Revolution (34 page)

I like that they felt it an unfair advantage, like the disgruntlement felt by Philip Morris that their profits were declining because their customers were dying.

The reason Cuba is the object of such unrelenting antagonism from the United States is that their very existence is a rallying cry to other nations that corporatism can be beaten. Ever since the Monroe Doctrine, the United States had intended to colonize Cuba. In
1898 they invaded it under the now-familiar guise of liberating it. Until the Revolution in 1959, the States ran it as a virtual colony—mostly with, as far as I can work out, casinos and Bacardi rum. Fidel Castro, a law student in the early fifties, started kicking off, along with his brother Raúl. After initially petitioning for change through diplomatic channels, they decided to form a militia from Havana’s disillusioned working class. Their first round of attacks on military targets were a shoddy affair and ended with Raul and Fidel banged up for fifteen years apiece and their small band of followers either nutted off or incarcerated.

Fidel, whilst being sentenced, delivered a four-hour speech in which he came across as double cool, telling the judge he’d do his time standing on his head and
“la historia me absolverá
”—“When people look back at this, they’ll think I’m great.”

Campaigners managed to get the brothers released after a few years of jail time, and they scarpered to Mexico to cook up a new scheme. Whilst there, they met Che Guevara, an Argentinian aristocrat who was seriously up for a row. Guevara said he’d join the pair in overthrowing the corrupt Batista regime. I’ve agreed to some crazy things with people I’ve met on holiday myself, but I’ve never gone as far as saying I’d help a couple of lads take their country back, so respect to Che for that.

Also present in Mexico was Alberto Bayo, who had fought on the side of the socialists during the civil war that followed the Spanish Revolution. He gave the lads guerrilla training to toughen them up. They took to it like ducks to water, and within a few months, with a crew of eighty like-minded revolutionaries, they set off back to Cuba on a yacht called
Granma
, a vessel seemingly designed to undermine the whole enterprise. A yacht—posh—called
Granma
: bit lame.

The nautical aspect of the Revolution was a right balls-up: When they practiced sailing, they’d done it with only a few people on board, so when they set off the boat was much slower. Also, some dope fell in the drink, and that put the mockers on things. Castro insisted the boat stop and rescue the chump, which really slowed things down but also created a real sense of morale and cohesion. I
suppose if Fidel had just looked over at the spluttering prat, tugged on his cigar, and gone, “Fuck him,” the others might’ve felt their leader lacked compassion.

Due to all the maritime calamities, they arrived in Cuba two days late, meaning their allies in the harbor weren’t there. Instead, Batista’s troops were, and they knocked off 60 percent of the rebels, including, I bet, that nitwit who fell in. The surviving revolutionaries fled into the Sierra Maestra mountains and hung out there for ages; it was a total shambles. They recruited peasants that they met in the mountains that were sympathetic to the cause and trained them in warfare. Obviously they did a good job, because they won a few battles where the odds were heavily stacked against them, Sparta style, like in the film
300
.

Che Guevara identified how a comparatively small resistance can overcome a national military:

Amazing to hear that the domination of sovereign governments by Wall Street was already an established pattern; also encouraging is Che’s verdict that people won’t fight to the death to protect a wage and a pension. Eventually the unavoidable conclusion that Revolution will benefit the people hired to prop the state up cannot be ignored.

S
OLDIERS ARE GIVEN A TERRIBLE TIME IN THE
UK
AND THE
U
NITED
States. I am always surprised by how many homeless people have been in the services in both countries. There are almost 60,000 homeless veterans in the States—12 percent of all homeless people. In the UK it could be as high as 25 percent. I chat to homeless people a lot. Partly because it makes me look nice but also out of a genuine concern for people that are, as I’ve already indicated, living in conditions that for most of us would be regarded as apocalyptic, the end of the world.

The people that are in poverty, pain, prison, those that are suffering—I feel like they carry the burden for us all, like troops on a foreign front to ensure our freedom.

Homelessness is a bit of a scourge on our society, a shrill whistle from the canary in the cage of our collective conscience that all is not well. Recent studies have shown that it’s not cost-effective for a society to have human beings scattered around like living litter, and the economic argument is surely the only one that people are averring. “It would cost too much to house them,” people might say. Well, that’s not true, according to separate research in Florida, North Carolina, and Utah, hardly enclaves of pie-eyed hippiedom, it’s proven to be three times as expensive to leave people lying around like half-finished suicides than to stick them in a flat.

We know it’s wrong; we all feel a bit of a cramp of entanglement when we walk past a rough sleeper, especially when alone, like it’s an ex-lover or something. Is there anyone who strides mightily by,
untroubled, with a smile? I bet even Trump, or Murdoch, or Boris feels something.

Louis C.K. does a brilliant bit of stand-up in which a friend’s cousin, who has never been to a city, first encounters a homeless person. Louis describes how the man is “particularly homeless” and that he and his New Yorker friend habitually ignore the man, but the out-of-towner is overwhelmed with compassion and attempts to help. “Sir, are you okay?” Louis and his cousin “start correcting her behavior, like she’s doing something wrong.” The woman asks the man, “What happened?” Louis’s proxy response is, “America happened.”

This is a beautifully executed demonstration of how an extraordinary attitude has been incrementally inculcated. It is also useful to see how astonishing transgressions are normalized, as it helps us to see more-obvious violations in a different light.

The Oscar-nominated documentary
The Act of Killing
tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto.

The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar—one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing.

In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out.

A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The off-camera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says,
“Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.”

Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag.

This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done.

After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber?

What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here.

It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness.

“What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?”

They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar. Maybe as they talked us through the suffering our indifference caused, we’d gag too.

“I’ve got plenty of room in my flat,” I think as I pass Jason, the lad who sleeps under the bridge at the end of my street. “I could just let him live here with me.” Why don’t I? I did once, as a younger and more chaotic man, take that line of inquiry to its natural conclusion and moved James, a homeless Scottish bloke, into my flat.

It was a fucking disaster, actually. He slept in my bed with me, I had a bath with him—it was a total nightmare. Most disturbing of all is the fact that he got tired of the arrangement before I did and fucked off. I had to book him a cab, which was bloody stupid because he was home as soon as he stepped out the flat; that’s the only benefit of being homeless. The point of the experiment was, obviously, to do something shocking on TV—I lived for that in those days—but also to humanize a homeless man, because it’s appalling that they’ve been dehumanized in the first place. This, though, is a necessary negotiation to enable the aberrance to continue. We all routinely do it; we make a learned moral evaluation. “This is fine,” we tell ourselves as we pass, ignoring the gentle tug of the angel within. “Don’t give them any money; they’ll only spend it on drugs.” Jesus, so what? I find it hard enough to not take smack sleeping in my cozy flat. Take that away and I’ll need at least a ten-pound bag of brown warmth to take the edge off.

If, as the Washington, D.C., meditation experiment implies, we are all invisibly connected, then this suffering is dragging us all down. We don’t need even to look at academic studies; just feel what happens to you when you walk past. Some inner alarm goes off to remind you that there is a problem, and it’s your problem.

“The problem is …” I tell myself as I squintily smile at Jason, key in hand. “… that he’s bloody disagreeable. He’s not like a jolly tramp in a Quentin Blake book. He’s a junkie and he’s stinky and he’s slippery.” I issue an inner evaluation that makes my inaction acceptable. It is not.

We are nearing the apex. Global change requires social change, and social change requires personal change.

“You’ve got all that money—give it to the homeless if you care so much.” It’s a fair point.

Are we all doing all we can? Interestingly, those of us with less give more. People with an annual income below £5,000 give an average of 4.5 percent, but the proportion falls as income increases. People earning £40,000 or more donate just over 2 percent to charity.

“From each according to his abilities, to each according to his
needs” is a maxim that won’t leave after a century-long saccharine rinse, capitalist lies, and communist misadventure. Why is the idea that the pursuit of self-centered happiness will lead to contentment so adhesive? I wake up every day newly baptized into the cult of individualism. I wish I was more like my mum or my nan, who find joy in nourishing others; they’ve sussed it.

I daily renew my pledge to adorn, forgetting again in the light of the morning what lessons I’d learned as I stretch out and yawn. The greed is reborn, the crucifix fallen, and again with a groan the greed rises and the heart is overthrown, the dissonant drone resumes: What can I do for me? My mind runs commercials for the tingling gut. What can I do for me? A jingling I can’t unhear, or a fractal screensaver burrowing down like a tick on my collarbone that I dug out with scissors in a shaving mirror.

What would happen if I brought Jason home? If I brought him across the fifty yards that separate his squalor from my splendor? Would the inconvenience and disruption be compensated by some holy glow?

I saw a woman on Stamford Bridge, embarrassed as the traffic stacked behind her broken-down car. She stood in a gesture of impotence at the rear passenger door, where her young child waited. “You all right, love?” I inquired, and she told me—in English more reliable than her car, but only just—that someone was coming. A passing cyclist heard the exchange and said, “Shall we push it to the side of the road?” I agreed, and he propped up his bike on the iron railings and we assumed the Sisyphean position at the rear, prematurely crouched. “Is the hand brake off?” says Tom, who’s trim and posh and is taking the lead in all this. We roll the car uphill—it’s on a humpback bridge—to the crest and then downhill from there. With the job done, Tom and I, unified by our momentary endeavor, shake hands. The woman seems pleased too as she waves from the driver’s seat.