WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Original air date August 22, 2017.
Philosopher, poet, and revolutionary, José Martí, believed that knowledge and understanding do not originate within us, but come to us through our cultural institutions and that what is expressed when you “express yourself” is a collective mind and so if your culture is imperial, slave-holding, and expansionist, what kind of self will you express?
From “Amor de Ciudad Grande” by José Martí
Times of gorge and rush are these:
Voices fly like light: lightning,
like a ship hurled upon dread quicksand,
plunges down the high rod, and in delicate craft
man, as if winged, cleaves the air.
And love, without splendor or mystery,
dies when newly born, of glut.
The city is a cage of dead doves
and avid hunters! If men’s bosoms
were to open and their torn flesh
fall to the earth, inside would be
nothing but a scatter of small, crushed fruit!
I asked our guest, Susan Babbitt, for suggestions on what to read regarding Cuba and Castro and she recommended the book Fidel and Religion which contains conversations on Marxism and liberation. It gives the intellectual history of the revolution and the reference to religion, as Einstein noted, is most sensibly thought of as a capacity for wonder, which takes humility. Something directly opposed to an imperial insistence on power and material accumulation.
GUEST
Susan Babbitt is an associate professor of philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, author of Humanism and Embodiment: From Cause and Effect to Secularism, and most recently of José Martí, Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Global Development Ethics. She’s also a frequent contributor to Counterpunch.
RELATED
Articles in Counterpunch by Susan Babbitt
Don’t Raise Liberalism From the Dead (If It is Dead, Which It’s Not)
Cuba’s “Battle for Ideas” Affects Us All, or Could, and Should
Invisible in Life, Invisible in Death: How Information Becomes Useless
Cuba’s Nobel Nomination and Baldwin’s Call to “Begin Again” by Susan Babbitt (July 29, 2020)
MUSIC
Songs by Pablo Milanés from Versos Sencillos De José Martí (1973)
“Yo Soy Hombre Sincero”
“Vierte Corazon Tu Pena”
“Banquete de Tiranos”
“Mi Verso Es Como un Puñal”
“Amor de Ciudad Grande”
ID – “Poetica”
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
