In my last post I talked about moving to more nuanced views of the world -- of the dangers of black-and-white thinking. I mentioned Jeffrey Goldberg's visit to Fidel Castro in Cuba as a startling example of not just Castro but Goldberg dealing in grays. Today I want to add that we have to see not just issues but each other in shades of gray. ¡Nobody's perfect! Which makes me think of our (ridiculous and hypocritical) insistence on candidates' purity, baseball players' purity, and Lady GaGa's anything but.
We are mixed messengers bearing mixed messages, to say the least.
So anyway, Goldberg's report of his visit to Cuba didn't go unremarked in Cuba. You will remember, Goldberg mentioned that Castro said something like the Cuban model wasn't even working for Cuba anymore (the anymore is important.) Apparently this statement caused some problems in Cuba. Castro said Goldberg had misinterpreted him. But please note, Cuba is laying off half a million workers in the public sector which employs most Cubans and is urging them to seek private sector jobs.
Goldberg reports the following mistranslation of his post
:"Not alone has he said things like this before, but the on-the-ground absoluteness is that it is a adage that the Cuban archetypal is not working, and that is why they are starting this all-embracing agreement with privatization," Goldberg told reporters.
If that's what the Cubanos read, I can see them getting miffed. Goldberg is having fun with this. The site he got the translation from appears to be a site which posts machine translations online. Check it out.
After you stop laughing, think about it: how can we be so absolutely sure of anything if even (especially) machines don't even hear or understand what we're saying!