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Cuban Video Game Recreates Revolutionary History
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Guardian reports that Cuban programmers have unveiled a new 3D video game that puts a revolutionary twist on gaming, letting players recreate decisive clashes from the 1959 uprising in which many of their grandparents fought. 'The player identifies with the history of Cuba,' says Haylin Corujo, head of video game studies for Cuba's Youth Computing Club and leader of the team of developers who created Gesta Final – roughly translated as 'Final Heroic Deed'. 'You can be a participant in the battles that were fought in the war from '56 to '59.' The game begins with the user joining the 82 rebels who in 1956 sailed to Cuba from Mexico aboard the Granma. Players then fight their way through swamps shoulder-to-shoulder with bearded guerrillas clad in the olive green of Fidel Castro and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara to topple 1950s Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The game lets you pick from three player profiles, one in an olive hat similar to the one Fidel Castro was known for, another wearing a Guevara-style beret and the last with the kind of helmet worn by the ill-fated Camilo Cienfuegos in many revolution-era photographs. Rene Vargas, a 29-year-old gamer who tried his hand at 'Gesta Final' when it was presented at a technology fair in Havana last week, says the graphics were surprisingly sophisticated. 'Bearing in mind the level of technical support there is in Cuba, it looks pretty good,' says Vargas. There are about 783,000 computers in this country of some 11 million inhabitants, according to government statistics from 2011. Private ownership of computers is low, but many Cubans access them at work, school or cyber cafes. 'We developed (it) keeping in mind the purchasing power and reality of Cubans,' says Corujo. 'It doesn't require incredible technological features.'"
Yeah Castro and his boy Che Che are real fucking heros. Che ran Castro's death camps and got off murdering people. HEROS!!
You're comparing the Cuban Revolution to the rise of Nazi Germany? Congratulations on almost completing your American primary public education little guy.
When you have a combat boot crushing your throat, it doesn't matter if its a Left boot or a Right boot.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Yes, that is exactly the kind of meaningless "political" "opinion" I'm talking about. What do you know about people crushing other people's throats with combat boots in the Cuban revolution? A revolution in which 58 men inspired a country of 6.5 million to throw out a dictatorial, postcolonial government? You know nothing.
Seems no different in premise than the Call of Duty games or any of the other war games that USians love to play. Too bad it appears to be a single player game and not an MMO - that would be rather awesome.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Shame. The summary doesn't even mention what game engine was used. And you call this news for nerds?
This article has screenshots and more details about gameplay.
Batista's regime can hardly claim the moral high ground, but the same can be said for Castro, Guevara and the revolutionaries. In fact, in any armed conflict, there are some rather bloody hands on both sides (figuratively speaking). It's important not to put anyone on a pedestal simply because of some view they espoused, without taking a long hard look at the actions they took to realize those views.
As opposed to your "opinion" where Che and Castro were angels and didn't kill anybody opposed to a complete nationalization of the Cuban economy. Propaganda comes from all sides, including your leftist friends, and until you grow up enough to recognize that fact, you only know one side of history--precisely what you accuse the grandparent of. Let's just hope you do not follow Che's path and kill him because your political disagreement.
I wonder if it has DRM? Is it FOSS? What does that mean in a socialist state?
Maybe the Cubans could give the game platform to Viet Nam, and they could come up with a plotline where you follow Ho Chi Min to his defeat of the imperialist US invaders. There's jungles and tropical climate in both situations, right.
In China, they could have the Long March MMOG.
On a somewhat more serious note, this is somewhat an exercise in jumping the shark. If you're at the point where you promote your history/ideology by turning it into a video game, it's ceased to be current experience, and has moved into the realm of cultural myths.
In the US, the number of people who have combat experience is dwarfed by the the ranks of the FPS gamers. The real experience of war has been eclipsed by the glamorized painless video version. It's likely that the sanitized version has displaced reality in the minds of a lot of people. This can't be a good thing.
Why is Snark Required?
are the Tropico games banded there??
fail. I didn't go to an American school.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Look you may not know this, but the Batista government was the bad guy, and was a puppet government propped up by the US after the Spanish American war...you know the one US started so they could get take huge chunks of spanish territory. Before those 82 rebels started their revolution Cuba had the following problems:
75% of rural dwellings were huts made from palm trees.
More than 50% had no toilets of any kind.
85% had no inside running water.
91% had no electricity.
There was only 1 doctor per 2,000 people in rural areas.
More than one-third of the rural population had intestinal parasites.
Only 4% of Cuban peasants ate meat regularly; only 1% ate fish, less than 2% eggs, 3% bread, 11% milk; none ate green vegetables.
The average annual income among peasants was $91 (1956), less than 1/3 of the national income per person.
45% of the rural population was illiterate; 44% had never attended a school.
Now they have a better Literacy, infant mortality and healthcare than the US. I would call that a pretty heroic tale.
...and yes, I am comparing a REVOLUTION to ANOTHER REVOLUTION.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
What do you think about Greece now then? Spain? Or Japan if a couple more decades isn't too long ago?
Just let it go.
A bunch of people murdered a corrupt government, kicked out foreign gangsters (with political connections otherwise they wouldn't have been so much stink from the USA for so many years), and being a bunch of murderers running a revolution a lot of other people got killed too for a few years afterwards. That's what happens with revolutions when you are revolting against people there and in your face and not on the other side of an ocean kept away by the French.
For all /. who think "know all about" Cuba: check this article out. From a highly-respected source (in its time), the Associated Press. Spoiler alert--there's not a single true thing in it.
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10200202785247365.1073741825.1084043443&type=1&l=7aa048e364
Uhh... Bullshit? It always amazes me that so many people are willing to credulousness accept "statistics" like that from total propaganda. You probably also believed that the Soviet Union was a massive economic powerhouse for it's people in the 80s, right?
Hint: People don't take leaky boats and swim across oceans to get elsewhere because where they live is just too wonderful for them to handle. Try talking to someone who's actually lived in Cuba and then escaped.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Name a single innocent person who was tortured, raped or killed by anyone associated with the Cuban revolution who wasn't punished severely for it. At least two Cuban soldiers in Angola were executed for raping an Angolan woman. Can your army say the same?
The glorious Cuban revolution continues to this day. The propaganda ads and constant near daily "celebration" of minor individuals and events is somewhat bizarre for foreigners to see. That the Cuban government has "rewritten" history to suit their vision and goals is no surprise. Neither is the fact that most Cubans, having grown up under it and exposed to this propaganda for the past 50 years, whole heartedly believe it and embrace it with a nationalistic passion not unlike; 'meruca. Fuck yea!
But, while the video game and the propaganda may bend the reality beyond any truth, the rebels did wind up forcing Batista out and remain firmly in power to this day. A single scraggly bearded PoS remains in charge even after 50 years. And, they love him!
"...they did follow due process every single time"
citation needed...
So... you doubt the propaganda of other countries but you believe the one fed to you by your leaders.
Hint: My working colleagues did not leave the US because it was so great to live there...
Those refugee "escapees" were almost 10% of Cuba's population. That's an awful lot of criminals per capita.
Of course they are not as developed as the US, but that's true for most countries. Cuba has a relatively high HDI, according to the UN, not the Cuban government.
He is comparing propaganda to propaganda. Although truth to be told you can't play as Nazis in American shooters so it would be only fair.
I'm sure his fanboys will make excuses, but here are the words of Che Guevara:
"The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese."
"The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations."
True. The US has the largest prison population per capita and even there it's only 1% of the adult population.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
As the son of exiles and someone who knows many families who lost loved ones to the lack of due process, please stop your ignorant rants and stop reading 'Internet Facts' written by the same people that did the atrocities which are all too well known to those that actually lived through it. You are insulting the memory of many people who actually wanted a truly free and democratic Cuba, and were not afraid to speak out against what they knew even back then was just an exchange from one bad dictatorship to another. The medicine is not better; nor is the education and overall quality of life, but you wouldn't know that unless you actually knew people from there or gone to visit Cuba yourself, and I'm not talking about the tourist areas.
I hope this is an early April Fools joke, even if it is a bad one.
People don't do the same thing to escape the wonderful capitalistic democracies of Mexico and various Central American states?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
"Hundreds of Batista-era agents, policemen and soldiers were put on public trial for human rights abuses, war crimes, murder and torture. Most of the people accused were convicted by revolutionary tribunals of political crimes, and were executed by firing squad; others persons received long sentences of imprisonment. A notable example of revolutionary justice was after the capture of Santiago, Raul Castro directed the execution of more than seventy Batista POWs.[24]
For his part in taking Havana, Che Guevara was appointed supreme prosecutor in La Cabaña Fortress. This was part of a large-scale attempt by Fidel Castro to cleanse the security forces of Batista loyalists and potential opponents of the new revolutionary regime. Others were fortunate enough to be dismissed from the army and police without prosecution, and some high-ranking officials in the ancien régime were exiled as military attachés.[24]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Revolution#Aftermath
Cuba definitely does have better healthcare than the US, where 50 million people have none.
For instance, Cuba has two and a half more doctors per capita than the US
Oh, and here's another datapoint: the table shows literacy levels in Cuba being higher than the USA.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Say what you will about the Cuban state, but they do have a lower infant mortality rate and a higher literacy rate than the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate
So although it might not be the best place to live, there is no bullshit in the OP's post.
So the nepotic upper middleclass and people who took the chance to run was equal to 10% of the population? How many of those people where even Cuban for that matter?
Dude... 50 million without healthcare.
You know which other first world country doesn't have universal heathcare?
None.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Every single cuban citizen who has to escape in a raft suffering 90 miles of sunburn while traveling a few miles per hour hoping you make it across the Gulf stream quickly so it doesn't carry you far enough into the Atlantic that no one ever finds you. The fact that people live there make the choice to ride a raft with THEIR KIDS in what is essentially their own personal death march should be enough to answer your question.
I use common sense and the actions of the people there to draw my conclusion. You're still trying to argue which political side is right.
10% of the countries population (roughly) has been so distraught that they elected a trip thats got less than a 1% chance of survival over staying and dealing with it.
We punish our soldiers when we find them committing crimes you speak of. Its well known fact (from those who escape the country) that the Cuban army on the other hand do commit those crimes ... and you yourself give an example of them doing so.
America has its own set of issues, but its hard to believe America and Cuba are even on the same planet, putting them in the same class just makes it clear that you have no concept of what you're talking about.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
"A revolution in which 58 men inspired a country of 6.5 million to throw out a dictatorial, postcolonial government?"
... and replaced it with another dictatorial, post-colonial government.
Am I supposed to be impressed?
Oh boy, I sure hope this game lets you blind fold and shoot people that didnt go along with the glorious Cuban revolution!
http://www.therealcuba.com/page5.htm
Python
You mean that "shit hole", that has better literacy, child survival rate and health care than the US?
Yeah, look at your own shit hole first.
Regardless of your political views, you should be impressed by Cuba's health indicators at least.
.: Semper Absurda
Oh yeah, all that horrible Cuban propaganda about their great health indicators...
.: Semper Absurda
Ironic then that the US uses it's Cuban military base to imprison, torture and murder people without due process (and far far away from media eyes) as well ain't it!
ER won't treat cancer patients or any chronic disease, also it's highly wasteful for the uninsured to rely on ER for general healthcare, prevention is much cheaper.
It always amazes me that so many people are willing to credulousness accept "statistics" like that from total propaganda.
All available evidence suggests that your average Cuban is literate, doesn't lose children in infancy, and has access to medical care that international organizations routinely rate as highly effective and remarkably low-cost.
For what it's worth, my mother took several trips to the more rural areas of Cuba in the early 1990's, during the worst of the post-Soviet depression they went through, and the people she met were universally literate, fairly healthy, and had enough to eat. They felt safe enough from the government that they could crack subtle jokes at Fidel Castro's expense in private homes (and yes, they had decently confortable private homes). The core of their health care system was the village doctor who lived just down the block and not only cared for everyone who lived there but also promoted public health and sanitation. The Americans on the trip were not followed around by government minders or anything like that. As part of the same program, several Cubans came to the US, and several other Americans made different trips to Cuba over a decade.
The general impression I get: Florida is a paradise compared to Cuba. Cuba is a paradise compared to Haiti, Hondurus, and many other Latin American countries. GDP per capita tells a pretty clear story: US - $48,000 Cuba - $9,900 Haiti - $1,200 Hondurus - $4,400 (all numbers from CIA estimates)
The other part of the story: The US government and the Cuban exiles in Miami have been demonizing Castro's government for over 50 years, so it's hardly surprising that most Americans have a very warped idea of what Cuba is actually like.
I am officially gone from
It should include the Bay of Pigs battle. You start off a counter-revolutionary stooge of the US, foolishly believing the US will support your invasion of Cuba. You land your boat, but are surprised by the brave soldiers of the revolution. You use the radio to call in air support. The cutscene plays showing the corrupt playboy american president ignoring your call in favor of spending time with his hollywood movie star girlfriend. You futilely fight on, but the end comes for you. If you survive long enough, you experience a jail cell slide for a few seconds, but regards of your outcome, then a suitably patriotic cutscene plays showing the deliriously happy people of cuba celebrating there new freedom.
50 million without health insurance, you mean?
Hard as it is to believe, you can get healthcare without health insurance....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
It's quite shocking to see how much worse the opinion Nazis get is worse than those of Soviets. The latter put a great deal of effort into propaganda, and had a chance to continue it for half a century after the former got defeated.
Nazis were evil, sure, but if you look around, most wars in the history of mankind revolved around "our tribe is good, their is bad, they don't deserve to exist, their belongings/land are rightful loot that should be ours". Try reading the Bible, you have an outright order from the tribe's god to genocide every living being, including even livestock, from a list of neighbours a prophet didn't like. Even in 21th century we have Tutsi vs Hutu, and so on. I'd say there is only one reason to consider Nazis more evil than the rest: Germany was one of the most civilised countries at the time, so such barbarous actions are more shocking than when done by Tutsi or some such. Doing something "for the good of your people" has at least a good intent, even if it's severely misguided. Hitler wanted to give Germans power, to let them expand to lands occupied by "lesser races", protect them from "evil plotting Jews", purge the race from the weak, get rid of "traitors" to the nation, etc.
On the other hand, Soviets had no good intentions whatsoever. Even before the revolution, "good of the working class" was an empty slogan. The actual source of their name "soviets", ie, workman councils, were immediately disbanded, and "dictatorship of the proletariat" was from the start a dictatorship of the Party. Unlike "Animal Farm", it was not a popular movement gone bad, it was planned to be bad.
In Nazi Germany, if you were an ethnic German, physically and mentally hale, and not a dissident, you were ok as long as you obeyed orders. On the other hand, in the Soviet Union, the very working class that was supposed to be the main benefactors of the revolution were also those hit the hardest. You don't go on mass murders of people you intent to fight for.
So even though there are no doubts Nazis were evil, Soviets and their offshots (Mao, Pol Pot, Kim) were a whole new class of evil that makes Hitler a mere naughty kindergarten kid in comparison.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Nope. The cubans revolted. The nazi government was elected. Sure, the election was not entirely democratic - they were beating up political opponents. They started a fire in order to have 'emergency powers'. But it was no revolution.
Castro's revolution had its flaws but he never openly tortured or killed his fellow citizens
No, he left that to Che Guevera.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I'm a physician in a New York City Emergency Room. There are plenty of Cubans here, and either Jodido is correct about the wonderful conditions in Cuba or these people are completely making up everything they tell me. Personally, I'll go with the stories of poor immigrants who have no reason to lie to a white Jewish doctor who has nothing to do with Cuba over the rantings of some random internet troll.
Castro's revolution had its flaws but he never openly tortured or killed his fellow citizens
That is flat out, 100% WRONG. One of my high school friends was from Cuba. Both his father and his uncle were tortured by the Castro regime because they didn't fight on the "right" side. They were lucky they weren't simply shot, but my friend's dad walked with a severe limp for the rest of his life. And Che was a murdering bastard who had a habit of shooting people he only suspected of not being loyal enough.
Know what those Che tshirts are good for? It makes it easy to spot complete morons.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Reminder: "Troll" is not a substitute for "I disagree".
To the best of my knowledge, my comment was simply factual.
It's not so far-fetched. Dictatorship of the proletariat on one hand, dictatorship by the National Socialist party on the other hand.
Potemkin indicators.
"torture", "murder" ? Citation needed.
Regardless of your political views, you should be impressed by Cuba's health indicators at least.
And if it is such a paradise why are people willing to jump on practically anything that floats to get the Florida?
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
Now they have a better Literacy, infant mortality and healthcare than the US. I would call that a pretty heroic tale.
If Cuba is such a paradise, why did the government refuse to issue exit visas to its citizens for decades? Why did it even require exit visas in the first place, for that matter? Most governments don't use border controls to keep people in the country.
they do have a lower infant mortality rate and a higher literacy rate than the US.
I see this statistic cited nearly every time the issue of Cuba comes up, but it's extremely deceptive. There are multiple reasons why the infant mortality rate for the US is higher, including a greater number of premature births, but one reason is that the statistics are calculated differently. In the US, where medical technology is very sophisticated (and very expensive, which is one reason why our health care system is so inefficient), many infants (usually premature) that would be considered stillborn in other countries can be resuscitated and kept on life support. Typically the survival rate isn't great anyway, unfortunately - but they are still recorded as "live births". So our mortality rate is effectively inflated compared to less advanced countries.
I dunno, maybe there is a positive correlation between high health indicators and high desire for ephemeral things, like freedom.
.: Semper Absurda
Here's a documentary from dissidents that discusses torture. If you read the news in Spanish, this kind of accusation comes up from time to time. Who do you believe, the dissidents or the establishment? It's not like we can examine their jails to make sure.
It is allowed to think the Cubans have a lousy government, and simultaneously believe that the US should not invade them.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That too, but the initial stink was due to organised crime linked to political figures losing a lot of money and the communist angle was more of an excuse. That's history. I'm amazed you are questioning it, because some of the mobsters had pet Democrats in their pockets.
Castro's revolution had its flaws but he never openly tortured or killed his fellow citizens
That is flat out, 100% WRONG. One of my high school friends was from Cuba. Both his father and his uncle were tortured by the Castro regime because they didn't fight on the "right" side. They were lucky they weren't simply shot, but my friend's dad walked with a severe limp for the rest of his life. And Che was a murdering bastard who had a habit of shooting people he only suspected of not being loyal enough.
Know what those Che tshirts are good for? It makes it easy to spot complete morons.
True effing that! Damn kids wearing Che shirts. Bunch of ignorant idiots. It's offensive.
You should ask your parents what exactly they did to deserve the public revolutionary trials. As them how many people they tortured or killed, or how many were killed because of their denouncing to a corrupt military dictatorship drunk on the blood of countless people.
And don't be a fool, I visit Cuba regularly and have several friends over there, they even got me to "la cabaña", the place where the trials and executions took place. I even got the list of executions, and even while I disagree in principle to the summary trials, the numbers were quite lower than I expected based in the hype from the Miami crowd.
As for a joke, supporting 50 years of embargo against your won people with the explicit goal to create hardship and unrest is not even funny.
You've been to "La Cabaña"? Big deal. So have I. I went there with my cousins. Then even got me in at Cuban prices. LOL They told me the truth about the place. In hushed voices. Why? Because if someone overhead, he'd probably be in trouble. The "Cañonazo" was pretty interesting to watch.
I'm not going to argue with you, because unless you're of Cuban descent then you just really won't understand. You probably never grew up hearing about how great things were before Castro. You didn't grow up hearing about the stories and romanticism of pre-Castro Cuba.
Ask your friends what would happen if they stood out in the open and cursed Castro. They're probably wouldn't even think about it for fear of what could happen.
The status of PoW is very murky in civil wars. Do you want criminals to be protected from execution simply on the grounds they were arrested during a war? The crimes these people were accused of commiting happened before the war on an ongoing basis. They were commiting repeated crimes against the citizens of Cuba, and they were tried for that.
While you may argue that the trials were merely showtrials with a politically pre-determined outcome (I don't know enough on the issue to argue this one either way), these were at the very least superficially legitimate trials.
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You probably never grew up hearing about how great things were before Castro. You didn't grow up hearing about the stories and romanticism of pre-Castro Cuba.
What if we rebranded that as "pre-embargo Cuba"...? Can you be sure that the hardships faced in modern Cuba are the result of the leadership and not the outside world?
And you're of Cuban descent -- big deal. Your family were presumably in the privileged class for whom things were undoubtedly better. You're not going to listen to anyone not of Cuban descent? Fine. But remember, just being "Cuban" doesn't mean you understand everything and everyone in Cuba. I'm sure things are bad, but you can hardly expect anyone to take you seriously if you talk about the "romanticism" of Cuba when most people didn't even have access to plumbed water.
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... and replaced it with another dictatorial, post-colonial government.
Sorry, nope. A "post-colonial government" in this context refers to the sort of government where the colonial upper classes break free of the control of the colonial power in order to retain power within their group. As a more recent example of the transition from postcolonialism, consider Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe got in on the ticket of dismantling the post-colonial land ownership structure, where pretty much every acre of the country was owned by a minority of rich white people. His regime has been a total nightmare and has done even more damage to the country than the previous post-colonial setup, but that doesn't make him "post-colonial".
My preferred adjective here would be "Stalinist", because it's not even communist -- just like Russia and China, it has ignored the notion of community control in favour of centralism. I'm also avoiding "soviet", because a soviet was a council, and centralist Stalinism restricted the soviets to a state of mere tokenism.
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Ah, I suppose that would be the emergency-room-based healthcare plan, brilliant.
What's your problem? It's the most efficient, effective and humane method of healthcare known to man! Leave it all till it gets chronic and then the tumor is so big that it's really easy to find, you see?
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When the Soviet Union collapsed they stopped buying Cuban sugar at subsidized prices. It was that massive economic crash that led to thousands of Cubans leaving crippling poverty. Their form of government doesn't work, they know that, that's why they are privatizing and moving to an open economy.
But do we know why it doesn't work? Remember that the USSR justified* their support as compensation for loss of trade due to the US embargo, and that with the fall of the Soviet Union, they went back to being artificially blocked from open trade. It is not possible to say beyond reasonable doubt that their form of government failed simply because of external intervention.
* Note, I say "justified" -- I'm not saying it wasn't in reality a means to buy military presence in the area.
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The grandparent AC claimed the US was doing those things in Guantanamo.
That's a bit much. If we want to compare Jesus with any 20th century figure, you want to look at Gandhi. If we believe any of the speeches attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were true (whether we believe the miracles or not) then they are the writings of a genuinely humble* pacifist. This would also explain why Jesus never hitched up with the various revolutionary groups -- his philosophy left no space for militancy.
* Yes, I know that it seems weird to call someone who reportedly claimed to be the son of God "humble", but either he was the son of God, or he was mentally ill (and was a humble man who just happened to genuinely believe himself to be the son of God), or he didn't actually ever say that, and it was just made up after him by someone else. (All this still assumes that the New Testament is essentially based on one genuine historical figure.)
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Hopefully they'll truthfully portray the "freedom fighters" as also being cold blooded murderers who tortured, raped and killed innocent people as well.
That stinking murderer castro is one of them.
What, you mean just like the enthralling Abu Ghraib stage in Call of Duty 4?
Or the level in Ghost Recon 6 where you sneak in and kidnap an unarmed family in the middle of the night, then escort them on a plane to be tortured by a Middle Eastern dictator
Or perhaps the stage at the end of Medal of Honor where you play a British soldier charged with rounding up the Cossacks an Leinz to put them on trucks to the Soviet gulags. In particular, perhaps you are referring to the part where one of your fellow soldiers comments that the Russians haven't sent enough trucks, and that chorus of rifle fire you here as you are marching out to the final waypoint....
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oh, poor reading on my part.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"My preferred adjective here would be "Stalinist", because it's not even communist ..."
I agree. That's why I wrote "wannabes". Nobody so far has implemented a true Communist government. They haven't even been good Socialists. They all get stuck at the "central government" part of Marx's theoretical "evolution" of society.
And it's easy to see why: once in power, the central government simply doesn't want to give it up.
I should add: if, as Marx claimed, this represents "evolution" of society, I think it is pretty safe to say that in humanity's experience, Socialism is an evolutionary dead-end.
I'm not questioning it. I don't claim that's not real. But the militant partnering with Communist pretenders (because there has never been a real Communist nation in recorded history) is also true. The only question I see is: which reason was predominant?
Health experts from all over the world, including the USA, have inspected Cuba's medical sector.
I've visited 2 health clinics myself (though I'm not a doctor).
Yes, they are that good, free for everyone and everywhere.
Why? Because in Cuba education is king and every other person is a doctor.
Not saying that the country doesn't have a lot of dark secrets, the health sector just isn't one of them. The US has more tropical diseases than Cuba. The #1 health threat to Cubans is the embargo.
That aside, Cuba is an unfree totalitarian surveillance state.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
NP, it happens!
If they worked for Batista, or benefited from his ill gotten gains
Even in 1980, a couple of decades later? For example, 125,000 people left Cuba in 1980 when Fidel Castro allowed exile for a brief time. That's long after any Batista allies would have been purged from Cuba.
It becomes blatantly obvious when you compare it with relations with other places that had similar governments.
Soviets were not "immediately disbanded" - in fact, they ran the country well into 1920s. Also, the electoral regime established by Bolsheviks favored urban areas (and hence factory workers) over countryside (and hence peasants) by a factor of five, and those identified as bourgeois were stripped of the right to vote, so it was not your typical one man one vote democracy. But then that was the whole point of "dictatorship of the proletariat".
But Marx's preconditions for the revolution were never actually met in any of the revolutions under the banner of socialism or communism (neither of which terms were Marx's anyway....)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'