Foco

In essence, the pressure on the individual from the outside is the pressure to make a tradeoff between corruption and one’s natural way of life. In other words, the pressure from the outside is aimed at the individual so that the individual would adopt corruption and replace one’s natural way of life with corruption. The opening for this tradeoff and the opening for the replacement of one’s natural way of life with corruption, in many cases, is appetite and lust. As Nietzsche wrote:

“It happens more frequently…that a scientific head is placed on an ape’s body, a subtle exceptional understanding in a base soul, an occurrence by no means rare, especially among doctors and physiologists of morality. And whenever anyone speaks without bitterness, quite innocently, of man as a belly with two requirements, and a head with one; whenever anyone sees, seeks, and wants to see only hunger, sexual lust, and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when anyone speaks “badly” – and not even “wickedly” – of man, the lover of knowledge should listen subtly and diligently; he should altogether have an open ear wherever people talk without indignation.” 

In the course of America’s short history – and one must note it is the brevity and shortness of America’s history relative to other countries which translates into a social fabric in America that has yet to fully develop – one of the first cases or instances of when America diverged away from the notion of having a way of life that was shared between all the peoples of the world and then moved towards the notion that America had to replace the way of life of other peoples with its own is the case or instance of Cuba shortly after World War II.

Essentially, what the Cuban revolutionaries such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were aiming for was to “create a culture oriented to collective welfare with people who had been acculturated to individualistic values of the old society, who believed that selfishness, acquisitiveness, and a dog-eat-dog world were the natural order” as Philip Brenner and Peter Eisner highlighted. The creation of such a culture or “way of life” would be fostered above all else through the psychological and social development of the Cuban citizen who in turn would “become more aware every day of the need to incorporate themselves into society” as Guevara contended. 

And as Brenner and Eisner wrote: “The aspiration to create the new Cuban man effectively served as the cultural guidepost almost from the beginning of the Revolution, even though the leaders did not at first articulate it.” They added: “The transition process from the old to the new Cuban man…required reeducation that should not take place only in schools. Cubans needed to learn the meaning and practice of the new morality repeatedly, through their daily activities and relationships.” 

In essence, there was a “moral incentive” in the way of changing the culture and the individual and thus the ‘way of life’ in Cuba rather than a “material incentive,” given that the latter incentive would only reinforce the old and corrupt culture and the old and corrupt way of thinking. In turn, it was this revolution in thought and the revolution in assessing man’s relationship to reality more than anything else which prompted Washington’s heavy-handed approach towards Cuba over the last number of decades. 

And not only did the attempt to overthrow Castro and his fellow revolutionaries fail and in turn draw Cuba closer to the Eastern bloc during the initial stage of the infamous Cold War, but the failure which was embodied and symbolized in the “Bay of Pigs” incident in the early 1960’s introduced a basic concept to Washington, which was that corruption could not replace what is essentially a natural way of life if there was a will to reinforce the natural way of life that is shared essentially by all the peoples of the world.