I pictured this beautifully restored American car in the city of Trinidad with the Museum of the Revolution in the background. While I love cars myself (and I would like to find a way of sharing mine) I’m hoping that two things don’t happen with the thawing of US Cuban relations. The first is that these old cars don’t just get scrapped or exported to collectors in the rest of the world. They are now part of Cuba’s heritage and as such should be restored and used in Cuba. Secondly, I hope that Cuba doesn’t get flooded with new cars as that is the last thing it needs. Many of the streets are small and narrow and the Cuban cities don’t need to end up looking like any capitalist city. As Cuba is starting from scratch as it were it needs an organised scheme of shared car ownership where cars can be booked for an hour or more when needed and are placed conveniently throughout towns and cities. This in association with a decent public transport system should keep the streets clear, safe and clean and not tie up money on these expensive items which for most people sit idle for much of the day. The crazy world of the West is like it is because of poorly designed, inconvenient and expensive public transport systems. My hope that as in most other things that Cuba does that it again dares to be different. Copyright Junagarh Media, http://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk.
Tag Archives: Public transport
Writing to the papers – have your say part 1
Today I was incensed to write to my local paper again over the ever increasing rail fares that ordinary workers have to pay to get to the great metropolis. The fares go up each year and this year is no different. The most pathetic utterance of our local Tory MP is that they are not going up as much as before. GREAT. And he probably doesn’t pay for the increase anyway, we pay for him as well. What a joke our democracy is. The Labour and Conservative parties blame each other for their collective failures and meanwhile the people can’t even be bothered to vote. Still, we know where the increased fares are going to end up, in the grubby little hands of tricky Dickie and the two capitalist Christians. I’m tired of paying for tricky Dickie’s island in the sun and what happened to the “meek shall inherit the Earth”, certainly not with these two Christian billionaires running the transport systems. If they have any conscience they would realise that Jesus would have kicked them out of the congregation a long time ago. At least we have a little bit of media freedom. USE IT or LOSE IT.