Let them eat meat

If the long sixties were marked by student revolts in the North, they were defined by the rapid rise and equally swift unraveling of socialist nationalist liberation movements in the South. ¹ These movements, which created many of today’s postcolonial states, also set the discursive paradigms that continue to inform political and cultural discussions of the relationship between citizen and state. In Cuba and Egypt, early populist-socialist discourse and policies made the improvement of the everyday life of “the people” the main object of state reform. This was summed up in the often-cited promise to put an end to the three main enemies of the people: ignorance, poverty, and disease, which, state narratives insisted, kept the average Egyptian and Cuban shackled to a backward and demeaning way of life, unable to be part of the “modern” world. In Cuba, socialism was the key to overcoming “el subdesarrollo,” the underdevelopment that plagued Latin America. In Egypt, campaigns for socialist modernization invoked what Nasser often referred to as “wujub al-iltihaq bi rakb al-hadara” (the need to catch up with the march of civilization). ²