The camera above, at La Cabana, is monitoring the people attending a children's books fair. I watched this camera pretty close for a while, and it seemed to be scanning for attractive young women and then following them through the crowd. Viva le Revolucion!
The United States under George W. Bush is becoming more like Havana, in the growing trend toward use of surveillance cameras in public places. Americans of previous generations saw that type of invasive surveillance as a totalitarian tactic, but times have changed. We have enacted new laws like the Patriot Act, which allows the government to review which books our citizens check out of the library or which books they've purchased on-line. And we're staffing up a huge bureaucracy under Tom Ridge that will be charged with convincing Americans to spy on one another and report their suspicions to the government. In this climate of fear, ignorance, and suspicion, surveillance cameras don't carry the psychological baggage they did during our more free and courageous past.
The founding fathers (right) apparently never anticipated the dangers of a world in which the President of the United States denounces entire nations as "evil," his cabinet members routinely sling verbal mud at our allies, and our military force is used to secure financial objectives such as controlling Iraqi oil fields. The Bill of Rights has become "too restrictive" for fighting war against the "terror" that might theoretically result from all of these hateful words and actions. Like Jefferson and Franklin, I'd be more inclined to control our leaders' mouths than our citizens' movements, but I'm in the minority these days in the United States.