable words, and didn’t have access to the Internet, so he concluded, “They just hate the cops, right?” and I said yes. I tried to tell him that the Rage guys might be the most prominent Marxists working in the record business, but this kid…could not care less. And he was right.
Morello’s post-Rage supergroup Audioslave, featuring Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell on lead vocals, will be until tomorrow the biggest rock band to ever play in Havana, back in 2005. (They had to spend $1 million of their own money, and were assisted heavily by the U.S. State Department, while treated with suspicion by their Cuban minders.) I have zero doubt that my Rage-loving Castro-hater was somewhere near the front row of that show, having the time of his life.
In a society still dominated by government, the inherent freedom of music will inevitably clash with the practiced overweening of the state. In 2012, the Cuban government cracked down on rap-inflected reggaeton, with the director of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television warning: “We will not play one more rude song, one more base song, one more song with offensive lyrics or videos that attack or denigrate the image of women.” Unlike similar finger-wagging in the States, such moralizing in Cuba has the force of law.
And Cubans whose sense of musical freedom extends to criticizing the government openly are still almost certain to suffer. Gorki Águila, lead singer for the punk band Porno Para Ricardo (who Reason TV interviewed in 2009), was released from his latest stint in jail just this Sunday.
Still, messers Jagger and Richards are coming to a much different island than the place that once demonized rock as “the music of the enemy.” Cubans have finally been allowed to take their first, heavily censored steps onto the Internet, and are lunging at the chance, regardless of expense. (“For you, the Internet is like water,” one of our tour guides told us this January. “For us, it is like caviar.”) Whole nightlife ecosystems have sprung up around the La Rambla area, as kids in packs stare into the magic on their iPhones. A fascinating and mysterious audio-visual USB-drive sharing system, called “The Packet,” has given Cubans access to all kinds of foreign and domestic movies, music, and television. Relatives from Miami and New Jersey are freer to come and send money, breaching still more walls in Castro’s information dam.
And not only can the Stones visit their old pal John in the Parque Lennon, they can walk a few blocks more and check out the Yellow Submarine, a music bar dedicated to all things Fab Four and owned, alas, by the Ministry of Culture.
Better yet, the Glimmer Twins can manage what the recently departed President Barack Obama could not, and take a long, open-ended, and unofficial walk around a marvelous and long-abused city, listening to the endless music and swapping war stories with the locals. Or hook up with Gorki Águila, and go check out some rap-metal.
There are few exceptions to the universal rule that the kids wanna rock. It is true that police states can keep a great city down, but only for so long. Hopefully the sight of some geriatric rockers prancing around to “Start Me Up” will help kick Havana in the direction it’s long wanted to go: Back to its rightful home in the center of American culture.
Listening to Ted Cruz’s response to the terrorist attacks in Brussels raised a question: Is he a pitiful victim of hysteria, a calculated promoter of it or both? Major emergencies call for sober leadership and careful thought, but Cruz is intoxicated by his 150-proof ideology.
It’s hard to tell whom he hates more—terrorists or Barack Obama. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan’s United Nations ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, charged that when unwelcome events occur, Democrats “always blame America first.” Cruz has the same reflex, according to Steve Chapman. His immediate impulse on hearing of the Brussels bombings was to attack the president of the United States.
Share prices for British soda makers and distributors plunged after the government announced plans for a tax on drinks with sugar in them. The tax will be 25 to 34 cents per liter depending on the amount of sugar. Fruit juices and milk-based drinks will be exempt from the tax.