Word: marxist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With his studied style, Roberto Robaina Gonzalez looks more like a manager of a rock band than a Marxist model. Yet Robaina, at 37, exemplifies the new face of Cuba. Two months ago, Fidel Castro surprised Havana by picking the man he affectionately calls Robertico, a math teacher who speaks only Spanish, as Foreign Minister. U.S. diplomats dismissed him as "dynamic but dumb." Havana's bureaucrats were speechless: in his previous job as head of the Union of Communist Youth, Robaina had wooed the young with discos and salsa music -- and those T shirts. Even Fidel had a public laugh...
Similarly, I'm not arguing for some Marxist nihilism that forces identity into a big monocultural box. Nor am I saying that Harvard was a great place when the students were white guys, the professors were white guys and all the books were written by white guys. I'd take an uneasy diversity to homogeneity...
About 20 protesters from the Spartacus Youth Club, a Marxist group, chanted "Clinton and Reno, you have lied--Waco was murder, not suicide" outside Sanders. But the protesters were largely ignored by the crowd, who seemed in a generally festive mood...
West's vision, which he calls prophetic pragmatism, is most fully spelled out in The American Evasion of Philosophy. The book traces how Emerson's emphasis on innovation, refined by John Dewey and other American thinkers, then leavened with a dose of Marxist class analysis and the black church's commitment to racial justice, can be the basis for a rebirth of democratic radicalism. Says West: "I'm trying to revive a grand yet flawed tradition, to take the best from liberalism, populism and the Gospel while keeping track of what happens to everyday people, the ones the Bible calls...
...practice, that makes West a Marxist who believes in God, an admirer of black nationalism who thinks such Afrocentrics as Leonard Jeffries are too narrowly parochial. He pulls the disparate threads together like jazz: "Emerson said it's all about experimentalism, and Louis Armstrong's music is all about improvisation. I think we need these kinds of links, to be eclectic, to open us up to what we actually share rather than what divides...