Fidel Castro and “China's Lesson for Cuba”: A Chinese Perspective

2007 ◽  
Vol 189 ◽  
pp. 24-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yinghong Cheng

This article examines the global impact of China's post-Mao transformation as reflected in Sino-Cuban relations. China and Cuba resumed their comradeship after Castro endorsed China's crackdown of the 1989 pro-democracy movement, and since then Beijing has promoted its approach towards legitimizing the one-party regime through engaging in economic reforms and opening to the world to Havana. “China's lesson for Cuba” has been discussed by many Cubanists worldwide. However, the Chinese approach has posed a dilemma to Fidel Castro: he admires China's power but has doubts about the future of socialism in China. The article argues that Castro has so far adopted his old strategy for dealing with Soviet influence in the 1960s in his engagement with China: praising his political ally's power as the evidence of socialism's vitality for his domestic consumption, while significantly limiting the application of China's economic policies. But his more pragmatic successors, Raul Castro in particular, may adopt the Chinese approach.

2019 ◽  
pp. 227-232
Author(s):  
Edward B. Barbier

This concluding chapter looks at the future of water. There are two possible paths for managing water. First, if the world continues with inadequate governance and institutions, incorrect market signals, and insufficient innovations to improve efficiency and manage competing demands, most chronic water and scarcity problems will continue to worsen. The world will see a future of declining water security, freshwater ecosystem degradation, and increasing disputes and conflicts over remaining water resources. The alternative path to managing water is the one offered by this book. If, in anticipation of the coming decades of increasing water scarcity, humankind is able to develop appropriate governance and institutions for water management, instigate market and policy reforms, and address global management issues, then improved innovation and investments in new water technologies and better protection of freshwater ecosystems should secure sufficient beneficial water use for a growing world population.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 180-188
Author(s):  
Afonso de Albuquerque

Non-western scholars usually face a dilemma if they want to pursue an international scholarly career: On the one hand, mastering western media theories is mandatory for taking part in international forums and exchanging experiences with people from different parts of the world; on the other hand, these theories are, in many aspects, foreign to their cultural backgrounds and, in many cases, seem inadequate for describing their own societies. My personal contribution to the debate arises from the fact that, although having some experience in participating in Anglophonic communication meetings and publishing in international academic vehicles, I never had first-hand experience, either as a student or as a professor, in American or European universities. In consequence, I was exposed to Western Anglophonic theories without being socialized in a scholarly environment in which they are taken as ‘natural’. Based on this experience, I contend that the global impact of western theories cannot be explained only by their intrinsic merits, but as the result of the socialization of scholars from all parts on the world in western educational institutions, and the networks built around them.


1968 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon D. Kaufman

The concept, “act of God,” is central to the biblical understanding of God and his relation to the world. Repeatedly we are told of the great works performed by God in behalf of his people and in execution of his own purposes in history. From the “song of Moses,” which celebrates the “glorious deeds” (Ex. 15:11) through which Yahweh secured the release of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt, to the letters of Paul, which proclaim God's great act delivering us “from the dominion of darkness” (Col. 1:13) and reconciling us with himself, we are confronted with a “God who acts.” The “mighty acts” (Ps. 145:4), the “wondrous deeds” (Ps. 40:5), the “wonderful works” (Ps. 107:21) of God are the fundamental subject-matter of biblical history, and the object of biblical faith is clearly the One who has acted repeatedly and with power in the past and may be expected to do so in the future.


1962 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Fraser

The bitter hostility with which Joseph Chamberlain was pursued by the sections of the Unionist party opposed to his policy of tariff reform, even after he resigned from Balfour's cabinet in September 1903 to conduct his campaign untrammelled by office, is a curious aspect of Unionist history. The party had seen its defeat clearly foreshadowed in a series of catastrophic by-elections, and yet it persisted in fighting its own internal fiscal battles instead of closing its ranks to meet the most formidable combination of Radical and Socialist forces that it had ever had to face. It knew that no viable proposals for fiscal reform would be put forward for several years, since its opponents were all committed to free trade. Why then did it perversely continue to dispute a remote contingency, thus encouraging its opponents to drive wedges into the divided Unionist leadership by well-chosen parliamentary motions in the sessions of 1904–5, and ensuring that in 1906 it was a demoralized as well as a defeated party that emerged from the polls? After every allowance is made for the purely human impulses that might account for these fiscal quarrels—the hopelessness of defeat, weariness of office, uncertainty in new and alarming political circumstances, and the suspicion that Chamberlain's ‘new departure’ was a bid to salvage his own political fortunes from the wreck of the party—it is still necessary to adduce some more convincing explanation for this seeming folly. For such an explanation, one must appreciate the full significance to contemporaries of Chamberlain's tariff movement, and his determination to make tariff reform and its attendant social and economic policies ‘the great question of the future, and the one on which party divisions will ultimately settle themselves’. His Unionist opponents believed they were fighting to protect not simply free trade, vital as this appeared, but also the whole fabric of Conservatism, both as a historic creed, and as a practical movement.


1878 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 130-154
Author(s):  
Gustavus George Zerffi

The principal component elements in the progressive struggle of the historical development of Idealism and Realism were, “Hellenism ” on the one side, and a misunderstood “Christianity” on the other. Hellenism, in spite of its Platonic idealism, still represented the embodiment of the forces of nature, while Christianity strove for the spiritualization and “disembodiment” of all phenomena, and of man himself. This tendency, which took its origin in the ascetics of India and the mystic priests of Egypt, produced that grand and mighty phenomenon of monasticism, the aim of which was to retire from the world, and to attain a state of conscious blissfulness in this life. Monks were said to be able to dispense with food, to float in the air, to have intercourse with angels and sometimes also with demons, to see with bodily eyes the glories of the saints, to pierce the future, and to lead an incorporeal life in spite of their living bodies. An EgyptoBuddhistic Platonism began to sway the minds of Christian believers, and they thronged in tens of thousands to people deserts and woods, mountains and sea-shores, with anchorets, pillar saints, coenobites, and hermits. Humanity was apparently altogether absorbed in a spiritualized stoicism, applying Epicurus's principles to an ascetic life, finding joy, contentment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-196
Author(s):  
Swantje Martach ◽  
Felipe Duque

New Dawn is a global arts/theories queering project, which was initiated in Berlin in 2020, and which speculates future aesthetics of the glove as “tool-to-touch.“ The present intra-view is a real ‘view-from-within,’ as it unfolds a conversation (a turning, moving, becoming [versare] together [con]) in-between the two members of this project’s theoretical section: Felipe Duque and Swantje Martach. This intra-view sets out to explore the role the glove plays within the touch. A gloved touch differs from a non-gloved touch, as the glove heightens the touch. The glove functions as a first other that is encountered in the touch, hence it is touched and touching us back. And it is a medium for and mediator of touching other others, as it is through the glove that the ordinarily touched (the world) is touched. By means of this double position in the touch, the glove emancipates from human control. It enables us humans to realize many touches that we alone would not be capable of, and in this way, it emancipates us from our limitations as humans. The glove is a very material invitation to become, that increases with every new gloves invented, a switch to which is just another un/dressing away. By focusing on the glove/hand entanglement, New Dawn can be read as promoting the haptic sense as a hitherto neglected contributor of the aesthetic. Being self-critical however, we argue that depicting the future of touch by means of the glove eventually is a rather restrictive speculation, as it limits all touch to the one we exert by and experience from hands; whereas reality disposes a multiplicity of touches (e.g. a touch between shoulders, eyes, lips). To expand future touches could thus be an interesting continuation for New Dawn.


2018 ◽  
Vol 215 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-176
Author(s):  
Dr. Ahmed Hamid Shalyan

This study focuses on monitoring the development in the lexical composition of the modern Russian language lexical-semantic digits pluraliatantum nouns and nouns, mostly used in the plural form. The material of the study used the book "Dictionary of new words." During the analysis it was found that the process of appearance of words and pluraliatantum nouns, is used mainly in the form of plural. numbers can be considered active and continuous, on the one hand, characterizes the category of plural nouns in the structure as a strong, mnogoznamenatelnuyu category, on the other hand, once again convinces us of the inseparable, mutually connection of language and society. Political and economic reforms in Russia, have occurred in recent decades, the expansion of ties in all areas with other countries of the world are reflected in the lexical composition of these units, their semantics and education


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 128-139
Author(s):  
Anne O'Byrne

Of all the terms Jean Améry might have chosen to explain the deepest effects of torture, the one he selected was world. To be tortured was to lose trust in the world, to become incapable of feeling at home in the world. In July 1943, Améry was arrested by the Gestapo in Belgium and tortured by the SS at the former fortress of Breendonk. With the first blow from the torturers, he famously wrote, one loses trust in the world. With that blow, one can no longer be certain that “by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the other person will spare me—and more precisely stated, that he will respect my physical, and with it also my metaphysical, being.” In a vault inside the fortress, beyond the reach of anyone who might help—a wife, a mother, a brother, a friend—it turned out that all social contracts had been broken and torture was possible. His attackers had no respect for him, and no-one else could or would help.


2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (5) ◽  
pp. VO547
Author(s):  
Lisetta Giacomelli ◽  
Roberto Scandone ◽  
Mauro Rosi

   In 79 A.D. Vesuvius buried entire cities in a few days under a blanket of pumice and ashes. It was a sudden event, which occurred after centuries of inactivity, heralded only by earthquakes that repeated periodically, for many years, creating addiction rather than alarm. After the event, the vegetation covered the volcanic products, and the memory of the disaster was lost. The first excavations began in Herculaneum in 1738 and in Pompeii ten years later, in times when archeology still did not exist. Much was destroyed, given away, thrown away. Almost intact buildings emerged, with all their contents, with many inhabitants caught on the run. The arduous process of recovering the sites has had important and not always happy stages, accompanied by continuous progress in the excavation methods.  Volcanology has drawn from those experiences as much as it could, setting itself the goal of reconstructing the story of an explosive eruption, the first in the world to be described, by Pliny the Younger, the one that most left its mark on buildings, vegetation, animals and humans. Without the eruption, Pompeii and Herculaneum would have disappeared. The details on how the romans lost their lives in the tragedy is an important component to be offered to Pompeii’s visitors and that is at present largely imperfect. Knowing it and reconstructing its impact on people and the territory, going beyond the archaeological site, is an experience of the past and a warning for today and for the future. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatiana S. Akhromeeva ◽  
Georgy G. Malinetsky ◽  
Sergey A. Posashkov

The article considers the interaction of science and art, as well as the development of Science Art from the standpoint of the theory of self-organization and the theory of humanitarian-technological revolution. The world is at the point of bifurcation defining the future. The choice of the further trajectory will be largely determined by what is happening in the emotional and intuitive spaces. This, in turn, depends on the deve­lopment of art, science, philosophy. The article discus­ses alternative futures and the role of culture in them.Charles Snow wrote about a gap between the two cultures — natural science, answering the question “How?” and looking into the future, and humanities, answering the question “What?” and often reflec­ting on the past.The growing gap between the two cultures prevents the civilization from relying to the necessary extent on scientific knowledge and leads to its devaluation. The authors show the importance of the “exchange of metaphors” between science and art, allowing to build bridges over the gap of two cultures. Another way to connect these two spaces is the development of interdisciplinary approaches, in particular, the theory of self-organization, or synergetics. In the 1970s, synergetics was conceived as a language that allowed humanitarians, specialists in natural sciences and mathe­maticians to discuss, formulate and pose common problems, while remaining, nevertheless, in the space of science. Now the central interdisciplinary problem is the study of not only the rational (as du­ring the last three centuries), but also the emotional and intuitive space of human and society.Currently, there are two forecasts materializing — the one of D. Bell, on the transition from the industrial phase of development to the post-industrial, from the world of technology to the world of people, and the one of N.A. Berdyaev, on the transition from the Se­cond Antiquity to the Second Middle Ages. The article shows how this will change the culture itself and its place in society.


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