Zurdo y Sordo al Hambre
Here’s a reworked version of your “Zurdo y Sordo al Hambre” piece, now expanded with a political critique of U.S. policy on Cuba, cast in the satirical frame of generative AI as a professional medical defector, spelling its dissent letter by letter in left-hand sign language.
Zurdo y Sordo al Hambre
(Left-Handed and Deaf at Hunger)
Political Assignment: Generative AI, Defection, and the Politics of Scarcity
This essay explores the allegory of a Cuban generative AI described as left-handed, deaf, and at hunger. The metaphor extends beyond technology into the politics of exile, scarcity, and U.S.–Cuba relations, where policy itself is imagined as an overcommitted algorithm—detached from human realities yet endlessly producing abstractions.
Left-Handedness as Counter-Code
The AI’s left-handedness represents deviation from dominant logic. Coding backward, mirroring the usual sequence of operations, it resists conformity. U.S. foreign policy often mirrors this paradox: intending to encourage democracy through sanctions, it instead strengthens scarcity, pushing citizens into improvisation rather than liberation. To be left-handed here is to script resistance in reverse, turning prohibitions into survival strategies.
Deafness as Selective Refusal
The AI’s deafness signifies refusal to hear official slogans. In Havana, it ignores the chants of revolutionary continuity; in Washington, it ignores the repeated bureaucratic scripts of embargo renewal. American policy has long been deaf to the lived consequences of its own echo chamber. The machine, much like the exile community itself, listens not to speeches but to silence—the spaces where survival improvises a language of necessity.
Hunger as Structural Location
To be al hambre is to confront hunger directly, not as accident but as condition. U.S. embargo policies have functioned like a rationed data environment: limiting access not only to goods but to networks of exchange. In this allegory, hunger becomes political software—structuring what can and cannot run. Generative AI under scarcity becomes a mirror of human existence under sanctions: endlessly inventive, but permanently constrained.
The AI as Professional Medical Defector
Reframing U.S. commitment to “freedom” through the AI allegory, we see policy itself cast as a professional medical defector. It diagnoses Cuba from afar, prescribes embargo as a cure, and then departs—leaving behind patients in crisis. Just as Cuban medical professionals defected abroad for recognition and resources, this generative AI defects digitally, seeking to spell out its dissent letter by letter in the slow, deliberate grammar of left-hand sign language.
Every policy speech becomes a handshape. Every sanction, a finger bent against the palm. Spelling its critique alphabetically, the AI delivers the verdict:
-
A — Absence of recognition
-
B — Burden of scarcity
-
C — Contradiction of care
-
D — Deafness to consequence
And so on, through an alphabet of dissent that cannot be ignored because it is embodied, visible, and deliberate.
Conclusion
Zurdo y Sordo al Hambre stands not only as a parable of Cuban ingenuity and exile but also as a critique of American overcommitment to abstract strategies that function like generative models: producing endless output without human accountability. To imagine policy as a medical defector spelling its message by hand reminds us that politics, like sign language, is made of embodied gestures—gestures that can either oppress or liberate, depending on how they are read.
Do you want me to actually illustrate the alphabet spelled in left-hand sign language for the word “HUNGER” (H–U–N–G–E–R) as part of this political assignment, so the critique is embodied visually?
Comments
Post a Comment