Cuba is the best example of a successful communist-ish state. Most if its struggles are due to sanctions imposed by the US and enforced via its allies across the world.
"if the entire world is a sh*thole, nobody will be able to tell it's due to communism"?
I fail to see what "needed technological developments" would West Germany give them.
> Cuba is the best example of a successful communist-ish state
Successful as in "not completely failed, unlike all the others". Look, I sympathize with their struggles being so close to the US & all, but the fact that this is the best-case for you have should give you a bit of pause, because Cuba is by no means close to being a paradise.
To put things in context, both the largest & most populated countries in the world used to be communist. They both had to abandon it & switched to a form of crony capitalism, which, as bad as it is, seems to actually work better for them than the alternative.
- individual freedom will be suppressed (because "public good"; can't have greedy people doing greedy things, them weeds need to be killed early).
- since individual freedom is suppressed the regime is naturally going to be autocratic, which means that "the state" is actually a handful of people... who now get to freely decide how they define "public good".
The fundamental error of communism is that in any implementation, it doesn't really have mechanisms to "punish" greedy leadership, only greedy individual citizens. Which is an idea as good as it sounds.