Stephen W. Browne

Cuba is erupting in protest. Starting on July 11, Cubans have taken to the streets in the largest demonstrations since 1994 chanting “Liberty” and “Motherland and Life.”

The Cuban government has swiftly retaliated.

“We call on all revolutionaries to go to the streets to defend the revolution,” said President Miguel Díaz-Canel. “The order to fight has been given.”

And make no mistake, the government of Cuba is still one of the most ruthless in the world. They are willing to kill as many Cubans as it takes to stay in power.

But I believe something has happened, something I’ve seen before in what I call “late-stage tyrannies” in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Tyrannies rule by fear, a specific kind of fear. The fear of the unpredictable.

If the penalty for every minor crime was death or torture, you could live with it as long as you knew what it was that would bring you to the attention of the secret police.

But what was so terrible about communism was that you did not know what would get you in trouble. It could be a chance remark, an ill-timed joke, or maybe nothing you’d ever find out.

So people lived their lives in fear, never daring to speak their minds, never making close friends. Just hunkering down and whenever possible making a break for freedom across 90 miles of dangerous waters on rafts made of junk.

But sometimes the unthinkable happens. People stop caring and start speaking freely. When that happens you know the end of the regime is near unless the government can kill enough of them. At that point it depends on the Army’s willingness to do so. And that depends on whether the soldiers can see themselves going home and facing neighbors whose kin they have murdered.

And one more thing. Dissidents in the old Soviet Union said one thing that sustained them in those dark days was the knowledge that somewhere else in the world there were people who knew they were being wronged.

And in that respect, the response in some quarters in America has been shamefully tepid.

The New York Times attributed the protests to food and medicine shortages. Which is a half-truth at best. There are food and medicine shortages, which is a feature of tyrannies not a bug.

Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have attributed the appalling poverty of Cuba to the American embargo.

A lie, Cuba is free to trade with every other country in the world and has a flourishing tourist industry run by foreign contractors. Tourists from all over the developed world come to Cuba to enjoy the sunny beaches, the resorts run on cheap labor, and the services of Cuban women who turn to prostitution our of hunger and desperation.

And astoundingly, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, himself a Cuban refugee who escaped to the United States in 1960 has announced America will not accept refugees.

“Allow me to be clear: if you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States,” he said.

The charitable explanation is our government would prefer Cuban troublemakers stay in Cuba to continue to make trouble for the regime.

The less charitable might point out Cubans, like refugees from other communist countries, tend to vote Republican.

A Cuban friend who saw her first executions at age three tells me she hopes, but is gloomy.

And I remember something I once heard.
“The dead remember our silence.”

“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”

― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Something I wrote a long time ago on the subject of cowardice; revised, edited, and presented for your consideration.

This is a hard thing to say, but I know a fair number of cowards, and I fear they are growing more common.

Perhaps I am being too harsh – and then again, perhaps I have been too charitable for too long. It is a terrible thing to accuse any man of cowardice. It wasn’t that long ago that society considered it perfectly justified to invite the accuser to accompany one to a place from which only one would return.

I would much rather call it something like, “excessive fearfulness.” It does seem to occur on a continuum from chronic anxiety to full-blown cowardice.

But then again, perhaps I’m just indulging in a euphemism to avoid thinking about an uncomfortable subject. Which would be a prime example of what I’m talking about!

What’s odd and alarming is, these days I see the phenomenon largely among young men. That’s not natural, the natural state of young men is idiot recklessness, not cowardice.

The conclusion I am forced into, is that their cowardice is learned not inborn.

Why this might be so, I’ll deal with later. For now, I’ll talk about what I think cowardice is, and perhaps more importantly, what it isn’t.

– Cowardice is not fear of death.

Fear of death is a normal, natural and healthy response to danger that evolution equipped us with to help us avoid it.

Cowardice is fear of death more than anything else.

Philsopher Ayn Rand was once asked (in the Playboy interview), if there was anything or anyone she’d die for.

The question was a good one. Why would someone espousing a philosophy of egoism, who denied the existence of an afterlife, be willing to give up the only life she believed there is?

Rand didn’t much care to deal with the question, and only addressed it twice in her works (that I’m aware of), but she did say that a man might die for people he loved, if the prospect of living with the knowledge he failed to act to save them, would make the rest of his life not worth living.

This is why armies strive to forge groups of men into bands of brothers. This is the truth behind the old adage, “The brave taste of death but once.”

– Cowardice is not necessarily running from danger.

Recognizing danger and running from it in time, can be a sign of clear-eyed intellectual courage.

Who is the coward, the one who recognizes danger and runs? Or the one who denies there is any danger, until it is too late to run?

A professional military man will tell you, the highest command skill is to lead a retreat in good order. Without courage and a clear head, a retreat too easily becomes a rout.

What are some signs and symptoms of cowardice?

– Dogmatic certainty.

What do Marxism and religious fundamentalism have in common? I am scarcely the first to notice that Marxism and any brand of odious religious dogmatism you care to name, are all T.O.E.s – Theory of Everything. A single model that explains literally everything and leaves no room for uncertainty or ambiguity.

And here is the paradox, a coward might very well fear the shattering of his world-model more than death.

Though what usually happens in the rare instance a dogmatist is forced to give up his model, is he frantically grasps after another which he holds to with equal or greater certainty.

Every known scientific theory notes phenomena not explained by it. The difference between science and pseudo-science may be, pseudo science is an organized system of answers. Science is a method of generating meaningful questions.

– Moral relativism.

Having to make difficult ethical judgements exposes one to the possibility of being wrong, of having to deal with moral ambiguities, and worse – of having to choose a side and being prepared to fight for it.

– Rudeness.

Eric Hoffer noted, “Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.”
Reflexive rudeness towards people who disagree with their cherished illusions about how the world works. Because the reality of how the world works – or mere uncertainty about how it works, is terrifying.

In an earlier time, men were conscious that rude behavior could earn them a challenge to a duel with weapons. Even in more civilized times, men continued to fight with their fists over slights and insults.

Now the internet gives anonymity and enough distance between people – and the capability of insulting anyone with impunity. The law has also grown far more harsh in its treatment of men who engage in “mutual combat.” Which in practice means punishing the winner.

We see, and experience the results daily.

– Disdain for the brave.

One of the surest signs of a coward is how they express contempt for brave men whether by discounting their deeds, casting doubt on their motives, or focusing solely on their human imperfections.

– Idealizing or excusing brutality.

Hoffer also noted the weak like to hint at their capacity for evil. I think it’s the weakling’s version of hairy-chested macho.

What are the Che and Castro lovers saying? Could it be, “I approve of this, fear me”?

– Victim blaming and identification with the aggressor.

Why are Israel condemned and Palestinian suicide-murderers idealized in some circles? Why was the U.S. condemned and the Soviet Union idealized? Multiply examples as you will.

Because one side believes in the right to say whatever you like about them – and the other would kill you for it.

Why do smart prosecutors try to keep women off juries in rape cases?

Because a significant number of women want to blame the victim, to distance themselves from the possibility that it could happen to them.

– Hostility towards self-defense.

Anyone who has ever had to defend themselves with physical force has probably experienced this. There are certain people who consider you to be a bad person, and condemn what you did, no matter what the circumstances.

I think the example of those who dare defend themselves is felt as a reproach by those who do not.

– Rationalizing.

Something all brave men have encountered, a time and place where their courage failed them. The brave acknowledge it and are ashamed. Cowards rationalize every failure of courage. Often by loudly proclaiming how their cowardice is actually courage.

– Love.

A coward can not love unreservadly, with a whole heart. Love is granting another the power to hurt you terribly, and a surrender of “hostages to fortune.”

Steven Pressfield put the words in the mouth of the Spartan Dienikes, in his novel ‘Gates of Fire.’

At the pass of Thermopylae, Dienikes found the answer to the question which had obsessed him all his life. What is the opposite of fear?

He knew it was not vainglory, and that courage was the result of something else.

Before he died at the Hot Gates, the answer was shown to him, “The opposite of fear, is love.”

G.K. Chesterton put it, “The true soldier fights, not because he hates what is before him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

The monument at Thermopylae. The inscription reads “Molon labe”
“Come and take them,” the response of the last of the 300 to the Persians’ offer to spare their lives if they would give them their arms.

I must say, I listened to Amanda Gorman the very first National Youth Poet Laureate read her poem The Hill We Climb at President Biden’s inauguration and was inspired.

Inspired to write this column, the poem was drivel.

Correction, it wasn’t a poem. It was a collection of sentences expressing sometimes admirable sentiments with a sort of rhythm to it impressed on the words and phrases with a hammer.

It did however rime in some places which is better than most of what Maya Angelou wrote and Angelou doesn’t appear to know an iamb from an end-stopped line.

An iamb, according to the indispensable The Poetry Dictionary by John Drury, is “a foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stress. Iambic words include arrange, complain, and revenge.”

An end-stopped-line is, “A definite halt or strong pause at the end of a line” often marked by a period, question mark, colon, etc.

Now in anticipation of the howls of outrage and cries of, “How dare you bully that sweet young lady?” I’ll hastily say yes, she does seem to be a very nice young lady who has overcome an auditory processing disorder which makes her hypersensitive to sound, and a speech impediment in her youth.

She also appears to be highly intelligent and was raised by a mother who limited television exposure and encourage her to read voraciously – and may the Lord send more mothers like her for the sake of our children!

What her mother and her reading didn’t teach her was how to write poetry, for which she is not to blame. Nobody is taught how to write poetry these days.

In fact, nobody appears to be aware there is or ever was a curriculum for how to write poetry.

Once upon a time if you showed up at any of the Western world’s most prestigious universities and said, “I want to be a poet,” they’d say “Sure,” and give you a course outline.

Because there was a curriculum for it, and it was a damn tough one that would have you writing poems in classical verse forms in Latin and Greek!

They did not invite you to sit gazing at a sunset and wait for inspiration to strike like a bolt of lighting from heaven, you studied the structure of poetry.

Surprise! Poetry has structure, in fact a myriad of structures. And they have names.

A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines in iambic pentameter with a rime scheme which begins ABBA/CDDC. It’s an Italian verse form and is more difficult to write in English because we don’t end all our words with open syllables.

Have you ever heard of trochaic tetrameter, and did you know it was unknown in English until Longfellow stole it from the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland and made it into The Song of Hiawatha?

You may be aware that Haiku is a Japanese verse form which adapted well to English but they thought of it first.

I love poetry and can recite pages of it from memory, but I’m not a poet. I am however a durn good interpreter of it and have some examples on my video channel.

Because becoming a poet is not just a matter or inspiration, but long hard hours of work put in to master the technique.

If your children express a desire to write poetry, don’t send them to school for it it’s not there. Get them Drury’s book and tell them to read lots of poetry aloud.

I’ve just been poring over the news accounts of the demonstrations in Washington, D.C.

The demonstrations held on July 4, 1970 I mean. Because I was there.

I was of course inspired by accounts of the current demonstrations. I was trying to find details after hearing there had been fatalities when it struck me that I’d been there before.

I do expect to find out more eventually, as friends-of-friends are there. (Chinese/Vietnamese from Oklahoma. They’re going because they loathe Biden for trying to keep them out of America when they were refugees.)

But at present details are sketchy and contradictory. Just like back then.

News media consistently refer to it as a “riot” or even “insurrection.” Which must be really bad since all summer they referred to disturbances causing an estimated eight billion dollars of damage “mostly peaceful demonstrations.”

However no video of any extensive property damage has yet emerged. Information on the fatalities is slim. One woman was reportedly shot trying to enter the Capitol building through a window. Others are attributed to unspecified reactions to gas or blunt force trauma.

Back then the action was on the Washington Monument grounds, in front of a stage set up for an “Honor America Day” with Bob Hope as organizer and MC.

Now there’s the first thing that doesn’t jibe. I remember it being commonly called a “Support America Day” rally.

Hope organized it with the blessing of President Richard Nixon, then facing pushback over incursions into Cambodia and the tragedy at Kent
State where four students were killed by National Guardsmen during a demonstration.

Rumor quickly spread that Abbie Hoffman had called for a “smoke in” counter-protest. Everybody was supposed to show up and conspicuously break the law to show how much we didn’t like the war.

I hitchhiked to D.C. to stay with a friend who went to George Washington University and was involved with the Students for a Democratic Society, then in the process of splintering.

I arrived after dark to see cops with riot sticks chasing people and began to feel a sense that perhaps this might not have been the best idea.

But next day full of enthusiasm a small band of us set out to join an estimated 100,000 people in the biggest demonstration of the era.

What I saw from the edge of the crowd was a phalanx of riot police screening the stage, bottles and fireworks flying, and Bob Hope sounding very nonplussed.

I remember Kate Smith singing her signature tune “God Bless America” and Red Skelton reciting the Pledge of Allegiance three times, trying in vain to get someone to recite it with him.

And I remember the crowd in front breaking on a chant of “BLEEP Bob Hope! BLEEP Bob Hope!”

Hope, ever the trouper, came back with a quip but it must have been pretty feeble because I can’t remember it.

Eventually we dispersed. I hitchhiked home the next day, and got arrested on the highway resulting in a taste of incarceration.

Not long afterwards my childhood friend went underground, but unlike other 60s radicals like Bill Ayres, Bernadine Dohrn, et al he wasn’t the son of a high powered corporate executive. He never resurfaced and I have heard nothing of him to this day.

The news accounts bore little resemblance to what I saw there, one even referring to the Support America demonstration as if it had actually happened that way.

I suggest keeping that in mind.