White Flags and Nike

Everything American is evil in Cuba. American goods and ideas are all signs of imperialism and consumerism and who knows what-else-ism.

The rat race, the chase for the almighty buck where all supposed to be things of a distant bourgeois past for the new man.

The new man would be a collective creature working in the common good of society and not his selfish interest.

…and yet in today’s Cuba, the regime is forced to kneel at the altar of the free market and sacrifice its ideals for the symbols of the free market, like Coke and Nike, in order to get enough paying customers to continue in its futile attempt to build a new man.

If that’s not a white flag in “the battle of ideas” , I don’t know what is.