I visited cuba in 1998 for a few weeks. I was staying with a family who hosted visitors like my father and myself for a little extra foreign currency on the side. The father of the family that we were staying with was a chief economist in Castro's government.

I will never forget riding the elevator at the university in Havana. There was a woman whose job it was to press the buttons in the elevator after you told her what floor you wanted to go to. She was there every day.

I can't imagine that was a very fulfilling job for her, as there was clearly no point as people could just press the buttons themselves.

Jobs still need to be productive on some level

In just 10 years after WW2 ended, Latvia for example, became from being allotments of Britain and Sweden a modern industrial country. And now this time is called in Latvian school history books 'the period of unnecessary development'.

That is a barefaced lie. Forgetting the rest of the evil attributable to Communist ideology, the Ukrainian Genocide alone is evidence that it was many more than "hardly thousands": http://www.ncas.rutgers.edu/center-study-genocide-conflict-r...

Indeed, one need only consider the ease of which one could immigrate out of USSR, or other Communist states for that matter, to know something was seriously fucked in your glorious worker's paradise. How good can a political system possibly be when that same system makes it illegal to leave the country and your own citizens are willing to risk their lives to get out? I think if you look back on history, the real stand-out achievements of the Communist system are really it's unrivaled ability to systematically dole out want, suffering, and death to all but a political elite.

Given the logic of your last arguments however, I can easily see why someone such as yourself can look past the facts of the matter and support such a murderous, despicable system such as Communism.

Pointing to accidental deaths, or deaths from wars, or other misdeeds as somehow justifying the volitional and indiscriminate murder of whole populations defies logic. Someone else's wrong does not justify the sort of violence that your original posting obliquely supported.

In the end, your willingness to claim the great benefits of Communism while evading the methods used to cement the power of Communist party officials over the population should be red flag enough to any sane-minded person to reject you and your wares. Even then I would argue the equality of misery produced by the Communist to be no great achievement. Oh... and as for never trying it... I've never been burnt to death either, but I'm smart enough to know I want no part of it.

In the modern UK this is financially impossible for a family like that to give that kind of education to their kids.

Besides, there was no such thing as 'Ukrainian genocide', its a part of modern US political discourse to maintain the US political agenda in the Eastern Europe, hence the research you are referring to.