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International Events 5, "As the World Turns"


DireWolfSpirit

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As I posted more than once: fb is what take out the Revolution. Also, notice, as I posted, due to actual information on the ground in Cuba -- this is not happening in Havana. They are trying now to replicate what Fidel pulled off.  Except even in Havana he was supported.

It is organized.  WTF do you think fb means? It means organized to the outside world, not via fb in other ways.  It was organized from the outside via what operates inside Cuba, which the whatsapp .  Which is still in operation because that's how we're receiving all the communications about what's going on in Cuba.

In the meantime, Delta arrived in Cuba, due to Russia bringing in Indian workers who brought in Delta.  Because we here in the US blocked all the forward movement that Obama created, so they have no other resources but Russia -- just like, hey -- 1960.  This country is SO STUPID.

Our hearts are breaking on this utterly needless cruelty imposed not only on Cuba but on Haiti, imposed out of MIAMI. And Biden's such chicken-shyte with Miami, unlike Obama was. But with Haiti, he had HILLARY.

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I don't know what you're going on about but I honestly haven't formed an opinion on any of this - although obviously it has my avid attention.  I certainly agree that Biden should have rolled back Trump's restrictions and at least returned to Obama's status quo -- and still should!  As for Biden's response to this specifically, at least rhetorically, well that's more complicated.  Especially after how weakly he performed in Miami-Dade in November.  All politics is local. 

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Yeah, while I have no sympathy for the US government in general, and it's Latin American policies in general, this idea of "the suffering of the people of Cuba is caused by the US" is quite simply a lie. The main cause is the Castros and the regime they imposed for more than 60 years, squeezing the life and the blood (sometimes literally) of the country and the people, being propped in the first decades by the USSR.

This idea that "Cuba is poor because of those damn Yankees" is an excuse by the regime to justify it's failures and stay in power forever. It gets support on the left because a decent part of it sees the US as the cause of all evil in the world and the big man Fidel is a hero in many circles because anyone that opposes the US must be a good guy.

The US was rightly criticized for it's role in supporting the dictatorships in Latin America in the 60's and 70's, but when they started, the Castros were already there. They ended decades ago and the people they put there still are without making any effort to open up and become a democracy. They killed, proportionally and relatively, far more people than many, if not all the right-wing dictatorships and you rarely if ever see any complaints about them by the left.

And even today this affects the politics in the region- the only reason Bolsonaro managed to get away with his past supporting comments about Pinochet and the Brazilian military dictatorship was because he and his supporters could, and did, point out that the left still supports Cuba and Venezuela today and had no moral high ground (indeed, both regimes killed more than the Brazilian military dictatorship, despite Brazil's much larger population).

 

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1 hour ago, Winterfell is Burning said:

Yeah, while I have no sympathy for the US government in general, and it's Latin American policies in general, this idea of "the suffering of the people of Cuba is caused by the US" is quite simply a lie.

 That is the lie, i.e. the narrative, that has been so successfully promulgated by the media and the USA.  The media has always swallowed it and promoted it and is still doing it.  They own the narrative. No facts, history, etc. has ever made a dent in that lie, because, you know, Florida.

The terror, the terror, the terror, of whoops, what? The end of truth forever of what the US political-capitalist system can't stand, that a very small nation within the Monroe Doctrine (declared by the USA) can't choose it's own course.

Just off the phone again with the people on the ground in Cuba. They have a very different story than the narrative the media-USA is putting out there.

How much do you know of Cuban history? How much Spanish do you know?  How much time have you spent in Cuba with Cubans?

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1 hour ago, Zorral said:

 That is the lie, i.e. the narrative, that has been so successfully promulgated by the media and the USA.  The media has always swallowed it and promoted it and is still doing it.  They own the narrative. No facts, history, etc. has ever made a dent in that lie, because, you know, Florida.

The terror, the terror, the terror, of whoops, what? The end of truth forever of what the US political-capitalist system can't stand, that a very small nation within the Monroe Doctrine (declared by the USA) can't choose it's own course.

Just off the phone again with the people on the ground in Cuba. They have a very different story than the narrative the media-USA is putting out there.

How much do you know of Cuban history? How much Spanish do you know?  How much time have you spent in Cuba with Cubans?

First of all, I don't live in the US, so this bullshit about Florida controlling the narrative and I'm a sucker who can't think for myself and see what the evil America is doing doesn't fly.

Second, Cuba is not choosing his own path. The Castros chose their path for the country by taking power by force, keeping it by force by murdering anyone that opposed them, and later their stooges took over. They are and always have been a dictatorship, and got very, very rich while doing it. Their people have no more say than Iraq under Saddam, or Spain under Franco, or Chile under Pinochet. Hell, even the latter the people got a vote whether they wanted to keep him or not, though that would never happened if he thought he would lose, of course.

There is no such thing as a good dictatorship, unlike you imply. If Cuba's regime could be sustained democratically, it would be so.  The fact you may talk with one or another person who never lived anywhere else and only has access to state controlled media (or might be even a part of the regime and/or profit for it, for all I know) means nothing. If you talk to citizens of North Korea living in there, I'm sure most will tell you they love the Kims, and might even mean that. 

This bullshit about "poor countries are only poor because those rich imperialists exploit them, otherwise they'd be paradises" it's not only condescending, it's often racist, because of course all those black/brown/asian people can be responsible for their own fates. Not only that, it's the #1 excuse of every dictator and kleptocrat why their country is poor and for why they do nothing but get rich.

 

 

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Police patrol Havana in large numbers after rare protests:

Quote

Large contingents of Cuban police patrolled the capital of Havana on Monday following rare protests around the island nation against food shortages and high prices amid the coronavirus crisis. Cuba’s president said the demonstrations were stirred up on social media by Cuban Americans in the United States. [...]

Many young people took part in demonstrations in Havana. Protests were also held elsewhere on the island, including in the small town of San Antonio de los Baños, where people objected to power outages and were visited by President Miguel Díaz-Canel. He entered a few homes, where he took questions from residents.

Authorities appeared determined to put a stop to the demonstrations. More than a dozen protesters were detained, including a leading Cuban dissident who was arrested trying to attend a march in the city of Santiago, 559 miles (900 kilometers) east. The demonstrators disrupted traffic in the capital for several hours until some threw rocks and police moved in and broke them up.

 

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9 hours ago, Winterfell is Burning said:

First of all, I don't live in the US, so this bullshit about Florida controlling the narrative and I'm a sucker who can't think for myself and see what the evil America is doing doesn't fly.

Second, Cuba is not choosing his own path. The Castros chose their path for the country by taking power by force, keeping it by force by murdering anyone that opposed them, and later their stooges took over. They are and always have been a dictatorship, and got very, very rich while doing it. Their people have no more say than Iraq under Saddam, or Spain under Franco, or Chile under Pinochet. Hell, even the latter the people got a vote whether they wanted to keep him or not, though that would never happened if he thought he would lose, of course.

There is no such thing as a good dictatorship, unlike you imply. If Cuba's regime could be sustained democratically, it would be so.  The fact you may talk with one or another person who never lived anywhere else and only has access to state controlled media (or might be even a part of the regime and/or profit for it, for all I know) means nothing. If you talk to citizens of North Korea living in there, I'm sure most will tell you they love the Kims, and might even mean that. 

This bullshit about "poor countries are only poor because those rich imperialists exploit them, otherwise they'd be paradises" it's not only condescending, it's often racist, because of course all those black/brown/asian people can be responsible for their own fates. Not only that, it's the #1 excuse of every dictator and kleptocrat why their country is poor and for why they do nothing but get rich.

 

 

Complete bullshit. Cuba was a dictatorship long before Castro took power. The island was run by the American mafia and American sugar companies under Batista. No attempt was made to help the people or help the country. I have been to Cuba many times and travelled through a good portion of it and can tell you as a millwright that the machinery that exists there, the infrastructure and such, dates from the 1920s and 30s. The only railroad was built not for people but to  transport sugar cane. The illiteracy rate at the time of the revolution was about 90 percent. Cuba was not rich in the slightest but a feudal state owned and operated for the benefit of Americans companies and criminals with the complicit agreement of the American government. Nothing of value was put into Cuba except to extract money from there. Without the revolution Cuba would be another failed state as was Haiti under the Duvalier regime. 

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13 minutes ago, Dog of England said:

Complete bullshit. Cuba was a dictatorship long before Castro took power. The island was run by the American mafia and American sugar companies under Batista. No attempt was made to help the people or help the country. I have been to Cuba many times and travelled through a good portion of it and can tell you as a millwright that the machinery that exists there, the infrastructure and such, dates from the 1920s and 30s. The only railroad was built not for people but to  transport sugar cane. The illiteracy rate at the time of the revolution was about 90 percent. Cuba was not rich in the slightest but a feudal state owned and operated for the benefit of Americans companies and criminals with the complicit agreement of the American government. Nothing of value was put into Cuba except to extract money from there. Without the revolution Cuba would be another failed state as was Haiti under the Duvalier regime. 

When I have said that Cuba was NOT a dictatorship before Castro took over, or that it was rich? It doesn't matter. The fact is that Fidel had 60 years to make it a more prosperous country, but it didn't. In fact, it became poorer- except for him, who became fabulously wealthy.

And this 90% illiteracy rate is, quite simply, a lie.  In fact, 76% of the population was literate, according to UNESCO, the 4th highest rate in Latin America. Cuba was not the paradise anti-Castristas claim, but it wasn't this hellhole his supporters paint- including the left in much of the world. It was, in fact, relatively well-developed for the region standards- it had, for example, more doctors per capita than most the UK or Sweden., and it's GDP per capita was better than Brazil's.

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4 hours ago, Winterfell is Burning said:

In fact, 76% of the population was literate, according to UNESCO, the 4th highest rate in Latin America. Cuba was not the paradise anti-Castristas claim, but it wasn't this hellhole his supporters paint- including the left in much of the world

Thank you for repeating this. The narrative presented by those opposed to US foreign policy and/or sympathetic to one party Communist rule of Cuba  is often tendentious. So, too, is the hardline anti-Communist/pro-US narrative. Anyone who peddles one or the other is presenting propaganda, wittingly or not.

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Also while the US had an embargo for mutiple decades Cuba got aid and below market prices from the USSR as well as being able to trade with every other country aside from the US. Marxist Leninist planned economies failed everywhere else to provide a decent standard of living you can't blame that on the US. Also I don't see the US opposition to Cuba as evil during the cold war Cuba was allied to an enemy power and 90  miles from the US. Continuing the embargo after 1991 was bullshit but I don't see the issue before that.

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The situation in Cuba isn't an either/or situation. Cubans had it bad under Batista and have had it bad under Castro. It's true that U.S. sanctions have hindered Cuba's development, but so did Castro's terrible mismanagement, and I doubt a ton would have changed if those sanctions were reduced or removed. 

ETA: And U.S. sanctions have nothing to do with the fact that if someone living in Cuba wanted to stand up and protest their living conditions, there's a good chance they'd be thrown in jail or meet a firing squad, hence why so many risked the 90 mile voyage to Miami, often on crudely made crafts not worthy of being called boats. 

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54 minutes ago, Winterfell is Burning said:

Of course, there's no better mark of a successful regime beloved by it's people than sending the police to arrest demonstrators.

I guess they learned that from the US. The US also used extrajudicial murder as a tool to repress dissent as was done to the Black Panthers. 

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12 hours ago, L'oiseau français said:

In the meantime, there are riots in South Africa over the arrest on Friday of former PM Jacob Zuma, for contempt of court. He refused to give evidence about corruption during his years in office.

Just a minor correction: Zuma is the former president. South Africa doesn't have a prime minister.

So what happened is that the Constitutional Court (the highest court in the country) ordered him to appear before the Zondo Commission (the commission of inquiry over state capture during his presidency). Zuma defied the court order and was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment for contempt of court. He tried to get the High Court in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal to rescind the sentence but that was thrown out as a regional high court has no jurisdiction to overrule the apex court. A large number of his loyalists then armed themselves and surrounded his compound in Nkandla to defend him but Zuma ended up turning himself over to police. His application to have his sentence rescinded was heard by the ConCourt yesterday and judgement reserved.

Right now the riots and looting is restricted to certain parts of two provinces: KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng. A number of shopping malls have been vandalised and looted as well as a number of vaccination sites have had to close. The death toll is reported to be at least 45 so far with many of the deaths resulting from people being crushed to death during stampedes. The military has been deployed to assist law enforcement.

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1 hour ago, Winterfell is Burning said:

The fact is that Fidel had 60 years to make it a more prosperous country, but it didn't.

41 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

It's true that U.S. sanctions have hindered Cuba's development, but so did Castro's terrible mismanagement, and I doubt a ton would have changed if those sanctions were reduced or removed.

A bit off-topic no doubt, but I do wonder what kind of "development" you guys have in mind exactly. Was there a model path that could have been taken and wasn't? Key choices that should have been made and weren't? Etc...

To put it differently: is there a "success story" you have in mind here, i.e. an American country that managed to develop both democracy and prosperity for its people? I'm genuinely curious.

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Costa Rica. A stable democracy for over 70 years, well-ranked in the Human Development, the World Happiness Report, and the Press Freedom Report. economically on par with a number of European countries in regards to economic freedom and development.

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Cuba is a small island nation cut off from the big trading block of their nearby continent. It's very hard to pull yourself out of the mud under those circumstances.

What the US was and is doing is: Either give up your ways or starve to death. When the starving started it was apparently only the fault of those who didn't give in to the US demands for surrender. While I don't really think that letting your own people down just to make a point, I still can admire what Cuba has managed to achieve against all odds. 

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23 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

A bit off-topic no doubt, but I do wonder what kind of "development" you guys have in mind exactly. Was there a model path that could have been taken and wasn't? Key choices that should have been made and weren't? Etc...

To put it differently: is there a "success story" you have in mind here, i.e. an American country that managed to develop both democracy and prosperity for its people? I'm genuinely curious.

Canada comes to mind.

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5 minutes ago, kiko said:

Canada comes to mind.

Honest to God, drop dead with that effing bullshit. The US did not shape our democracy, did not sponsor us, actually went to war with our colonial predecessor, had citizens try to violently overthrow our government, and doesn’t do anything positive for Canada unless it’s first a positive for the US. So stuff that where the sun don’t shine.

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