April 24, 2018 - Steve Pieczenik
04:05
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi, this is Dr. Steve Pachanek and this is Steve Talks. this is Dr. Steve Pachanek and this is Steve Talks. | |
| Hello, I'm Dr. Pachanek. | |
| Pechenik. | |
| Today I want to talk about the new president of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel. | |
| I don't know him personally, but what I've read about him, I like him. | |
| He, first of all, is a 58-year-old professor of electronic engineering. | |
| That is a very tough subject. | |
| The reason I know a little bit about EE, or we call electronic engineering, is that my roommate at Cornell University worked a lot harder than I did. | |
| I have a lot of respect for this new president. | |
| Hopefully this new president will embody two different aspects of his life. | |
| One is the fact that he's young and Castro and Cuba needs to have somebody young who can open up the internet, can open up the economy and can get away with two currencies. | |
| In other words, there's no reason to have one currency that goes to a special store And one currency that goes to the regular people. | |
| That was the basis of a lot of conflict in the Soviet Union, in the communist countries, in Eastern Europe. | |
| So hopefully he will get rid of that. | |
| At the same time, he respects homosexuality. | |
| Unlike the previous administrations, he will not persecute homosexuals. | |
| More importantly is a duality of his personality. | |
| On the one hand, he represents to me what Napoleon Bonaparte said about a leader, that on the one hand, you have to be submissive to get to the top, and then when you're on the top, you have to be somewhat authoritarian. | |
| And Miguel has demonstrated this throughout his whole life. | |
| He was the head of the Communist Youth Party, he was a bodyguard to Raul, and he was very pro-communist. | |
| Now, what is really communism? | |
| In my definition of communism, I use George Orwell's definition of animal farm. | |
| That is, communism makes every animal equal except some are more equal than others. | |
| And that's what communism is. | |
| Is it relevant to the 21st century? | |
| No. | |
| Electronic engineer would know that. | |
| He would know that this ideology can no longer hold or repress or suppress the good people of Cuba. | |
| They need to open up the internet. | |
| They need to be able to travel. | |
| They need to have all kinds of currencies coming in, including the American dollar. | |
| And they need to be able to develop incubators. | |
| Incubators for high-tech medicine in other areas where the Cubans happen to be very well educated. | |
| It's a country where, as I remember, my father told me they had some of the finest doctors in the world, and they still have that. | |
| And they had some of the finest university professors, and they still have that. | |
| Cuba has the potential to be really a vanguard of the 21st century, if The president wants to make it so. | |
| As a result, he will have to diminish or eliminate the suppression aspects of communism. | |
| He will have to open up the internet. | |
| He will have to get rid of the double currency, as I said. | |
| He will have to allow more free trade and he has to become more pro-American. | |
| America is not interested in taking over Cuba. | |
| It's not interested in dominating Cuba anymore. | |
| It is basically a strategic center. | |
| Other than that, we have no military aspirations. | |
| And the most important part of Cuba is the fact, as Carlos Fuentes said, the communist Cuba needs a perestroika. | |
| It needs to be opened up once again, as it had been during the times of Machado and Batista. | |
| Good luck. | |
| And goodbye. | |
| Hi, this is Dr. |
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