Note:
Men, manly men who see themselves that way, will feel less manly walking on the shoulder of the road than driving.
Especially on a road or street where there's almost no other pedestrian traffic. Being alone at the side of the road without the protection of a vehicle around you is weak, vulnerable, unmasculine.
Where's the bicycle in that? Boyish, childish, trivial.
Other note:
There's a hinky move to paint the Latin and South American populist movements as homophobic. Same general cloying artificial sentiment that keeps insinuating and mewling about the oppression of women in Islam. Has as its driving purpose the attack not the defense.
More research necessary - Ginsberg did get the bum's rush out of Cuba for insisting the treatment of gays there and then, the mid 60's, was inappropriate and uncool.
What we want to do is get into the minds of the pronouncing authorities. Cuba also took exception to Ginsberg's criticism of their anti-marijuana-ism.
What's in their minds? How about what it was the Cuban revolution was a response to.
The official American version is consumer items, they were opposed to our freedom to buy things and have things and get ahead on our own initiative.
The truth is darker and less condemning of the revolution.
Cuba under Bautista was a cesspool of vice, managed and maintained by American criminal executives.
Cuba under Bautista was an encyclopedia of horror stories of the kind now associated with places like sex-tourist destinations and lawless border towns, where disposable lives can be rented or bought, the underworld of indulgence and depravity - politically-sanctioned slavery, exploitation call it what you want, these things go hand in hand.
Corruption looks different depending where you are when you see it - from the veranda of the seaside mansion it looks like the necessary rough unpleasantness of doing business in the real world, but from the knife-edge squalor of the cheapest rooms in town it's hell pure and simple. And the constituents can be identified and their origins traced - in the case of Cuba and the southern nations, the voiceless suffering go right back to the indigenous. The sugar economies of the Caribbean and Central America were slave-driven from their beginnings and the more cunning version of starvation wages was just a refinement, a more secure and adaptable version.
So the deal is again as usual, you have to commit to a position - whether it's okay that it's like that. Or not.
Big party in Havana! Wild! And then go home, and make sure your women never get within a hundred miles of the place.
Fidel and Che said not, and everything they did came from that commitment.
They linked what they saw with who they saw doing it. Accurate in the broadest sense, the particulars, over time, carried their inaccuracies out to injustice and high-contrast inequality. This gets amplified into bigotry, though it begins as valor and protection of the truly innocent.
That's what needs to be recognized and confirmed - the polarities are false and cynically exaggerated, and the appeal that tries to create an image of brutal intolerance is made to people who have more in common with Fidel and Che than with those who are trying set them up.
