Fidel Castro dies

[Larry of the Lawn]

In Soviet cuba, they eat technology with bare hands.

[maarsen]

2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Please define with specificity what you mean when you say "political freedom is limited".  How is it limited and what happens to people who breach those limits?

No elections. People do not talk about politics much there. Even so there is almost no evidence of government agents tracking the movements of foreign visitors. The closest I came to that was when visiting a military reserve without my passport and being turned away. Our guide waited until the general (?) had left and then signed us in. 

[Dr. Pepper]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

I have been going to Cuba regularly since 1990.  And yes, always legally.

It's the safest place in the world one can be at this point, when it comes to health and opportunities to get caught up in a terrorist event.  What happens now all over the world, as at the Boston Marathon, Sandy Hook school shootings, etc. just do not happen there and can't happen there, for a whole variety of reasons.  Any more than dying neglected in a nursing home, etc. can't happen there.

I would never say the nation is perfect.  But in so many ways, especially for children, it's the best place in the world to live.  It's when one gets older, and faces the facts that on an island, opportunities for so many in terms of career and professional expression, are limited.

It also has the best music.  People are kind, compassionate and generous (and people are also corrupt, etc. too -- though not yet on levels of corruption we see here.

Nor is Cuba a museum or a land that time forgot.  As mentioned above, I've been going there regularly since 1990.  The changes between then and now are enormous.  It's only USian tourists who see an unchanged land, and that's because they don't know what else to look for and don't want to see anything else, because old cars are all they know about Cuba. The cliches never change, but Cuba is anything but a cliche and changes all the time.  Change is not at a halt but continues to accelerate.

The reason internet access is iffy and limited is because the United States commanded that Cuba be left out of the fiber optic grid that is the foundation for global internet communications when it was being put down.  This was part of punishing Cuba for defying the United States.  Perhaps this was the most extreme action of the U.S. decreed embargo -- along with Clinton's elms-Burton.  Which cannot be repealed unless a majority of Congress votes to do so.  Which doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon.

I don't know how you can say any of this, Zorral.  It goes against everything all budding young capitalists learn from infancy - that America is the greatest country on earth and all other countries suck, especially communist ones where they can't even make new cars.  

[maarsen]

I talked to one guy in Cuba who owns one of those old cars. He took out the engine and put in a newer Toyota engine so he would get better gas mileage. He plans to put the original engine back when he sells the car to an American. 

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

 

2 hours ago, maarsen said:

So, how many people here have actually been to Cuba? Health care and education are as good as or better than a lot of places in the US.  You have  much less chance of getting shot by police if black. Political freedom is limited. Cell phones do exist and so does Internet access. If you do go, pretend to be Canadian. As I was told, 'no matter how things change, we will always remember our friends '.

Cuba ranks slightly below Russia in overall HDI, and more than slightly in terms of GDP per capita. Political freedom is (ironically enough) also a good deal higher there since Russia is at least partially democratic. Yet I doubt many people here would consider Russia a particularly nice or well run country; I know I don't. 

As for their relatively low crime rate, yes, that is a natural progression of being a police state. Many dictatorships in the world do have, and have had, the same benefit. I guess that it is a reasonable trade off if you really hate crime, although I again doubt that most posters here would support if US politicians enacted similar measures to get rid of organized crime groups in America, or wherever you live.

[Dr. Pepper]

3 minutes ago, maarsen said:

I talked to one guy in Cuba who owns one of those old cars. He took out the engine and put in a newer Toyota engine so he would get better gas mileage. He plans to put the original engine back when he sells the car to an American. 

That sounds like a lie because it's a story about a communist manipulating technology and I just learned in this thread that technology is only for capitalists.  

[maarsen]

For a police state, Cuba does seem to have a lack of police. The ones I do see seem to  be less than interested in holding the populace under their thumb and more interested in just getting home from work as public transit involves a lot of hitchhiking. 

[Zorral]

9 minutes ago, maarsen said:

I talked to one guy in Cuba who owns one of those old cars. He took out the engine and put in a newer Toyota engine so he would get better gas mileage. He plans to put the original engine back when he sells the car to an American. 

Actually what the Cubans are putting into those cars are DIESEL engines, because diesel is cheap(er) and more available, and mostly because diesel engines were made available by government import.  It's had a terrible effect on Havana's air quality.

However, in the meantime, this can't happen there either.  Here, however, the war on women and their reproductive rights continues to escalate and accelerate, and our infant mortality rates continue to rise.

 

[Zorral]

10 minutes ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

 

Cuba ranks slightly below Russia in overall HDI, and more than slightly in terms of GDP per capita. Political freedom is (ironically enough) also a good deal higher there since Russia is at least partially democratic. Yet I doubt many people here would consider Russia a particularly nice or well run country; I know I don't. 

As for their relatively low crime rate, yes, that is a natural progression of being a police state. Many dictatorships in the world do have, and have had, the same benefit. I guess that it is a reasonable trade off if you really hate crime, although I again doubt that most posters here would support if US politicians enacted similar measures to get rid of organized crime groups in America, or wherever you live.

Yet the newly 'elected' potus-to-be is cozying up to Putin as fast as possible, isn't he?  Again, the irony.  Additional irony as Cuba - Russian relationship is finally thawing again after a long freeze.  So how to explain with any kind of positive spin for anyone involved here that the US and Russia are friends, Russia is friends with Cuba, but the US continues to view Cuba as The Great Enemy?  Putin is laughing his a$$ off at the U$.

Organized USian crime groups in league with Batista terrorized Cuba until the Revolution -- which is why the mafia families were so happy to join with the US government to take out Fidel.  (And though  the US gummit, military and organized crime failed at that, there is a lot of consensus that the mafia succeeded in taking out JFK -- your mileage may vary on that last, of course.) Batista and his regime more viciously imprisoned, tortured and murdered far more than the Revolution has -- and the Revolution has been in power longer by now.  Young girls aren't kidnapped off the street for the Batistianos' sexual pleasure either in the regime of the Revolution.  Also when the coward Batista fled the island he took over $300 million with him, not to mention what he already owned and stashed in the US before that. Only the most factually challenged of Fidel's haters have accused him of personally enriching himself.

 

 

[Zorral]

37 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

I don't know how you can say any of this, Zorral.  It goes against everything all budding young capitalists learn from infancy - that America is the greatest country on earth and all other countries suck, especially communist ones where they can't even make new cars.  

  the things people will say when they know what they're talking about!   Yanno, I should make a list sometime of the very many island nations that manufacture their own cars. 

 

[Bennis of the Brown Shield]

13 minutes ago, maarsen said:

For a police state, Cuba does seem to have a lack of police. The ones I do see seem to  be less than interested in holding the populace under their thumb and more interested in just getting home from work as public transit involves a lot of hitchhiking. 

So you are disputing the international reports about Cuba jailing regime critics and severely curtailing the freedom of expression, on the account of you seeing a bunch of lazy policemen when you visited the country as a tourist? Or do you mean that regime critics lock themselves up in Cuba? 

For that matter, having many policemen is not actually a necessity for being a police state. China has a very small police force in relation to its population for example. An interesting article about that: http://www.economist.com/news/china/21708700-chinese-cops-are-overworked-underpaid-and-miserable-policemans-lot-police-state-not-happy

 

4 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Yet the newly 'elected' potus-to-be is cozying up to Putin as fast as possible, isn't he?  Again, the irony.  Additional irony as Cuba - Russian relationship is finally thawing again after a long freeze.  So how to explain with any kind of positive spin for anyone involved here that the US and Russia are friends, Russia is friends with Cuba, but the US continues to view Cuba as The Great Enemy?  Putin is laughing his a$$ off at the U$.

Organized USian crime groups in league with Batista terrorized Cuba until the Revolution -- which is why the mafia families were so happy to join with the US government to take out Fidel.  (And though  the US gummit, military and organized crime failed at that, there is a lot of consensus that the mafia succeeded in taking out JFK -- your mileage may vary on that last, of course.) Batista and his regime more viciously imprisoned, tortured and murdered far more than the Revolution has -- and the Revolution has been in power longer by now.  Young girls aren't kidnapped off the street for the Batistianos' sexual pleasure either in the regime of the Revolution.  Also when the coward Batista fled the island he took over $300 million with him, not to mention what he already owned and stashed in the US before that. Only the most factually challenged of Fidel's haters have accused him of personally enriching himself.

 

 

Look, I'm not claiming the Batista regime was any better than Castro's. In fact, it may very well have been a bit worse. Some people in this thread go a little beyond just exonerating Castro from that, however. 

[Zorral]

The Cuban police don't go around shooting unarmed people either.  Women walk alone in the wee hours of the morning without fear -- though with so much tourism that is changing . . . .

 We've neglected to acknowledge here how much the US is a police state itself. It's always been that way for large swathes of its citizens, particularly African American citizens, for whom the nation's legal system was from the beginning organized as a police state for them. It's even in the Constitution -- that well-regulated militia was organized to keep down slave uprising -- not to guarantee the rights of the average white citizen, who in the eras of the Constitution being written and the early Republic couldn't vote anyway.   Now the US is a police-surveillance state via the justification of keeping us safe from terrorists -- while increasingly the state and the police behave like terrorists themselves to so many of us.

 As by the very largest percentage the US has the largest per capital incarceration system in the world, it's pretty hard to make an argument that this isn't a police state isn't it?

Among the many changes I've witnessed personally since 1990 is the enormously decreased police presence in the streets and elsewhere.  They used to be everywhere -- and actually they're weren't so much police in the way we've gotten used to thinking of police in precincts and so on -- but military stationed in civic spaces. They had always been uncommon outside of Havana and Santiago, but now I never see a cop anywhere outside of those two cities.  We still do see the military, but that's because they're going to or from service to their families.

Mostly they seem on duty to keep the tourists from getting themselves into trouble.

 

 

[Rippounet]

23 hours ago, Zorral said:

Reported directly last night in the moments after the news was broken to the Cuban people, from my partner who is in Havana.  He got into a taxi, whose driver had not heard thew yet.  So he broke the news to the driver, who said, "¡No me digas eso.  No me digas eso.  Yo soy fidelista!"

Many, many, many Cubans still love him, and still believe in the Revolution, no matter what the media here wishes us to believe.

Many Americans just can't understand that half of the world actually likes socialism better than the individualistic neoliberal bullshit that their country never tires of trying to impose on the world.

And yeah, I've actually been to Cuba and talked politics with Cubans. They have no illusions about their system, but they're also smart enough to have no illusions about the rest of the world either. And many of them are way happier than you'd think. Also, let's bear in mind that Batista was a terrible ruler - because the older generations of Cubans haven't forgotten it.

In fact, few people actually know what Cuban socialism actually looks like... With some genuine successes in the mix. But hey, objectively analysing a socio-political system is much harder than focusing on "democracy" and "freedom" even though our "liberal demoracy" is democratic in name only.

13 hours ago, House Balstroko said:

 It is entirely dishonest to portray Castro as a model leader when you're not willing to live under the conditions many Cubans go through

I would be perfectly willing to live in a Cuba that hadn't suffered from decades of an economic embargo imposed on it for purely ideological reasons. It's always fantastic to hear people talk of how hard it is to live in a socialist country while ignoring that much of the hardship is due to US interference.
Oh wait... Actually I do. By American standards I live in a country that's so socialist it verges on communism!!

[James Arryn]

Cuba needs to impose a system where people from some parts of the country have 2.4 times the voting power as people from others, where your race, gender and religion go a long way to determining your future career/health/lifespan/incarceration, where election zones are openly rigged to favour one party over another, where torture and war crimes are officially sanctioned and where 2 of the past 3 leaders came to power despite their only opponent garnering more votes.

Then they'll be free.

!

[DireWolfSpirit]

Yeah I agree with some of the open minded comments about Cuba. The U.S. led embargo on Cuba resulted in a lot of the hardships on the island and is little reason to point fingers as if it somehow showed a triumph of capitalism. It merely relects the muscle of a larger, vindictive and repressive neighbor (Estados Unidos) trying to impose its will on that tiny neighbor, Cuba.

Another interesting comparison would be for the plight of urban U.S. populations of homeless and uninsured vesus the plight of a sick and/or poor Cuban. An uncomfortable amount of the U.S. is living paycheck to paycheck and about one catastrophic illness away from bancruptcy. A capitalism that cannot provide for the aged and unwell has very little bragging room over tiny socialist islands.

And finally, gloating over another countries leader dying, is quite a tasteless execise of behavior imo.

[Rippounet]

What seems to me to be a rather balanced article:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/fidel-castro-death-cuba-embargo-peasants-poor-urban-areas-modernisation-a7441036.html

[TrueMetis]

18 hours ago, House Balstroko said:

Most of the things you use. The internet, computers, smartphones, (information technology in general).

Then we have the industry which developed following the industrial revolution (cars, trains, aircraft...)

But all of those things exist because of heavy government research. If for some bizarre reason you attributed those things to an economic system it would be socialism, not capitalism, to thank.

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

What seems to me to be a rather balanced article:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/fidel-castro-death-cuba-embargo-peasants-poor-urban-areas-modernisation-a7441036.html

To this I'll add one personal example.

Right before Hurricane Matthew blasted through Cuba in August, we were in Baracoa, the oldest settlement in Cuba, in the east, and the first capital, on Guantanamo Bay.  Until the embargo it was a very prosperous city.  It's major partner was New Orleans right across the way.  With embargo, not only Baracoa, but New Orleans's fortunes declined steeply.

However -- there was never a road or highway -- not to mention bridges over the rivers -- that linked Baracoa to the rest of the region, much less the rest of Cuba, until Fidel's decrees that one be built.  It was very difficult -- the terrain is high, sharp mountains.  We drove that highway, went over those bridges in August.

The hurricane destroyed all of the highway and the bridges, as well as a great deal of Baracoa itself -- and it was beautiful and steeped in deep, deep culture and history. All around Baracoa are farms and little mountain ranchitos.  However, not a single life was lost.  Not a single head of cattle.  Not a single pet.  No one lost their possessions -- refrigerators, ovens, pressure cookers, etc.  Cuba's civil defense system kicked right in as the hurricane approached and everyone and everything -- and ALL THE ANIMALS -- were transported to a place of safety.

The Cuban government has been providing materials, the civil defense organization is helping, which includes the military, to rebuild the highway, the bridges and the city.

Now, compare this to what people are dealing with right now, in Louisiana, say, after the flooding there this summer.  Or even Katrina, especially in Mississippi, right now, all these years later.

No, I am the last to say that Cuba is perfect (though it really is a pretty great place for men, gotta say! and children).  But it has a sense of the public safety, the public good, that is certainly not to be found here and many other places.

[The Marquis de Leech]

12 hours ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

I think it is fairly reasonable to claim that the causal relationship goes both ways, given how all communist countries stagnated technologically and economically, only to then (in most cases) experience great growth rates once they transitioned to more market liberal systems.

Yeah, no.

If it was a simple causal relationship of "free market = advances, planned economy = stagnation," that war-ravaged and humiliated husk of a country barely out of feudalism would not have been able to (within a quarter of a century) repel the largest military invasion in human history (an invasion launched by a capitalist country, no less). Oh, and beat the entire world to Space a dozen years after that.

That's not to say it works the other way either, of course (and I don't mean to defend the immeasurable cruelty of Stalin's regime). The funny thing about these sorts of experiments - economics does not take place in a laboratory, and one cannot consider it absent from a multitude of other factors. Which in turn is why ideological debate continues to happen, and why we're not all free-market liberals, as per Fukuyama.

[Yukle]

Castro is an example of an ethical dilemma: it is true that the overall literacy and healthcare of Cuba increased significantly throughout his lifetime. It's also true that imprisonment for political dissidence increased, Cuba's trade dropped (especially once the Soviets collapsed and no longer paid inflated sugar prices) and he was extremely punitive.

There are those who say that the overall good outweighs the bad, and those who say his means too brutal to be justified.

I think he was not a good leader, as he assumed that his oppression was necessary and only through such oppression could he change Cuba. That said, I do understand more favourable views of him.