When I was in Havana our AirBnB was next to the Spanish embassy. There was a long line every morning of potential emigres waiting for their turn. (I have no idea how the process works when they get to the front of the line, I just was told they were trying to get out of the country legally. )
After spending a couple weeks in Cuba it’s not hard to see why.
Which is the consequence of being sanctioned into oblivion for decades by the global hegemon, much to the dislike of the entire rest of the world.
https://www.wfpusa.org/countries/cuba/#:~:text=Cuba%20import....
Which is enough, as the US controls the emission of dollars, have monopolies over several technologies and, as it extends the sanctions even to the ships that trade in Cuba, disallowing them to enter in US, on practice it difficult trades between Cuba and any other country.
> It doesn't explain why Cuba needs to import 70-80% of their food despite being a fertile tropical paradise.
Modern agriculture depends on machines and fertilizers. And if you go without modern technology, climate change and shortages of water can be an even greater blow to your production. You will produce food, but will be susceptible to famine crisis, as were all countries before sufficient technological development.
Moreover, Cuba is also not an agrarian country. The urban population is greater than the rural, like in any modern country. Remember that societies without much technology had to have a much greater part of population in rural areas instead of cities to be self-sufficient in food.
I don't know as much about this next part, but seeds are also harder to import. I'd hazard a guess at there not being much capacity in that market unless you're buying from Monsanto or the like, which seems not to be an option in Cuba as those (American) companies are not exempt from the embargo, unlike exporters of food and medical supplies.
[*] According to many people, I’m not talking about the parent comment.
A decent intro to Monsanto (now Bayer, really) that covers some elements of their monopolistic behaviour: https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/home-garden/monsanto
tl;dr, there is a monopoly, and america decides if that monopoly can do business with Cuba
As they have fewer baskets to place their eggs, they are much more succetible to crisis: a blow in one economical activity generates crisis that affects a lot all other areas. For example, one of the causes for the current crisis is the pandemics that dropped their tourism to zero for 2 years. Now they have much less to invest, affecting all economical activities.
There have been famine and starvation before the communists took power. I don't think Cuba has ever been fully food self-sufficient. Not many countries are.
Not to mention agriculture needs access to fertilizers which the sanctions make harder to get.
The more important part from your source:
> The largest island in the Caribbean, Cuba is one of the most successful in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Food-based social safety nets include a monthly food basket for the entire population, school feeding programs, and mother-and-child health care programs.
This is a big achievement.
Also it doesn't make sense to compare Cuba with the richest Western Countries. Communist revolutions tend to happen in the poorest countries of the world. Saying they are poor because of communism is confusing cause and effect.
If we compare Cuba to her peers in Latin America, especially Haiti, then Cuba is doing vastly, vastly better. Cuba is doing really well on the human development index, providing free health care and decent education for all.
Cuba better than Haiti??? You are reading to many fake news. Cubans are travelling to Haiti to buy food and medicine.
Cuban healthcare good? You are joking right? If you need surgery have to bring your own equipment, including chirurgical globes and syringes. You have to either buy it in the black market or have a relative in a capitalist country to send it to you.
Dont even get me started on education.
Happy to provide you more details and break the bubble you are leaving in.
I have visited schools and the education level of the vastly higher. The knowledge of the children greatly impressed me. In fact you could talk the average person on the street about complicated issues regarding history, philosophy and economy. Many where even multi-lingual.
It is true that Cuba has trouble getting some medical equipment due to the sanctions but she also has a for a small island impressive pharmaceutical industry. There is a great medication for diabetics that would save many lives if it were allowed to be exported in the US. Not to mention having developed their own covid vaccine.
You are probably living in a exile-Cuban bubble.
People were not afraid to talk critically about their government with me and did so often.
Ever heard of something called propaganda? Are you still searching for the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein had?
These people are literally paid by the government to spread anti-cuban propaganda. It is even on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Herald#21st_century
> On September 8, 2006, the Miami Herald's president Jesús Díaz Jr. fired three journalists because they had allegedly been paid by the United States government to work for anti-Cuba propaganda TV and radio channels.
> Less than a month later, responding to pressure from the Cuban community in Miami, Díaz resigned after reinstating the fired journalists, saying that "policies prohibiting such behavior were ambiguously communicated, inconsistently applied and widely misunderstood over many years".
Why are you lying?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-68434845
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/18/cuba-protests-...
There is shortages of certain goods, yes. Starvation? No.
Haiti has a complicating factor. After winning independence from France, France told Haiti to pay 'debt' back to France. In the end, it had to pay 112 million Francs, which is an amazing sum for a newly independent country, and I think that it's unique in history, a government demanding that exorbitant of a payment from a newly independent country. It took until 1947 for Haiti to finish paying, 122 years of payment. You can't get over that sort of thing easily.
Wikipedia has a good article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_Independence_Debt. In another article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_debt_of_Haiti) it's said that Haiti's debt is mostly from that demand.
That said, Cuba's life expectancy (Cuban GDP per capita: $7,486 or so, as of 2021) is equal to or greater than much wealthier countries, like Lithuania ($30,577), Oman ($46,574), Seychelles ($30,126), or Russia ($26,120). In 2020, its life expectancy surpassed the US! Cuba has consistently outperformed countries like Lithuania, Russia, and even the world in life expectancy (counting since 2000), all of which have much greater GDP per capita. See https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy and https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-gdp-pe....
Even before Castro came to power, Che Guevara planned in enacting extreme tariffs to keep American money out. He used 19th century American tariffs to justify this.
Cubas government is far more interested in maintaining control than opening up to trade.
They are willing to advertise to tourists, which brings in cash without shaking things up.
But they aren’t willing to make the adaptations international trade requires.
Bad news for citizens of these countries that would have visited Cuba if they also want to visit USA and don’t want to bother with US visas:
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/tourism-...
It's had an embargo against Cuba since 1962.
They’re a wonderful people repressed by one of the world’s worst governments, and unlike, say, North Korea, they know it. They all have family in Florida. They are very aware of the outside world.
With that being said it could also be incompetence and/or corruption, but ignoring the embargo completely is just working to weaken your argument.
Like Cuba, Venezuela was a poverty stricken mess before the socialists took power.
Cuba could have been an incredibly successful country, they embraced communism and got what they asked for, poverty and slavery....enjoy...
Nobody in Cuba “asked for”, what you call “poverty and slavery”.
There are over 2 million tourists a year to Cuba. So saying “even the tourists aren’t going any more” is factually incorrect. I’m not sure if numbers going up or down is related to “bread in resorts”. I suspect it isn’t a leading consideration for most.
The fastest growing economy of the last few decades is communist, and Vietnam and Laos just plod on, so while I might have sympathy that authoritarianism is a horrible system, I’m not sure I see the picture as bleak as you do.
I realise what I am about to ask you will come across as flippant, but I actually sincerely mean it. Could you go and read some books on the topics you think you’re an expert on before posting utter turgid nonsense you read on another forum here? I don’t want to live in a communist state, but I’m not so arrogant as to blame the citizens of a sanctioned authoritarian system for their own misery. Neither should you.
or the consequence of having a clueless communist regime, since most communist countries do very poorly economically. Sanctions rarely give the whole picture.
China is often the target of anti communist propaganda so how do you square that hole? 1# economy when looking at GDP(PPP) so your “analysis” falls short.
Communist “regimes” often have to deal with outside interference from the “superior” capitalist system.
OP’s point is extremely valid: Cuba does not have the right to self determination as other countries impose themselves on them and prevent their economic growth.
The Cuba case is really quite interesting when you compare it to more recent cases of indivisibility of security.
We all have short memories I guess, super heros and cartoon villains.
Never change hn.
And that primarily came to be when they cut back on the centrally planned economy and allowed more free markets. Whether they will allow that to continue is to be seen.
> Communist “regimes” often have to deal with outside interference from the “superior” capitalist system.
No, they generally don't, but they use that as propaganda. Eastern Germany built their "anti-fascist barricade" in Berlin officially to keep the evil Western infiltrators out, but their guns were turned to the east, and they murdered people for trying to escape from communism. The Soviet Union as a whole often attributed its failures to the meddling of the Imperialistic West, because admitting that you messed up is dangerous.
Communists always find a reason for their failure, and it's never them. That's really nothing new.
they courted Western investment and resource-sharing with promises of access to their massive population, and then proceeded to steal and copy everything not nailed down, heavily restrict foreign firms' ability both to access their consumer markets and to repatriate capital, employed sweatshop labor, all while supporting quasi-state quasi-monopolies that literally could not fail in any meaningful way. Don't take this as unqualified criticism; it worked, and compensated for some of the worst injuries and excesses of the West's relations with the Chinese state. But the point is that it wasn't adherence to tenets of "fair-market capitalism" so much as abuse of labor and investor trust that gave them an edge. (And, to be fair, a tamer version of this strategy featured in America's own rise to economic powerhouse; Liu and Andrew, Ma and Ma Bell.)
Also, as an anecdote, the superfest story says hi. The Reds invented a superior glass manufacturing process that was ignored by the West until they could control and profit off it without it benefiting the USSR. You're familiar with it because it's (probably) the screen you're reading this on.
It’s almost as though being brutally sanctioned by a superpower makes it nearly impossible to succeed. Do you not see the irony of your statement?
"In the 1961 edition of his famous textbook of economic principles, Paul Samuelson wrote that GNP in the Soviet Union was about half that in the United States but the Soviet Union was growing faster. As a result, one could comfortably forecast that Soviet GNP would exceed that of the United States by as early as 1984 or perhaps by as late as 1997 and in any event Soviet GNP would greatly catch-up to U.S. GNP."
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/01/so...
It would suck badly there without the sanctions, too.
Though I think the sanctions give the regime an excuse. Obama was right to start to lift restrictions... a decade of continued stagnation even after the sanctions lifted would have undermined the regime's ability to continue to rule more than anything else.
This particular stable state has lasted more than a lifetime. The average age in Cuba is 40, which while higher than many countries still means that the average Cuban has no living memory of any of the events that lead to the sanctions, much less could they have participated in them.
If the brutal ugly side of US imperialism (in the form of military aggression or intense actually-illegal unitary sanctions etc) goes away, so does the legitimacy. People will be asking "why" they can't buy basic consumer goods, and the answer will not be believable in the slightest.
Cuba is not North Korea. It's not isolated in that way. Nor does it have a Juche style cult of self-reliance. It is heavily dependent on tourism for its economy. Even its official communist ideology emphasizes internationalist linkages and outlook.
The sanctions are counterproductive and unjust.
As the communists like to say "The capitalists will sell us our pitchforks".
No, we don't have to.
For example, Russia would have had a hard time policing their rambunctious oligarchs who would have used corruption to undermine the Putin regime to obtain more power for themselves - perhaps they could have supplied backing to Prigozhin with an offer that they could replace the Putin regime with something better. By sanctioning the oligarchs it forced all of the oligarchs to abandon any hope of competing with Putin and greatly strengthened Putins grip on power. Sanctioning polices the behavior of the Russian oligarchs much more effectively than Putins regime could have done, effectively outsourcing the cost of compliance to less corruptible 3rd parties.
I guess you're referring to how trade has not lead to liberalism of the Chinese and I wasn't suggesting it would. There are plenty of elite in China who have benefited from trade outside of the regime and that's probably still one of the biggest threats to the regime within China. As soon a China loses the 'mandate from heaven' we could see the alternatives move in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven
Not to be confused with the American Revolution era Navy flag that has a pine tree and the motto “an appeal to heaven”. That flag was recently in the news because the wife of a Supreme Court justice flew it at their house.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Tree_Flag
Coincidently, both “mandate from heaven” and “an appeal to heaven” define a right to rebellion.
Maybe those words make you feel smart or strong or reinforce your ideological positions... but they're bad policy. Unless you cover your eyes and ignore evidence.
Your mindset is that Cuban suffering is because of US sanctions. How about having the mindset of the leaders looting the country causing Cuban suffering?
As someone that is self-admittedly a leftist, why do you put 0 agency or blame on the leaders of Cuba? All they need to do to have trade with the US is to have free and open elections.
That is truly hilarious. There are numerous countries, especially in Latin America, that can tell you a story or two about what happens when free and open elections fail to lead to the USA's chosen candidate winning. It's not sanctions being lifted, that's for sure.
Also,the USA cares absolutely nothing about democracy in their partners. Never has, still doesn't. One of the USA's biggest curent allies is Saudi Arabia, one of the least democratic nations on Earth.
I said exactly what you said: the regime is fucked and the economy will suck and things will be oppressive even without the sanctions.
But they use the sanctions to legitimize themselves. I've heard it directly from Cuban apologists... And in the meantime Cubans suffer.
Regime change via sanctions isn't going to work. 50 years of evidence can show you that. So what are they for?
Removing the sanctions removes one excuse among many that the dictatorship uses.
This isn't China. It's a tin-pot dictatorship on a tiny island right off the US, dependent on tourism.
As for your argument around legitimacy, it does not matter. They will find an excuse to legitimize the government no matter what. See what venezuela did when we still had relations with their government.
All this talk of legitimacy actually just does not matter. Cuban people know their government sucks and if they havent realized it already they are too deep in the propaganda to ever be convinced
edit: Also out of curiosity, if this was a fascist dictatorship on the border would you advocate free trade?
You would think that being less than 500 miles off the coast of Florida that Cuba would want to have strong relations with the USA rather than Russia over 6,000 miles away.
The Soviet Union fell in 1991. It should have been clear since then which horse Cuba should be betting on. Cuba has had 33 years to figure out that their revolution was dead. Their lack of success warming up relations with the USA and their failure to do so is on them.
Why?
> If we accept the axiom that each person wants to maximize their resources, then we should expect a natural outflow from the [poorer] nation to the [richer] one. In order to limit that, any ruler would be incentivized to pain the [rich] world as the enemy or make it a crime to affiliate/sympathize with them. this naturally leads to conflict between nations.
(I replaced communist/capitalist with poor/rich since that's what your point is actually about.)
Are you saying that the poor world is naturally the enemy of the rich world? That the rich world should utilize its power (e.g. using sanctions) to keep the poor world (which in your view is the enemy) weak?
Like the "stone soup" fable...
I'm not pretending the USA doesn't meddle destructively or that Battista was some saint, but multidecade single party rule of Castro was an objective failure, along with the other Socialist regimes of the 20th century.
The track record sucks. Time to face facts.
If your system is incapable of dealing with any sort of adversity, then that is failure of the system.
All countries around the world have problems.
And yet, most countries are able to deal with them. Unlikely, apparently, every major socialist country.
People hoped that even such a huge capitalist country like Russia would fall after sanctions. Granted, did not work out because Russia found alternative allies in China and Iran but the idea that capitalist countries can just eat up sanctions like nothing is insane. Otherwise sanctions wouldn't be a political tool to begin with.
Lots of capitalist African countries have people just starving on mass and that is despite having free access to markets and despite western countries not only not sabotaging them but on the contrary providing development aid. But you will tell me how that is "not real capitalism" and how they are doing it wrong. Real capitalism is just the few rich Western Nations, we don't talk about the losers.
Communist revolutions tend to happen in the poorest countries on earth and they face adversity on every step of the way. That they even manage to survive shows how resilient socialism is.
What I said is that there is always an excuse for every single failed socialist country and that this is indicative of a problem with that system.
It is every last one of them. There are zero real successes.
> But you will tell me how that is "not real capitalism"
At no point did I claim that capitalism always suceeds.
I merely claim that some successes do exist.
The same is not true for socialism. There are no successes anywhere, and there is always 100 excuses for why those failures don't count.
The Soviet Union started from one of the least developed places on earth torn by WW1 and a bloody civil war and foreign intervention and became a global super power that would sent the first man into space.
As for Cuba, I will use the Western source someone else quoted here:
> The largest island in the Caribbean, Cuba is one of the most successful in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Food-based social safety nets include a monthly food basket for the entire population, school feeding programs, and mother-and-child health care programs.
Generally socialism has been quite successfully globally at providing high literacy rates and massive increases of life expectancy.
Most capitalist countries are utter failure. Even the richest country in the world the US has a huge issue with systemic poverty and a prison system that has one of the highest incarnation rates in the world. So there is the success? Norway living off from oil and gas?
[0] https://www.wfpusa.org/countries/cuba/#:~:text=Cuba%20import...
And yet those aren't the countries that people want to go live in.
The evidence speaks for it self. The capitalist countries are the ones with all the wealth, that everyone wants to move to, and the socialist ones are the countries that people want to escape.
If you will notice, we are right now talking on a thread about 10% of the population of cuba, leaving cuba.
> The Soviet Union
The thing that doesn't exist anymore? Some success that was.
> Most capitalist countries are utter failure
And yet, when a capitalist country fails, where do the people in that country want to leave to?
Oh, thats right. They want to go to other capitalist countries.
> the US has a huge issue
And yet, it one of the most desirable places in the world to live in, empirically proven by immigration rates.
> Generally socialism has been quite successfully
And yet the people actually living there still flee. No matter what metric you give, apparently the people living there don't care, because they still want to leave those countries and to move to capitalist countries.
Communist revolutions tend to happen in the poorest countries so you are mistaking cause and effect. The countries that communism took hold on have been poor to begin with. Yes, communism is not magic and can not make you the richest country on earth overnight but neither can capitalism.
Commandeering an empire's wealth into militarization and the space program sure made for great pageantry just like North Korean nukes and cyberweapons, but it doesn't mean anything like a holistic measure of well being was achieved.
The space program started after WW2. There was never any famine in the Soviet Union after WW2 except the one directly after the was for obvious reasons.
And the militarization was necessary to survive against Nazi Germany and later to keep the balance of power intact against an empire that had proven two times that it was able and willing to use nuclear weapons.
The space program proved the importance of science under socialism and the great education system while the US only managed compete by stealing Nazi scientists.
there are other socialist nations to trade with
Obviously they wont. It was just a tactic to avoid the chaos of the fall of the Soviet Union while still changing out the economic system. Keeping political stability while allowing the people in power in enrich themselves thanks to capitalism.
A: We respond that socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism
Full quote: Some have called our road "Social Capitalism", others "State Capitalism", and yet others "Technocratic Capitalism". These are all completely wrong. We respond that socialism with Chinese characteristics is socialism, by which we mean that despite reform we adhere to the socialist road – our road, our theory, our system, and the goals we set out at the 18th National Party Congress. ... Socialism with Chinese characteristics is the dialectical unity of the theoretical logic of scientific socialism and the historical logic of China's social development. It's scientific socialism rooted in Chinese realities, reflecting the will of Chinese people, and adapted to the requirements of China and its circumstances. — Xi Jinping, speech to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, 5 January 2013[5]
Q: What does the Constitution say?
A: Article 1 The People's Republic of China is a socialist state under the people's democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants. The socialist system is the basic system of the People's Republic of China. Disruption of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited.
From the preamble: After the founding of the People's Republic, China gradually achieved its transition from a New-Democratic to a socialist society. The socialist transformation of the private ownership of the means of production was completed, the system of exploitation of man by man abolished and the socialist system established. [...] China will be in the primary stage of socialism for a long time to come.
> and the goals we set out at the 18th National Party Congress. This includes building a socialist market economy;[..]
You might as well translate "socialist market economy" as capitalism with red flags. There is no market economy under socialism, that is the whole point.
No one in their right mind thinks China has a socialist economy. These people have decades of experience twisting ideology to whatever they want to do. Though Xi is whole bit less liberal than his predecessors. Some do argue that he plans to bring China back to a more socialist course but I am not sure about it. Personally, I think the growing socialist rhetoric is mostly a reaction to the growing wealth inequality and other problem in China.
> The People's Republic of China is a socialist state
it seems warranted to say that China self-identifies as a socialist state.
You're of course free [*] to say that China does not self-identify as a socialist state. I don't particularly care.
[*] As long as you don't put that in a banner in Tiananmen Square, I guess.
"It (Operation_Mongoose) was officially authorized on November 30, 1961 by U.S. President John F. Kennedy."
JFK was shot in the head (most likely Oswald visited Mexico City and the Cuban and Soviet consulates). So... even more bad gambles by Cuba.
Anyone who can get out is one of the minor definitions of being smart.
Great point, and just FYI: "emigration" here.
In Southern Europe, talent leaves for better job opportunities and higher salary. In Cuba, people are literally fleeing to achieve basic human rights and 21st century quality of life.
I'm not sure if you've been to Cuba before, but having visited in the late 2010s, it's a caricature of life in a communist dictatorship.
Internet wasn't allowed, except for in certain public parks at certain times of the day, only on phones with certain websites, and with dial-up speeds.
The sum total of fresh food in grocery stores was 1 type of government ham, 1 type of government cheese, eggs, a few fruits, and that was basically it.
I could go on. It's a beautiful island country, but please don't fall for the silly idea that US sanctions or european-style "brain drain" have anything to do with the reason Cubans are leaving.
Authoritarian communist dictatorships are no joke.
Plenty of folks get started working for the state industry or university. Then they hop on a plane to America via Canada and claim citizenship.
I’m confident there are still traditional political refugees, but they coexist with “company men” wanting more pay.
Moving from Madrid to Amsterdam to get a higher salary is not what we're talking about here. I don't think someone from Madrid would start weeping at the sight of a Dutch grocery store.
When Spain talks about brain drain, they're worried about 1-2% of their population leaving over decades. Not 10-20X than in a year.
Virtually all Cubans, regardless of educational attainment or employment status, would kill for a shot at life in a democratic, free-market country, be it Spain or the Netherlands. Hence why they're leaving.
Then I realized this is all public, and Cuban intelligence services spy on the diaspora.
Censorship by proxy sucks.
I’ve run into this before with Chinese and other nationalities. I don’t know what’s safe to say, and what could get someone in trouble. So the ethical thing is to say nothing, unless it’s really important.
It sucks that foreign powers can censor a conversation like this, but they can.
Of course Cuba being Cuba makes all these benefits harder or undesirable.
This leaves the gene pool itself deserted. Spandrell controversially wrote about this, calling cities "iq shredders".