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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.'"
You're comparing the Cuban Revolution to the rise of Nazi Germany? Congratulations on almost completing your American primary public education little guy.
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.
This may surprise you, but actual history is distinct from freerepublic hyperbole.
Well, technically they were called labor camps.
But hyperbole? So we have a guy who fought for "freedom" and ended up being in power all his life. And passed that power to family members. I cannot say what it was like under Batista, but good grief! Castro couldn't have created a democratic system? He could have at the very least done a George Washington and been the first President. And then peacefully left office.
It makes me really appreciate the Founders of the US. There were so many opportunities to turn this country into another Western Hemisphere dictatorship shithole and they didn't.
Of course a democracy doesn't guarantee anything -see Mexico.
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.
Of course a democracy doesn't guarantee anything -see Merica.
FTFY
crikes look at how many "democracies" America has established against the will of the people that have turned ugly that's a far worse track record than Cuba. I mean Vietnam for crying out loud. Ho Chi Minh looked to the US for help breaking free of it's colonial status (like US/England) and then when they wanted to establish a govt of their own choosing .. war.
Just another second banana
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.
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.
was Call of Duty banned there? I thought I recalled hearing about a mission where you assassinated Fidel Castro which I thought was rather ballsy considering Castro was alive at the time and not at war with the country. That'd be like the NAACP making a game where you assassinate former President Bush.
Just another second banana
Then you should also know why the missiles were there--which is that the US invaded Cuba in 1961, the invasion was crushed, but the US didn't give up and was planning to invade again in 1962 (Google "Operation Mongoose") this time with US troops instead of spoiled rich kids who thought the Cubans would welcome them back with open arms (they did "welcome" them back with arms but not the kind the country club types expected).
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?
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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You realize when you say something stupid like 'Meruca' you instantly lose everyone in your listener group except the other idiots such as yourself with an axe to grind?
You lose any credence you had instantly and make it clear that you're not out about the truth or facts, you're out to promote your agenda.
If you actually wanted to spread truth, you wouldn't try to drag your own personal agenda into it. You end up letting everyone around you know that your 'facts' aren't trustable.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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
Oh yeah, all that horrible Cuban propaganda about their great health indicators...
.: Semper Absurda
Fanboi here. That's a passage from his younger diaries, when he had barely had contact with blacks and was certainly not politically defined as he would become later. He wrote that when he was about 24. Later, he wrote the following:
It might be noted he later actually fought and bled in Congo fighting against Mobutu along Congolese revolutionaries.
That's not to say everything he did was right. He was a proponent of death penalty, something a man of his education (he was a doctor) should have abhorred already in the 60s. He heavily miscalculated the campaigns in Congo and Bolivia. But racist? No way.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
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
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
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.