About 5.3 million people, nearly half of the country’s population of 11 million, filled the streets of cities, towns, and municipalities across the Caribbean island today to celebrate International Workers’ Day. “A sea marched toward Revolution Square this May Day,” began the report in Trabajadores, the daily newspaper of the Confederation of Cuban Workers, covering the mobilization of 600,000 in Havana. “It was certainly a sea of workers and other people, men, women, old, young, teenagers, and kids who came together to form this multicolored and enthusiastic stream, showing the world once again that Cubans defend their revolution and won’t be intimidated by blockades and other threats.”
At this point, I’d trade Cuba’s government for the United States.
edit: deleted posts, sorry guys it’s just too much to get a flood of people come at me, there’s no time to respond to all of them and quite frankly I try to avoid talking about the US anyway
Most of the issues with Cuba’s poverty stems from sanctions. Those sanctions are in nobody’s interest except a few Cuban expats in Florida. Who at this point are the descendents of people who were kicked out for largely good reasons.
As for human rights abuses, we don’t even need to make the comparison between the US and Cuba on that one.
Nah there’s also plenty of mismanagement, in particular spending the cold war being a one product economy and thinking that the USSR will be around forever, overpaying for sugar and sending industrial goods in return.
Venezuela messing up royally and not being able to subsidise Cuba with their oil any more is a more recent problem, but pretty much the same pattern.
Cubans are masters of improvisation and the party is smart enough not to interfere with the people’s capacity to self-organise to get around acute problems, unlike Americans and Russians they don’t micro-manage for the sake of micro-managing, but they’re very much not masters of strategic planning.
Over long, better short, Cuba has to increase its value-add and labour productivity. Export fewer resources, more and most of all more high-value finished products, also become energy independent. It’s nice that they can help out Venezuela with toilet paper but truth be told it’s not really a product that’s highly sought after on the world market because by and large, countries are better at not fucking up their economy than Venezuela.
Or, differently put: Wake me when Cuba exports electric buses. That, preferably, look weirdly like 40s, 50s American cars, in a retrofuturistic way. Or something more niche, but have something that’s not rum, tobacco, or honey. Oh, pharmaceuticals, gotta give them that.
This sounds awfully simplistic.
“What about the US?” is not a real arguement. We are discussing Cuba, not the US, Botswana or Uruguay.
The Cuban regime is brutal and authoritarian with minimal respect for human rights.
I started this thread with “I might trade the US government for Cuba’s right now”. In that context, it’s completely fair to compare the two.
I am talking about blaming everything on sanctions.
I am not that knowledgeable about Cuba, but I have met people from Cuba who moved to the Eastern Block and I know a little bit about events Cuba in context of global history (missile crisis, overthrow of Batista).
Your approach doesn’t sound nuanced enough based on my experience talking to Cubans (and they are not your descendants of Cuban exiles in Florida types).
But they still have free healthcare. You can walk off a plane in Cuba and get healthcare. It might be shit healthcare, but poor people in the US have shit healthcare too in Republican states.
So what? There are countries that have free healthcare and also have a democratic political system and aren’t run as a brutal dictatorship.
You keep doing the “but what about the US?”, thing. We are not discussing the US, we are discussing Cuba.
I’m not OP, that was my first comment. Also, we can compare Cuba and the US right now because we’re going authoritarian and they’re already authoritarian. It’s interesting that they have some things better than us.
Comparison is fine. But you are engaging in whataboutism. We are discussing Cuba’s brutal authoritarianism, this topic can evaluated with references to the US.
The poverty is the result of the US economic siege war, don’t pretend like they did it to themselves.