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We need to talk about Cuba


maarsen

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5 minutes ago, Zorral said:

 

But dealing with people who really don't know anything about what happened, to whom and when and why -- ignorant of this deep and complicated history and don't care to know anyway is kind of a waste of time, right?

 

5 minutes ago, Zorral said:

 

I mean I am not going to write in this topic a history of Cuba from Loma de Chivo a/k/a San Juan Hill to 2018, which is what I'd have to do -- and which I know -- but which nobody would read or wants to know anyway, since that would take having to learn something that contradicts what they think they already know, even though they don't know Spanish, history, Cubans or have ever gone there, not even once. It's kinda frustrating, you know?  Time for a glass of wine, one might think.


I am interested in learning more, though I'm not expecting you to teach me- but all I'm saying is that yours is not the only view. And you do seem to be skating over some of the aspects people find most problematic about Cuba.
Now I might be prone to leaning towards another viewpoint because of my inbuilt biases about communism, but I'm not rejecting yours out of hand. I'm just not accepting it just coz you're the only directly involved person (I think) in this particular discussion.

 

 

50 minutes ago, felice said:

I very much doubt they're genetically happier;

Didn't suggest they were.

 

 

51 minutes ago, felice said:

And I doubt they'd stay very happy if the government entirely vanished overnight and left them in a state of anarchy.


Well yeah, but it's not a choice between their current government and nothing at all, is it? I mean, in idealistic terms. In short term practically it might well be, if someone were to just flip the government now, but I'm not suggesting that should happen either.

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17 minutes ago, Zorral said:

People, vast numbers of Cubans, wept, upon Fidel's death.

Even now Cuban families travel to his memorial in Santiago to pay their respects and assure him they remember him.  Every Sunday the lines to put a flower on his very simple memorial are very, very long.

It's hard to be overly impressed with this. Dictatorial regimes often have cults of personality. North Koreans with Kim Jong-il, the Soviets with Lenin's Tomb, etc.

@polishgenius

The Cuba Libre Story I linked earlier -- if you have Netflix -- is quite in-depth, but as I said, it does have something of a leftward slant.

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5 minutes ago, Ran said:

It's hard to be overly impressed with this. Dictatorial regimes often have cults of personality. North Koreans with Kim Jong-il, the Soviets with Lenin's Tomb, etc.

You weren't / aren't there.  It's personal.  Not a cult.  Though, yes, a very large percentage of Cubans have never known life without Fidel.   And, shortly, when Raul steps down as he will this year, I believe, it will be the first time of a Cuba without a Castro running the government or the military.  This impacts people emotionally in a very big way, as one could imagine. Heck, it impacts me.  I never have known of Cuba without a Castro.  Fidel remains a presence in my imagination for sure, inside or out of Cuba.

Again, if one understood Cuba, one would never use the word cult.  One would use the word, ancestor, in honor of those religions such as Lucumi and Palo, in which we have seen figures of Cuban history in the process of becming  'santos' - ancestors in their own right.

It's a natural human reaction to try to understand something we don't understand and know by what we do know.  Very often we get it wrong that way.

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16 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

 


I am interested in learning more, though I'm not expecting you to teach me- but all I'm saying is that yours is not the only view. And you do seem to be skating over some of the aspects people find most problematic about Cuba.
Now I might be prone to leaning towards another viewpoint because of my inbuilt biases about communism, but I'm not rejecting yours out of hand. I'm just not accepting it just coz you're the only directly involved person (I think) in this particular discussion.

 

 

Didn't suggest they were.

 

 


Well yeah, but it's not a choice between their current government and nothing at all, is it? I mean, in idealistic terms. In short term practically it might well be, if someone were to just flip the government now, but I'm not suggesting that should happen either.

The Cubans would not like at all to exchange what they have now for what we have in the US. But then, why would you believe me, since i am the only person in this discussion with wide, vast and prolonged real experience of the place and the people.

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To be really really clear, the argument put forward was not that Cuba was a horrible place or had horrible people, and all the talk about how awesome a people it is really doesn't matter in this context.

The argument by @dmc515 and others was that Castro was something of a piece of shit. All the talk about how good the place is run makes me think the argument about Mussolini making the trains run on time was what really mattered. Even if it's true about Cuba, that has nothing to do with the arguments against Castro. It does not excuse Castro desiring to nuke the US and being willing to sacrifice his nation to do so. It doesn't excuse Guevara's exploits either. 

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Just now, Zorral said:

You weren't / aren't there.  It's personal.  Not a cult. 

I don't contest that it's personal, but this does not change that it is cult behavior.

 

Just now, Zorral said:

Though, yes, a very large percentage of Cubans have never known life without Fidel.   And, shortly, when Raul steps down as he will this year, I believe, it will be the first time of a Cuba without a Fidel running the government or the military.  This impacts people emotionally in a very big way, as one could imagine.

Absolutely. 

Just now, Zorral said:

Again, if one understood Cuba, one would never use the word cult.  One would use the word, ancestor, in honor of those religions such as Lucumi and Palo, in which we have seen figures of Cuban history in the process of becming  'santos' - ancestors in their own right.

It falls exactly within the definition of a cult of personality, one that Castro and the regime deliberately encouraged and manipulated by using his image (and that of other revolutionary leaders, most notably Che Guevara) in conjunction with propaganda. This is an old and common feature of of totalitarian regimes.

Call it what you will, it's still a cult of personality that was in large part shaped by Castro and the Cuban government as part and parcel of their domestic and international propaganda efforts.

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20 minutes ago, Zorral said:

You weren't / aren't there.  It's personal.  Not a cult.  Though, yes, a very large percentage of Cubans have never known life without Fidel.   And, shortly, when Raul steps down as he will this year, I believe, it will be the first time of a Cuba without a Castro running the government or the military.  This impacts people emotionally in a very big way, as one could imagine. Heck, it impacts me.  I never have known of Cuba without a Castro.  Fidel remains a presence in my imagination for sure, inside or out of Cuba.

Again, if one understood Cuba, one would never use the word cult.  One would use the word, ancestor, in honor of those religions such as Lucumi and Palo, in which we have seen figures of Cuban history in the process of becming  'santos' - ancestors in their own right.

It's a natural human reaction to try to understand something we don't understand and know by what we do know.  Very often we get it wrong that way.

Hehe, we should get Dennis Rodman into this thread too. 

As for how well run Cuba is, their GDP per capita is half of Romania's. Not that impressive for a country that used to be relatively developed during the earlier half of the 20th century. They did better than many other communist regimes though, you have to give them that. 

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25 minutes ago, Zorral said:

But then, why would you believe me, since i am the only person in this discussion with wide, vast and prolonged real experience of the place and the people.


Why should I believe you, specifically, over other people I've read and heard with the experience? Just because you're here, now? Believing only what the last person one spoke to tells us to is behaviour fitting for the US president, but you can't expect it in real debate.

I'm also not sure why you said I'm saying that Cubans desire to switch what they have for what you have in the US, since I didn't even come close to that.

32 minutes ago, Ran said:

 

@polishgenius

The Cuba Libre Story I linked earlier -- if you have Netflix -- is quite in-depth, but as I said, it does have something of a leftward slant.

 

I don't have Netfilx right now, but I'll keep an eye out for it somewhere down the line.

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6 minutes ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

Hehe, we should get Dennis Rodman into this thread too. 

As for how well run Cuba is, their GDP per capita is half of Romania's. Not that impressive for a country that used to be relatively developed during the earlier half of the 20th century. They did better than many other communist regimes though, you have to give them that. 

It's a pro capitalist agenda that decides that GDP is a relevant indicator of a successful country.  Capitalism isn't the best.  It isn't even particularly good.

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10 minutes ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

Okay. So why is for example income inequality a problem then, if money doesn't matter?

??  Who said money doesn't matter.  I'm talking about using the problems of using something like GDP to determine the attributes of a country.  It's very capitalistic centric.  Income inequality tends to be a defining problem of capitalism.  

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6 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

??  Who said money doesn't matter.  I'm talking about using the problems of using something like GDP to determine the attributes of a country.  It's very capitalistic centric.  Income inequality tends to be a defining problem of capitalism.  

GDP per capita means the amount of income that is produced per person in the country. A pretty important metric if you consider money to have a noteworthy effect on peoples' lives. 

Of course it shouldn't be the only standard by which to evaluate a society, don't get me wrong, but Cuba is at any rate a pretty damn poor country nowadays, which is worth taking into consideration amidst all the discussions about how well the Castros have run things. 

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1 minute ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

GDP per capita means the amount of income that is produced per person in the country. A pretty important metric if you consider money to have a noteworthy effect on peoples' lives. 

Of course it shouldn't be the only standard by which to evaluate a society, don't get me wrong, but Cuba is at any rate a pretty damn poor country nowadays, which is worth taking into consideration among all discussions about how well the Castros have run things. 

I know what GDP per capita means.  I don't consider it an important measurement.  I don't consider it a relevant one at all.  I'm concerned about things like whether or not a country can care for the basic needs of it's citizens.  Are they healthy, literate, have housing, etc.  Don't particularly care if the country is producing a certain amount of money.  Worries about that come from a deeply capitalist bias.  

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20 minutes ago, Dr. Pepper said:

I know what GDP per capita means.  I don't consider it an important measurement.  I don't consider it a relevant one at all.  I'm concerned about things like whether or not a country can care for the basic needs of it's citizens.  Are they healthy, literate, have housing, etc.  Don't particularly care if the country is producing a certain amount of money.  Worries about that come from a deeply capitalist bias.  

Yeah, and the amount and quality of healthcare, education and housing you can provide for your citizens is of course intimately tied to how productive the overall economy is. 

Also, if only those basic needs matter then I don't see what your problem with capitalist countries is. The amount of people that can't meet those needs is pretty small, and most have enough for way more than that. 

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On 1/19/2018 at 9:51 AM, Rippounet said:

I'm always a bit wary of the lofty discussions about "democracy" and "liberty" because they tend to eclipse the demands of survival.

As somebody that has been an observer of American politics for a very long time, it’s hard sometimes not to cringe at the word “freedom” as it’s so often misused by conservatives to promote their preferred policies or is simply a term of propaganda.

And I think there are two reasons for this. One is that their talk of “freedom” is often very hypocritical. They will talk about on and on about “freedom” but then have nothing to say about people like Arpaio blatantly violating the fourth amendment rights of the Latino population in Arizona. And then of course, I think most of us are aware of the civil liberties disaster that was the George W. Bush administration.

But other than the mealy mouthed double talk about “freedom” that comes from some quarters here in the US, I think there is a more deeper philosophical issue, if you will, which is that often libertarians, particularly, hard core property rights libertarians, which tend to bleat about it the most and dominate the conversation about “freedom”, here in the US at least, with their preferred version of it, which is basically grounding their ideas in property rights and negative rights.

Back a few years ago, Ron Paul quipped that he wouldn’t have supported the 1964 Civil Rights act. Now I think that is a horrible position to take, but it is highly consistent with Paul’s and the libertarian position on “freedom”.

And I think for that reason, the libertarian conception of freedom is very flawed, mainly because it is unable to deal with the world we live in, rather than the one libertarians think we live in. Or expressed another way, the libertarian method about freedom simply disregards the threat of private power in limiting freedom. And then of course, the libertarian notion of freedom, sees there is a simple trade off between freedom and equality, ie you can have one or the other but not both, and I don’t think it’s as simple or as linear as libertarians sorts would make it. For instance, the ability to support oneself is pretty important to enjoy freedom, and if your not able to because you’re facing private discrimination, ie being treated unequally for some really arbitrary reason, your freedom is rather limited.

And then of course if your at the bottom of the economic pecking order, you’re going to likely have less “freedom” than others, as your probably going to have to jump through more hoops just to survive, than others who are not at the bottom of the economic pecking order. In fact, your "freedom" in such case may likely be mirage, which I think is the main point of your post.

Now having stated all this, I think it would be a mistake for liberal or left leaning people to think freedom isn’t a good thing in many cases. Certainly, freedom allows people to make their own private decisions with regard to their family arrangements, allows them to express their conscience, permits people to live in manner that may not be considered “normal” in a socially conservative society, and so on and so forth.

The point, I’m making here, is that I think liberals or left leaning shouldn’t cede the ground about freedom to conservatives and libertarians so easily, and should dispute their version of it as being flawed.

Now I’m not aware of liberals having a version of freedom, fleshed out from first principles, like say property rights libertarianism (maybe somebody did, but hey I’m more likely to read the TV guide  than philosophy as it makes my head hurt), and libertarians might say that a notion of freedom not derived from first principles like the libertarian conception of it is unmoored and unprincipled, to which like Keynes I’d say;

The libertarian conception about freedom is a fine example of how starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.

And a remorseless logician starting with a mistake is exactly how somebody like Ron Paul ends up in bedlam over the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

But, anyway, I don’t think liberals or left leaning people should just give up on the notion of freedom, but rather should dispute the right wing version of it.

On 1/19/2018 at 9:51 AM, Rippounet said:

t's easy to claim that communism is bad when you're sitting in front of your computer in a first-world country. But perhaps it ain't so bad when your country is dirt poor. And perhaps one would be willing to accept a police-state if it offered better chances of survival than a "democratic" one.
Especially since "democracy" is a spectrum rather than a binary state and many first-world countries are much further from democracy than people tend to assume. And "accountable government" is fast becoming a fairy tale at this point.

Finally, talks about bringing "democracy" to a place like Cuba tend to be self-serving on some level or the other. Conservative "sorts of people" (as OGE would say) don't give a shit about Cubans but merely use it to make the US look good by comparison. And even well-thinking do-gooder liberal folks might do better discussing this thing with the Cubans themselves rather than anyone else, because they might be surprised by the way they see their island and regime.

In another thread I quoted Schlesinger about Cuba who in the 1950s made the remark:


"The corruption of the government, the brutality of the police, the regime’s indifference to the needs of the people for education, medical care, housing, for social justice and economic justice...is an open invitation to revolution."

And Schlesinger also said:

"I was enchanted by Havana – and appalled by the way that lovely city was being debased into a giant casino and brothel for American businessmaen over a weekend from Miami. My fellow countrymen reeled through the streets, picking up fourteen-year-old Cuban girls and tossing coins to make men scramble in the gutter. On wondered how any Cuban – on the basis of this evidence – could regard the United States with anything but hatred."

Based on Schlesinger's comments it doesn't seem to me that many Cubans were enjoying freedom all that much, at least not 14 year old Cuban girls and destitute men.

Now, I don’t like authoritarian regimes, either left wing or right wing, as I guess you could call me an Orwell social democrat. But, one of the frustrating things about conservative sorts of people here in the US is that when they talk about Cuba, there is simply no acknowledgement of why revolution happened in Cuba and the US’s part in it. When people’s basic needs are not being met, when the wealthy plunder a country, and when a people have a feeling they have no control over their own country, being at the mercy of international businessmen, and in the case of Cuba, gangsters, it really ought not to be surprising that the people would get fed up and throw a revolution. And it seems to me that it’s a lesson that conservative sorts of people just never want to learn.

Also at this juncture in our history, it is simply silly for the US to hold a grudge against Cuba, we should attempt to normalize relations with them, and let the Cuban people figure out for themselves what kind of political and economic system they want to have. Given enough time, I’m sure they will do alright.

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13 hours ago, polishgenius said:



I mean, in the other topic FB implied that the views of those who left Cuba don't count. What sort of thinking is that? Castro had a country that had such a significant portion of the population wanting to leave that eventually, by FB's own admission, he stopped allowing people to leave, but their views against him don't count because they left? As the child of anti-communists exiles myself I find that idea fucking horrifying.

The fact that America has worse countries they call friends and their own sins to sort out does not make Cuba and Castro good.

I think you are missing a giant point. dmc515 said this about Trudeau's comments: 

Quote

Got no problem with this, but Trudeau's comments on Castro aren't going away.  They were ill advised, amateurish, and something no relevant party in this hemisphere will forget anytime soon.

I said the comments were a message of sympathy to the people of Cuba, and exiles didn't matter. dmc515 then posted Obama's message. Well guess what - Cubans in exile with US citizenship vote in US elections and the Democrats would like to take back Florida one day. They don't vote in Canadian elections, so, yes, the Cuban exiles in Florida don't matter with regard to Trudeau's message. The US opinion in general doesn't matter, because the US has spent more than 50 years trying to destroy Cuba, while Canada has been a friend to Cuba.

Don't forget, the US for all of that time period has had a boycott on doing business with Cuba. They will hunt you down, fine you out of existence and throw you in jail for a decade or more if you do business with Cuba. In contrast, they will do the same to you if you agree to follow the Arab boycott of Israel. But in that same time period they never had a boycott against eastern block countries like Poland, sanctions against Russia being very recent. 

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52 minutes ago, Khaleesi did nothing wrong said:

Yeah, and the amount and quality of healthcare, education and housing you can provide for your citizens is of course intimately tied to how productive the overall economy is. 

Also, if only those basic needs matter then I don't see what your problem with capitalist countries is. The amount of people that can't meet those needs is pretty small, and most have enough for way more than that. 

Except that Cuba is able to provide for these needs despite being a 'poor' country.  The US struggles to do the same - we have some horrendous numbers - despite having a relatively high GDP.

I'm not sure what you consider 'pretty small' or 'more  than enough'.  It's obviously not true for millions of Americans, a number I wouldn't consider small by any stretch.

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45 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

As somebody that has been an observer of American politics for a very long time, it’s hard sometimes not to cringe at the word “freedom” as it’s so often misused by conservatives to promote their preferred policies or is simply a term of propaganda.

<snip>

Well said!

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6 hours ago, Dr. Pepper said:

Except that Cuba is able to provide for these needs despite being a 'poor' country. 

You do realize that the black market is a major part of how people manage to keep themselves fed? "Cuba" as a state is not achieving this. The Cuban people are doing it despite the state.

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6 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

I said the comments were a message of sympathy to the people of Cuba, and exiles didn't matter. dmc515 then posted Obama's message.

That's true.  I obviously stand by my original statement, but let's have a detente here.  The statement was politically stupid.  If you don't get why, I can't help you.  Trudeau knew it was politically stupid, that's why he walked it back two days later.  Further, if you don't get why it was morally ill-advised, which subsequently means you're unable to confront Castro's inexcusable actions, I don't wanna fight anymore.  I don't care, and the whole damn thing is ironic because I'm usually inclined to argue against the injustices of American imperialism, but with this board sometimes...  So, it is incredibly weird to me that apparently a lot of people around here perceive as if I'm the defender of the United States Government.  I'm a liberal academic that nobody cares about.

@Kalbear, thank you.  Really.  I have not read much after your post.  I tried to qualify as best I could in the original thread.  Anyway, looks like the shutdown is happening!  Time to get crazy!

It's just really silly to me.  It seems there's palpable anti-american sentiment around here.  That's fine.  Go ahead - from Pahlavi to Bishop and beyond.  Go do the drum circle like y'all are eager undergrads that just took your first IR class.  I was totally the same way for quite awhile.  Now, I just find it banal and tired, but it's certainly justified. 

I really don't want to interrupt this thread, because I think it's beautiful.  I feel my involvement and opinions will only lead to animus, and I don't want that to happen.  I have some opinions on economic development and democratization, but they can wait.  Continue talking about how awesome Cuba is.  That's been the reports I've heard as well.  Please continue.

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