Many central and south American heads of state have tried to stand up to that empire, and many have died in plane crashes. Hugh Chavez, demonized in American media, put pieces of the bill of rights on all food packaging, stood up for the poor and was opposed by the rich. Those people help him survive a military coupé. I would not be surprised if in 40 years, declassified documented revealed that coupé was US led.
For those who think that's crazy tin foil hat, remember that the US did cause the September 11th 1973 uprising in Chile, which led to the deaths of 11,000 civilians.
In a few hundred years when this era is not covered in the relentless nationalism that paints our view of the world, people will discover how much of our modern world was controlled by so very few.
+ Fidel does not allow his people to leave, with the threat of punishment.
+ Fidel does not allow democracy
+ He does not allow any real internet access
+ Fidel puts political dissidents in jail
+ Fidel's private Army own's 85% of the economy
+ Cuban's live in relative poverty
+ Only the US 'embargos' Cuba, they are free to trade with 167 other nations in the world - and even buy American products from wherever they want - just not America.
This is not 'propaganda'.
> Fidel does not allow his people to leave, with the threat of punishment.
Everybody is (now) free to leave Cuba. But OK, I think that's fairly recent.
> Fidel's private Army own's 85% of the economy
"Fidel's private Army" is just an ugly sound byte. It's the Cuban army and it's not going to be dissolved now that he's dead.
> Cuban's live in relative poverty
While poverty is a problem, it's not a Cuban problem. For instance, Americans also live in poverty (at least 45 millions of them)
On the other side, western propaganda blanks out a lot of facts about Cuba. Among those is the fact that a significant percentage of Cubans approve their government.
> On the other side, western propaganda blanks out a lot of facts about Cuba. Among those is the fact that a significant percentage of Cubans approve their government.
I can't help but notice that you skipped over the little details about a lack of democracy, a lack of free access to information, and how dissidents are punished.
> On the other side, western propaganda blanks out a lot of facts about Cuba. Among those is the fact that a significant percentage of Cubans approve their government.
Weird. Then why the resistance to holding elections?
And it is a dictatorship, so no elections. I wrote significant not majority.
Just wanted to point out that it's hard to get a realistic picture in the middle of all the propaganda. For instance, there's no starving in Cuba and health care for everybody. You cant say that about all countries with elections.
On Cuba, even suggesting change of leadership is enough to put you in prison.
And I've seen just outside town the gorgeous villas with manicured gardens and water features, where members of the Party live. There's inequality in the West but nothing like there is in the "worker's paradise".
Unlike the USA, the UK has efficient universal healthcare and access to quality education, plus working safety net for the citizens. It might not be easy to rise from the poverty, but it is possible and indeed, most Britons are doing OK.
As to your small personal dab, I grew up in a Communist country and am familiar with the package, don't need no lectures from guys in Che t-shirts.
You went on a tourists' visit of poverty. Try doing the same in London, and let's see how you do there, bruv.
And yes I am aware that as a tourist those are the bits I was allowed to see; I'll wager the "real" Cuba is far worse.
Ha ha ... haha hah .... ha
Except, any company making a deal with Cuba is automatically banned from dealing with the US.
To this date, the US even interfers in Europe regarding that: There is a famous case where a German bought Cuban Cigars from a Dane, and the FBI interfered, and seized the funds from their bank accounts.
If any company ever touches the USD, the US claims to have jurisdiction over them.
> + Cuban's live in relative poverty
The median wealth and income in Cuba is higher than most middle american countries.
Cuba is not a great country to live in, but please don’t distort the facts. That doesn’t make you any better than the North Korean propaganda that claims the US president eats babies.
Can you be more precise by what you mean when you say "making a deal"? Does flying to Cuba constitute "making a deal"? Air Canada has flown there for years and still flies to the US.
Just to put a concrete point, Per capita GDP of Cuba is 4 times the largest democracy country (India).
I'm seeing it at closer to 3x based on <http://www.tradingeconomics.com/india/gdp-per-capita> and <http://www.tradingeconomics.com/cuba/gdp-per-capita>.
But even granting 4x, notice that it was 5x back in 1970 (which is as early as the Cuba chart in this dataset goes). And if you look at numbers from right before the Cuban revolution, it was about 6x...
Of course the embargo, the Soviet subsidies, the removal of those subsidies, and the sugar price crash in the 90s make it hard to make much practical sense of Cuban GDP per capita and its evolution.
I _would_ like to respond to your "normal characteristics" point, though. The "people aren't allowed to leave" your country _is_ a normal characteristic of communist states, but that doesn't make it OK. And I would argue that it's not necessarily inherent to "communism", and _is_ "evil" in pretty basic terms: it violates the right of freedom of movement. See also UN declaration of human rights, article 13. I understand the practical reasons such a restriction is instituted, and I can even make some moral arguments for it (e.g. owing a debt to the society that provided your education and hence not being allowed to take your skills elsewhere), but I still don't think the outcome is OK.
This is the big one. Many countries have restrictions on people coming, for various reasons, but any country/govt that prevents people leaving knows perfectly well that it's doing something that people want to flee.
Lots of people in Miami consider themselves Cuban and are just waiting for the opportunity to go home and reclaim their family's birthright. Leaving a particular regime doesn't mean abandoning your heritage.
The US didn't cause this. They tried to stop it.
If that wasn't obvious by itself, a brief glimpse at Venezuela and what Chavez/Maduro's regime has accomplished should dispel any remaining doubt.
But I'd say its factually incorrect.
Should incorrect statements be downvoted even if it shows an interesting state of mind?
No I'm not denying that providing hospitals and doctors to Africa is a good thing, but America, and even ordinary Americans like Bill Gates have done so much more for Africa than Castro ever did, and it seems rather unfair that Western efforts are neglected and we are seen as colonizers to seek independence from whereas brutal and oppressive dictators such as Castro are presented as honored crusaders for throwing a smidgen of help to Africa.
That said, I have yet to see anything resembling a credible source that claimed more than 10,000 direct deaths caused by the Castro regime. I've seen much higher numbers (50,000 or more) in terms of indirect deaths: people trying to get out of Cuba and drowning in the process.
The population of Cuba around the time of the revolution was about 7 million; now it's around 11 million. The population of the Soviet Union in the 1930s was between 150 and 200 million (good statistics are hard to come by; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937) for why). Even if we take the extreme 7 million and 200 million numbers, 10,000 Cuban deaths is equivalent to about 285,000 Soviet deaths on a per-capita basis. And that's over a 50-year or so period. So yes, Stalin killed a lot more people no matter how you count it. Of course, "leader who killed a smaller percentage of the population than Stalin" is a _really_ low bar; pretty much everyone except Pol Pot clears it.
In general, the "Cuba under Castro" numbers for political violence don't seem any worse than other Latin American countries in the 20th century. Again, this isn't _good_, just like it's not good that we can end up talking about "oh, that's equivalent to hundreds of thousands of deaths on a per-capita basis, which is _tiny_". :(
For comparison Puerto Rico have had about 10k murders in the last 15 years alone[1], and that's in less than half the Cuban population.
From 1998 figures[2] and 2002 population numbers I guesstimate that officially about 820 murders occur per year in Cuba, and the 10k in 50 years evens out to 200 per year.
[1] http://www.estadisticas.pr/iepr/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=nf...
[2] http://www.sld.cu/sitios/dne/buscar.php?id=3297&iduser=4&id_...
Yep. Would it likewise surprise you to learn that the Pinochet government, which is described in similar ways, killed (at the high end of the estimates; the officially accepted ones are 10-20% lower) about 3200 people and "disappeared" about 1000, over the course of 17 years? Also, about 30,000 tortured, though; I have not seen claims of this for Castro's Cuba. All this out of a population of 10-13 million. It sure surprised me when I looked up the numbers.
I'm not condoning the things either government (Pinochet's or Castro's) did, but they are both nowhere close to being "drenched in blood" the way Stalin's or Pol Pot's or Mao's governments were.
I'm also surprised that the population isn't more, Chile felt like a "big" country to me compared to tiny Sweden, but 11 is not much bigger than 8. Though by now it's 18 and 9 millions, so I child deaths seem to be down in Chile since the 80's.
[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Cuba#Political...)
What do you have to say, as an African, to Fidel Castro's role in the Angolan civil war, and in establishing Angola's dictatorship?
Many don't know this, but George W. Bush had quite an impact:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President's_Emergency_Plan_for...
It's the time when society divides into economic winners and losers, and the wealth gap will increase - sometimes dramatically. So yay innovation and (somewhat more) freedom, but woe social tensions.
I don't doubt that his doctors may have helped you.
However, the man has committed grievous crimes, keeps 'his people' in abject poverty, on an 'island prison'. More than 85% of the economy is in the control of the military - his private Army.
"Up until today, Cuba still sends significant numbers of doctors to remote African areas and provide expensive medical procedures for free."
This is false and misleading. They do not provide it for free - they are paid by international agencies and it is one of the few real 'exports' that Cuba has.
Most perniciously - the money that is supposed to go to the doctors mostly goes to the military junta - while the doctors themselves receive very little.
Moreover - the Cuban doctors abroad are prisoners. They are held with the threat of violence or internment of their families back home. If they try to escape or leave - they go to prison:
http://www.cubanet.org/htdocs/CNews/y00/jun00/06e4.htm
Those doctors that 'helped you' get 5% of their 'salary' - while 95% goes to their captors.
Praise the doctors, not Fidel.
I find it abhorrent that such statements could be made about a cruel dictator, who has done 'some possibly good things' in the name of his legacy, whilst at the same time tormenting millions.
It's sad that people should hold such a tyrant in such esteem - because not only are those medical programs are paid for mostly by 'evil Western Nations' - aid to African nations is overwhelmingly from 'Western nations' (at least in terms of direct/indirect aid - of course China is a huge economic investor).
Let us not make a totem of this man without being cognizant of all the things he has done.
Way less crimes than those who accuse him. Never sprayed Vietnamese with Agent Orange or napalms for one, never dropped nuclear bombs on civilians, never supported Pinochet et co, doesn't have 25% of the world's incarcerated in just 4% of the global population, and lots of other things besides.
>keeps 'his people' in abject poverty
A 40+ years embargo has something to do with that too...
>More than 85% of the economy is in the control of the military - his private Army.
It's in control of the state, which is how things are supposed to work in communist countries. Not necessarily worse than having it in the hands of corporations...
That's a logical fallacy. You can't say that Castro's crimes against humanity are okay because the US has committed worse ones.
>A 40+ years embargo has something to do with that too...
Only a US embargo. That leaves more than 80% of the world GDP to interact with.
Nope. The US brutally punished countries which traded with Cuba. The best and most macabre example of this would be the 1974 Bangladesh Famine, which had a death toll of 1-1.5 million, and was almost entirely preventable.
After the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation war, when Bangladesh achieved its independence from America-backed Pakistan, US initially refused to recognize Bangladesh as a country and trade with it because Bangladesh wanted to prosecute Pakistani war criminals, responsible for the worst genocide since the Holodomor(and committed using American arms). Infact, Nixon and the US refused to condemn Pakistani actions, and actively worked to suppress evidence of their crimes.
When the famine started in 1974, the US initially promised food aid to Bangladesh, but refused to deliver because Bangladesh exported jute to Cuba(Cuba was one of the first countries to recognize Bangladeshi independence). By the time Bangladesh agreed to stop all trade relations with Cuba, and US aid finally arrived, the famine was pretty much over and had claimed its 1,500,000+ victims. Now, to make it clear, the US had 2 million+ tonnes of grain pretty much ready to deliver, but held back at the last moment while hundreds of thousands were starving to death. This was also while US was giving huge amounts of grain as food aid to surplus food producing South Vietnam, which the Vietnamese traded for weapons.
Correct, but it can help a lot of people come down off of their high horse.
That's a naive view. Do you really think the rest of the world can just straight up ignore the US's embargo and play nice with Cuba, while still staying on good terms with the US?
My impression was then when America tried to force other countries to participate in the embargo they told them to shove it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms%E2%80%93Burton_Act
Also yes Cuba has trade with the rest of the world
http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/cub/
> Cuba is the 140th largest export economy in the world. In 2014, Cuba exported $1.74B and imported $5.91B, resulting in a negative trade balance of $4.17B.
> The top exports of Cuba are Raw Sugar ($392M), Refined Petroleum ($314M), Rolled Tobacco ($236M), Hard Liquor ($116M) and Raw Nickel ($108M), using the 1992 revision of the HS (Harmonized System) classification. Its top imports are Wheat ($234M), Refined Petroleum ($228M), Concentrated Milk ($207M), Corn ($204M) and Poultry Meat ($196M).
> The top export destinations of Cuba are China ($311M), the Netherlands ($157M), Spain ($141M), Senegal ($92M) and the United Kingdom ($67.3M). The top import origins are China ($1.05B), Spain ($920M), Brazil ($507M), Canada ($389M) and Mexico ($360M).
Of course geography still matters, the US is nearby, large, and rich. Exporting to the US would be a huge plus for the Cuban economy but it wouldn't change everything.
Your impression is wrong.
An example knock-on effect relevant to HN is that as a UK company, we couldn't sell windows software to Cuba because things like windows run-time libraries would be covered by the US export embargo. In theory, they wouldn't even have a legal copy of any US operating system.
I'm sure there were similar knock-on effects across all industries that had US products, suppliers or connections in their business.
As even you said, Cuba was not supposed to have Windows copies, but I'm sure they had
Iran theoretically couldn't have access to Boeing parts (and this was a stricter embargo), but they had
There's always a way of solving things.
Most of Cuban problems were caused by themselves, not the embargo.
What? This was the real world, a matter of first hand experience. We could not consider jeopardising sales to our biggest market (the US) by breaking US embargo for a barely significant market.
But see my other comment.
(However, I don't think Cuba has qualms about pirating software, if this was hw it would have been a different issue)
Except, not really.
You can’t put any app using any encryption technology up on the Google Play Store or the iOS App Store, if you also distribute anything to Cuba.
For the first you need to get an approval from the US DoD, which requires that you never interact with Cuba.
It's not you selling to Cuba, it's Cuba buying through intermediates.
(Of course if you really want you can sell things directly to Cuba, but you need to find a way of disguising it)
You're (or, were) also forbidden from bringing Cuban cigars to the US, but if you arrive from a flight from Panama with a box of unmarked cigars nobody is going to do anything.
That’s part fo the issue.
Same goes for other products. Don't base them on U.S. technology if you plan to trade with America's enemies.
From wikipedia:
>>Cuba produces sugarcane, tobacco, citrus, coffee, rice, potatoes, beans and livestock.[2] As of 2015 Cuba imported about 70-80% of its food.[51] and 80-84% of the food it rations to the public.[52] Raúl Castro ridiculed the bureaucracy that shackled the agriculture sector.[52] Before 1959, Cuba boasted as many cattle as people. Today meat is so scarce that it is a crime to kill a cow without government permission.[53] Cuban people suffered from starvation during the Special Period.[29]
They hold on to the politics of the Communist party dictatorship as a means to continue their power and wealth extraction (China's political elites are by far the wealthiest politicians on earth, they make the US Congress look like paupers).
Partly because we are not the US and did not have a direct confrontation.
But partly because Trudeau Sr. was a communist-revolutionary apologist, in the French intellectual sense - and chilled with Fidel to boost is 'socialist hipster' cred and to thumb the eye of the Americans.
As a young man, I found it admirable. Now that I know many ex-Cubans, I find it utterly repulsive and a stain on our history. It's one thing to have 'relations' or 'diplomacy' with another nation - it's altogether another to chum around with a thug. If it was in the name of getting Fidel to let his people off the island, or encourage democracy... sure ... but it was not that.
As opposed to a right-wing capitalist pig, like most other leaders?
The name-calling can go both ways.
The logical fallacy I think is yours for trying to compare Cuba to the USA in a tit-for-tat comparison of misrepresented facts and issues.
Dropping a nuclear bomb seems 'bad' until you put it in the context of what the Japanese were doing, and the costs otherwise.
The North Vietnamese that the Americans & South Vietnamese were fighting against were 10x worse than Castro (they executed 100's of thousands in the streets - and put millions in concentration camps after the Americans withdrew) - and using 'agent Orange' was an act of reasonable desperation on the part of the Americans as it was used only to clear foliage near American firebases, the casualties were mostly American and of course it was not done with the knowledge people would be hurt - the author of the note makes it seem like it was used on purpose to hurt Vietnamese which is a gross misrepresentation.
Americas role in the world is fundamentally different than that of Cuba (and of course there is the issue of scale) which makes it futile to compare the USA to Cuba, tit-for-tat in terms of 'things done'.
But the comparison is resolved rather more pragmatically:
People literally risk everything, including their lives to flee Cuba to get to America.
Never the other way around.
Wow, I am Vietnamese, and this is so shockingly far from the truth. FYI, the total number of American casualties in the Vietnam war amounted to something like ~50,000, while the conservative estimate for the total number of Vietnamese deaths was at least one million- the majority of which were civilian. What's worse, Agent Orange's effects were far reaching. Long after the war had ended it continued creating unimaginable damage, to the environment, to the people, to the economy [1]. Conveniently downplaying this horrible crime (which the US has still not owned up completely) is misrepresenting the facts. And yes, Western nations have done 'worse'. Much of the tragedies around the world in the 20th century had much to do with the Western countries' imperialiastic mindset.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange#Effects_on_the_Vi...
The US has bombed and invaded Afghanistan for the crimes of a handful of (mainly Saudi-backed) loonies (after first sponsoring Bin Laden in the 80s), have invaded Iraq under BS false pretexts (WMDs etc) and created huge losses, chaos, anarchy and civil war, have helped destabilize Libya with the same outcome, have targeted the Syrian regime and in the process helped ISIS grow, and so on. And that's just the open actions since 2001...
It isn't really clear if this is true, there is a clear bias of studies to focus on the effect on American veterans, but there are 1-4 million Vietnamese affected depending on what non-American source you believe.
Tu quoque fallacy, for the record
Heck, US cops alone have probably killed much more people than the Cuban regime in those 50 years. And the place with 25% of the world's prisoners and 4% of the world's population is rich to call other places "police states".
This is tu quoque, because you're trying to say bad thing you did was OK because someone else did a bad thing too. However, you'll notice the above poster definitely did not claim what Castro did was OK.
Yes, because comparing the capabilities of a small, poor island nation is the same as comparing the capabilities of the most powerful country in the world.
Castro had no capability to do what the US has done, had he had the chance how would've done much worse.
A discussion that doesn't contain a "what about" element is one-sided. Those criticizing "whataboutism" only want their own shit to be left out of the discussion.
That some would call whataboutism a bad thing just goes to show how much some pots are used to be the only ones allowed to call the kettle black.
Even that, I wouldn't call "evil" -- self-serving imperialistic and post-colonial would fit better. Evil is a BS biblical notion for pre-modern people. It's no way to look at history with a rational mindset, and doesn't offer any explanation of various acts, nor a historical perspective.
For what its worth, I think "evil" is a word that shouldn't be used outside of storybooks. It is a binary word that is far too overgeneralised to the point it is meaningless to ascribe. It doesn't serve any persuasive or descriptive purpose.
Yes, on the North Vietnamese invaders who had a track record of murdering civilians well before the US was ever involved. And the Japanese who perpetrated the Rape of Nanking, etc.
But even so - the US has voted out these previous politicians whereas Cubans were and are not able to do that.
BTW, you are wrong: cubans do vote, too.
I'm also wondering why so many people were so desperate to leave Cuba in rickety rafts even though they could have just voted out the Castros instead in one of these elections you mention, but I'm sure you can explain that too.
+ The US sprayed 'agent orange' on trees near their firebases, and the vast majority of the 'victims' were American soldiers, not Vietnamese. Obviously, they didn't know what it would do.
+ The 'embargo' is 100% the fault of Fidel. He put nuclear weapons 40 miles away from florida, from those who backed by the credible threat of using them, thereby putting hundreds of millions of lives at risk. That's why the embargo started - he had ample time to wind it down. Jimmy Carter, Clinton, Obama - and even Bush Sr. would have made a deal of Fidel agreed to have elections.
That's straight up false. Between 3-4 millions Vietnamese suffered from it[1], and its devastating effects are still very relevant today. Concerning US soldiers, "By April 1993, the Department of Veterans Affairs had compensated only 486 victims, although it had received disability claims from 39,419 soldiers who had been exposed to Agent Orange while serving in Vietnam."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange#Effects_on_the_Vi...
(Khrushchev, not known as one of the Cold War's more pacifistic figures, responded that he found Castro's suggestion quite disturbing)
And the US isn’t putting nukes into NATO states? Italy and Turkey already have had some before Cuba got some, so what’s next? Estonia?
> And the US isn’t putting nukes into Estonia?
Honest question: Where is this coming from? I'd hate to call this war-mongering and spreading misinformation, but this is a great way to polarize a conversation in one fell scoop.
It was the cold war, and the US had already put nukes into Italy and Turkey, well within range of Moscow.
In such a game-theoretical standoff, the USSR had had to react – to keep the balance of power.
It’s a completely crazy situation, and I’d consider both sides of the conflict as Evil, but I’m not sure why so many people try to claim the US was Good, while the USSR was Evil. Both stood for some good, and some very bad principles.
I edited the comment to reduce the conflict potential, but keep the general idea of it.
Given Russias interest in toying and more with its neighbors, misinformation like this goes a long way of "normalizing" those conflicts. It prepares whomever is reading your comment to say, "huh, the both sides here are shades of gray" and just accept that conflict as normal.
So yeah. There are no US nukes in Estonia. If there are, please back up your sources.
Objectively? They were both Evil. If you compare them, the USSR is hands down the evil one. I really hate this whitewashing of USSR's history just to put down the US. I'm pretty sure nobody here defending Castro or Cuba ever had to live under a communist dictatorship.
It's as simple as:
Ask anyone from Eastern Europe or even Cuba on whose sphere of influence would they had rather been. I'm willing to bet everything that 90% of the answers will be NATO.
But comparing the US and USSR isn’t nearly as easy. Both were (and are) horrible to non-citizen. And while the US was mostly okay to the white citizen, minorities had to suffer for quite a while. And nowadays, the US mistreating its own citizen is getting extreme.
> Ask anyone from Eastern Europe or even Cuba on whose sphere of influence would they had rather been
That question isn’t nearly as easy either.
In Germany we’re having a huge group of people who lived under communism – and want it back. In some states (those which lived under communism), up to 20% of the people.
(This also answers the "I'm pretty sure nobody here defending Castro or Cuba ever had to live under a communist dictatorship" question, I guess? I didn’t live myself under communism, but I know quite a few who’d want it back, because they had it better)
Go ahead and compare how the United States treated the citizens of, say, France, with how the USSR treated the citizens of, oh, say, Czechoslovakia. We'll wait.
> And while the US was mostly okay to the white citizen, minorities had to suffer for quite a while.
It's telling that you are attempting to draw an equality between segregation -- which was legally ended in 1957 as part of an open and democratic process -- with the USSR's extensive gulag system, intricate controls on freedom of expression and freedom of thought, and general lack of civil rights for everyone, which lasted right up until the day it disintegrated.
> In Germany we’re having a huge group of people who lived under communism – and want it back.
If Communism was so great, why did you have to build a wall to keep people from running away from it? That's the unanswerable point here.
What is sad is how quickly people reach for a wide, monotone brush they like to paint things with lately. As an american, i have heard roughly your description of castro my entire life. To hear another version, from someone living a life in a continent i have never visited is both refreshing and educational.
I guess it's fair that many Americans don't know a lot about him and don't know about the details of his activities in Africa with doctors (and military, by the way). But that's kind of an American thing ... not enough 'world events' in the American press :), no offense.
As for the two doctors your pointed to, I am sure they are the exception. I happen to be Zimbabwean, actually, a good number of my childhood doctors were Cuban and they were there happily and willingly. My brother, a doctor himself, has many friends from Cuba who say the same.
You should read this article when you get a chance.
http://qz.com/846337/cuban-leader-fidel-castro-was-a-liberat...
There really is nothing disturbing about my opinion. At least on the African continent that is. Perspectives differ, I guess.
I didn't really want to comment in this thread but to be clear, the US embargo has kept Cuba in abject economic poverty not Castro.
The comment you are replying to is embracing that complexity. Paving over it with simplistic thinking "Castro was evil and wrong" does a great deal of violence to the truth.
I am no fan of the shape Fidel Castro's Cuba took, but I think it is more important that we learn from the mistakes of the revolution (which are not a simple matter of being 'evil' or 'wrong') than that we demonize them.
In general, we should learn from history or be doomed to repeat it.
I honestly agree.
I just think it is ridiculous to claim that Castro was "a great leader" when Cuba has fared very poorly under Castro in almost every respect. I felt obliged to point this out.
Were they given the chance (cold war, embargo, et al)?
I feel obliged to point this out too.
Cuba has been embargoed only by the USA.
Cuba can buy absolutely anything it needs - even American products - simply by going through any one of a myriad of interlocutors: Mexico, Canada, Jamaica, Venezuela.
There is absolutely no forgiving Fidel's cruel dictatorship.
Just as I understand there is some Cuban goodwill with respect to the doctors they send abroad - and early on Fidel's creation of better literacy/healthcare programs.
But remember this: Fidel worked with the Russians to put nuclear weapons 40 miles away from the USA - and created a crazy situation - the closest the world has ever been to full blown nuclear war. That was this man's hubris - he nearly helped put the world on fire. That kind of existential threat is not easily forgotten. Point being: the 'embargo' is 100% Fidel's fault, and he could have easily taken steps to have it removed, but his ego would not allow it.
That's after US did the same to Russia and failed invasion of Cuba. “In response to the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961, and the presence of American Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided to agree to Cuba's request to place nuclear missiles in Cuba to deter future harassment of Cuba.” [1]
You may want to read [2], which was posted on HN before. In short, US was a real bully back then. Anything did by Cuba and USSR were mostly reactive knee-jerking response to the aggressive stance of US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis
[2] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real...
It was a response to the Cuban revolution, which was Communist, and 'Soviet inspired' from day one - a global movement which was threatening the entire world.
I'm not an expert on the embargo, and it's a bit complicated because it's got multiple pieces of enabling legislation, but at first glance the only one of those that says anything close to what you're saying is Title III of the Helms-Burton act (see http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Documents/... for full text). That explicitly allows companies "trafficking in property which was confiscated by the Cuban Government on or after January 1, 1959", if it was confiscated from a United States national, to be sued in US courts. This obviously only matters to companies doing business in the US, because otherwise they don't care whether they get sued to start with. Note also that certain forms of real estate are excluded from the provisions of this law, again at first glance.
Am I just missing something? Do you have a citation for your claim?
The same happened with MasterCard and VISA, and is part of the reason why I think Germany should continue to keep its own payment system, and just ban MasterCard and VISA and PayPal within the EU.
Or that you can’t technically put apps on the iOS App Store or the Google Play Store if you trade with Cuba.
(As you technically need an export declaration, as described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10835045 )
The Reddit discussion references the Helms-Burton act, and for the case of things like banks and payment processors, I expect the problem is Title I section 103, which prohibits US nationals from extending loans or other financing to anyone for the purpose of financing transactions involving confiscated property as defined elsewhere in the act.
So for the cigar case, if the cigars were grown on land that was confiscated (for example), my reading of it is that processing a payment for the cigars would be prohibited under the act. Certainly so for MasterCard and Visa, which are clearly extending credit.
That's not the same as a blanket ban on both doing business with Cuba and business with US companies, but it does make things very complicated, I agree, especially because there are so many ways of extending credit when companies deal with each other.
An embargo sparked by Castro. Just saying.
As someone who studied the subject formally, don't place maximum weight on the success and failures of the (statistically insignificant) rise and fall of modern nation states. This is a very far cry from a controlled experiment to begin with, anyways.
Don't read into that too much. I'm not saying mainstream economics doesn't have compelling arguments to make about the elegant effectiveness of free (properly regulated) markets. I'm just trying to be fair: it's a far cry from a scientific fact, which it seems like not just this comment, but a lot of us in the west (even mainstream academic economics) sell the idea as.
I guess that destroys my argument that there hasn't been a single successful planned economy in history so far.
Well anyways, the objective fact here is that Cuba is objectively richer and more successful than some nearby economies that have had more right wing influence in nearby Central America.
Centrally planning an economy is an NP complete problem. Marxism is dumb and if any would be socialist on this forum can explain to me how we as a society can retain the benefits yielded by capitalism without the use of capital and how socialism of such a form can exist without a centrally planned economy, I'm all ears.
Marxism has failed and failed and then failed again, and then it also led to the deaths of 100 million.
For a concrete example, someone who is interested cannot really respond to you if they wanted to because you're firing in every direction with very little detail or explanation. How is anyone supposed to guess at what you consider to be the "benefits yielded by capitalism"? What socialism "of such a form" do you mean? Why do you seem blind to the many "dumb" parts of capitalism or liberal democracy? Do you study the various alternatives that have been discussed in the history of political science and theory? What specifically do you find dumb about Marxism, particularly as compared with its counterparts in other economic models and interpretations of human history?
On HN, you'll find emotional, knee-jerk reactions receive a swift, negative response. Especially when they're negative emotions, delivered with insults and anger. You can do much better than this, and you'll find interesting conversations coming your way.
> He had his fights and ills, but not with us.
Yeah, generally with his own citizens who he stomped on for decades. But hey, at least you got a couple free doctors out of it so screw those guys.
To pretend here, for me, as if he was cruel to our continent would be both ungrateful and untrue. The man offered free training and medical school for most of our African doctors, he harbored, trained and armed many a guerilla group in our pursuit of independence from colonization. Up until today, Cuba still sends significant numbers of doctors to remote African areas and provide expensive medical procedures for free.
The truth is, if as a continent we are to point at individual world leaders who did the most for African nations, Fidel Castro is very high up that list, if not at the top.
He had his fights and ills, but not with us.
With that, rest in peace Fidel Castro. Your legend lives on.