External Influences, Internal Weaknesses

The most disturbing tendency which can be observed more readily today is the need of many leaders of developing countries to 'belong', to buy into global trends and practice. Because they have become alienated from that which is native or more appropriate, they value the external sometimes just for the fact that it has originated 'outside'. Again, this is a symptom of imperfect information, imperfect knowledge and biased intelligence.

Hamelink (1983:5) refers to the phenomenon of cultural synchronization as the cultural arm of the old project to maintain the dependency structure of the metropolis-satellite arrangement.

"Exogenous influence may be imposed on the receiving cultural systems or it may be actively invited by them...a particular type of cultural development in the metropolitan country is persuasively communicated to the receiving countries (and) the traffic of cultural products goes massively in one direction and has basically a synchronic mode."

This becomes particularly reprehensible when it is used to destabilize a government which is trying to work out a destiny which is more appropriate to its own environment. The ongoing impasse between Cuba and the United States of America is not as illogical as it may seem to those who wonder why it persists even so long after the demise of the Cold War. The United States of America seems to have adopted the wardship principle in claiming to be defending the right to democracy for Cubans and on behalf of Cubans, in order to justify its own imperialist determination to see Cuba synchronized. If nothing positive (and this is an impossibility) could be said about Cuba's achievements, one would have to admire its determination thus far to intervene in its internal and external environments on its own terms.

"In the immediate decades ahead we face the growing prospect of having to change the most fundamental aspects of our belief system and patterns of social life. The challenge will be to see through the illusions of a consumer oriented, technologically based existence, to alter the premises upon which the belief system of the dominant culture is based, and to retain those aspects of our past cultural achievement that are compatible with a culture in equilibrium, with the carrying capacity of the natural systems that make up the biosphere....We face the tragic prospect of the next generation being caught in a conceptual double bind where the ability to understand the problem will be dependent upon the same patterns of thought partly responsible for the scope of the crisis"(Bowers 1993: 9-10, 32)

BOWERS, C.A. (1993). Education, cultural myths and the ecological crisis: Toward deep changes. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press.
HAMELINK, Cees J. (1983) Cultural autonomy in global communications: Planning national information policy. New York: Longman.

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"Patria est communis omnium parens" - Our native land is the common parent of us all. Keep it beautiful, make it even more so.

Blessed is all of creation
Blessed be my beautiful people
Blessed be the day of our awakening
Blessed is my country
Blessed are her patient hills.

Mweh ka allay!
Guanaguanare