This is very different from the DPRK.
> conventional wisdom
Talk about unclear referents! I question the existence of a universal "conventional wisdom" on political issues like these.
It is actually very hard to characterize a reliable source in a way that does not exhibit any sort of cultural or political bias.
I'm sure that, unsurprisingly, if you live in a majority white country, most Cuban supporters would be white and left-leaning. If you were a Cuban that supported the Cuban regime and were happy, why would you leave, taking on so much risk and expense?
I met a Cuban like that. Simply put, to make more money. He knew the nuances of their system and was thankful for the good parts and the opportunities he had, but at the end of the day knew that for him individually it was more convenient to leave when he had the chance. It's just something that doesn't work for everybody by necessity.
I think he had a relative abroad that sponsored some sort of student visa, and he just never went back.
They've always existed, just have microphones now.
Nazi Germany (fascist far right) -> totalitarian dictatorship that invades its neighbors and executes dissidents
Soviet Union (communist far left) -> totalitarian dictatorship that invades its neighbors and executes dissidents
And if you think about it, how much of American culture in the 20th century was a result of things that came out of corporate boards?
Wait, are you saying equity ownership and therefore control, of “US style corporations” isn't inheritable?
Schumpeter said something in the lines of "it's ironic that in democratic free-market countries most economic activity happens under hierarchical top-down organizations".
It’s only even slightly ironic if you ignore that “free-market” is the capitalist euphemism for a society whose structure is top-to-bottom regulated (largely, through the exact shape of the imposed definition of “property rights”) around principals engineered and fought for tooth-and-nail over centuries by the capitalist (née mercantile) class to allow their heirarchical top-down organizations to replace those of the feudal aristocracy as the main driving force in society.
In the meantime, what happens is that the market is not and invention, but it "is". That is why there are black markets. And they are illegal. So what now? Easy: you have to brive all the public workers to get what you want. This is not only sad, this is attacking the dignity of the normal people who deserve a life.
Cuba does not have a major hunger problem at all and has a higher life expectancy than the US.
Lumping Cuba and North Korea together is silly & misguided.
That is plainly false. There are lots of cheating in how they count that, for example, if a kid is going to have any kind of problem, they suggest and try to abort it and it does not appear in the count, to give you just one single example about how they count life expectation. There is lots more that is only make up, such as the health care myth and others.
They do have lots of doctors they send abroad and the regime gets 70% of their income. When you land abroad, if you work like that, they take away your passport so that you cannot escape. They do campaigns to donate blood and they sell that blood (over 21 million dollars in sales for blood that was supposed to be, most of it, an altruist action by cuban people in one year). They are literally treated as slaves.
Did you see what happened last July? There were riots in the streets. They did not have even medicines or food and they (the regime and its propaganda) started to talk about the embargo (incorrectly called blockage) as the problem, when the problem is that those people in that odious regime do not let even the food or medicines go through without taking a part.
I mean, they take advantage of the anguish of relatives that are outside and they smash them. After that I saw president Diaz Canel promoting violence against people for the protests from his very own words, not a translation or similar (I can speak spanish).
The first "manipulation" identified would not impact Cuba's position as 1st in life expectancy in Latin America, as they concede in their article.
It is because if you cannot take care of a kid with some kind of problem and dies young, it lowers the life expectancy. So they encourage abortion and remove it from the count.
They have basically the same system: more repression and strictness in North Korea. But same base: corruption, repression, intervention and treating their citizens as animals with no dignity.
Unfortunately it's myths like this that are shown as evidence of the /entire/ narrative around NK being false, by those who treat NK as a socialist paradise. There is a lot of poor journalism on the topic (see: myth that NK claimed to fire a rocket into the sun, myth that NK claimed to have found a unicorn, claims that KJU doesn't poop, etc) and as such it's easy to simply say that it's all made up.
Certainly not justifying those arguments at all; this just shows how easy it is for the less-critical on any side of an issue to believe whatever they want because of a few counterexamples.
This is also a myth? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_abductions_of_Jap...
I wonder what they would not do to a local if they do that to foreigners.
How about this? https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/10/19/north-korea-horrific-pre...
The hair cut stuff is irrelevant, and sorry if it was not accurate. But the level of freedom there amounts to zero. I do not trust westerner media either all the time like a kid. I am not this silly. But hey, there is way more than that...
What gives?
I can understand different countries have different pros and cons, different people value different things, and something an American might find unpalatable might not be considered so bad somewhere else.
But North Korea seems to stand out as being one of very few countries that has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Odd that anyone who wasn't born there would willingly and voluntarily pledge their allegiance to such a regime.