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.