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Fidel Castro has died

bbc.com

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Re: Fidel Castro has died

#721

Post by mzw_mzw »

jgome wrote: post #540
gedy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Never sprayed Vietnamese with Agent Orange or napalms for one, never dropped nuclear bombs on civilians Yes, on the North Vietnamese invaders who had a track record of murdering civilians well before the US was ever involved. And the Japanese who perpetrated the Rape of Nanking, etc. But even so - the US has voted out these previous politicians whereas Cubans were and are not able to do that.

So the US as a nation is evil. BTW, you are wrong: cubans do vote, too.

Really? There have been free and fair elections in Cuba, where anyone can start up a political party, campaign for their positions without any fear whatsoever of government retaliation, and successfully get elected to office, even if they have anti-Communist views? Wow, I hadn't heard about this. You seem to be pretty confident about stating it, though, so perhaps you can go into some detail about these elections.

I'm also wondering why so many people were so desperate to leave Cuba in rickety rafts even though they could have just voted out the Castros instead in one of these elections you mention, but I'm sure you can explain that too.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#722

Post by _zrxj »

raldi wrote: post #166
peterkelly wrote: post #19

Excerpt from the article on CNN (probably edited by the time you read this): http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/26/americas/fidel-castro-obit... "One Castro or another has ruled Cuba over a period that spans seven decades and 11 U.S. presidents. Fidel Castro outlived six of those presidents,[[[NOTE: change to seven if George H.W. Bush dies before Castro]]] including Cold War warriors John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Ro…

The software they use to draft these should be given support for a special tag that it will refuse to publish to prod an article containing.

I worked on software like this. You wouldn't believe how many variations of a typo can escape parsing.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#724

Post by mzw_mzw »

kuschku wrote: post #531
endisukaj wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> US was Good, while the USSR was Evil Objectively? They were both Evil. If you compare them, the USSR is hands down the evil one. I really hate this whitewashing of USSR's history just to put down the US. I'm pretty sure nobody here defending Castro or Cuba ever had to live under a communist dictatorship. It's as simple as: Ask anyone from Eastern Europe or even Cuba on whose sphere of influence would they had rathe…

Most of that is true. But comparing the US and USSR isn’t nearly as easy. Both were (and are) horrible to non-citizen. And while the US was mostly okay to the white citizen, minorities had to suffer for quite a while. And nowadays, the US mistreating its own citizen is getting extreme. > Ask anyone from Eastern Europe or even Cuba on whose sphere of influence would they had rather been That question isn’t nearly as e…

> But comparing the US and USSR isn’t nearly as easy. Both were (and are) horrible to non-citizen.

Go ahead and compare how the United States treated the citizens of, say, France, with how the USSR treated the citizens of, oh, say, Czechoslovakia. We'll wait.

> And while the US was mostly okay to the white citizen, minorities had to suffer for quite a while.

It's telling that you are attempting to draw an equality between segregation -- which was legally ended in 1957 as part of an open and democratic process -- with the USSR's extensive gulag system, intricate controls on freedom of expression and freedom of thought, and general lack of civil rights for everyone, which lasted right up until the day it disintegrated.

> In Germany we’re having a huge group of people who lived under communism – and want it back.

If Communism was so great, why did you have to build a wall to keep people from running away from it? That's the unanswerable point here.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#725

Post by mzw_mzw »

ifdefdebug wrote: post #238
edblarney wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The western view of Castro is painted with decades of terrible propaganda." + Fidel does not allow his people to leave, with the threat of punishment. + Fidel does not allow democracy + He does not allow any real internet access + Fidel puts political dissidents in jail + Fidel's private Army own's 85% of the economy + Cuban's live in relative poverty + Only the US 'embargos' Cuba, they are free to trade with 167 ot…

Here are some points of propaganda: > Fidel does not allow his people to leave, with the threat of punishment. Everybody is (now) free to leave Cuba. But OK, I think that's fairly recent. > Fidel's private Army own's 85% of the economy "Fidel's private Army" is just an ugly sound byte. It's the Cuban army and it's not going to be dissolved now that he's dead. > Cuban's live in relative poverty While poverty is a prob…

I can't help but notice that you skipped over the little details about a lack of democracy, a lack of free access to information, and how dissidents are punished.

> On the other side, western propaganda blanks out a lot of facts about Cuba. Among those is the fact that a significant percentage of Cubans approve their government.

I can't help but notice that you skipped over the little details about a lack of democracy, a lack of free access to information, and how dissidents are punished.

> On the other side, western propaganda blanks out a lot of facts about Cuba. Among those is the fact that a significant percentage of Cubans approve their government.

Weird. Then why the resistance to holding elections?

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#726

Post by raverbashing »

duncanawoods wrote: post #713
raverbashing wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is naive As even you said, Cuba was not supposed to have Windows copies, but I'm sure they had Iran theoretically couldn't have access to Boeing parts (and this was a stricter embargo), but they had There's always a way of solving things. Most of Cuban problems were caused by themselves, not the embargo.

>> This is naive What? This was the real world, a matter of first hand experience. We could not consider jeopardising sales to our biggest market (the US) by breaking US embargo for a barely significant market.

You're right, you shouldn't consider doing it unless there are significant gains to be had.

But see my other comment.

(However, I don't think Cuba has qualms about pirating software, if this was hw it would have been a different issue)

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#727

Post by woodpanel »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #534
woodpanel wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to see the Cuban revolution as something different than the sole work of Castro etc. wether you regard their work as accomplishment or atrocity. Also Socialism, Communism, Marxism are just the packaging. The core of the whole movement back then was the wast income inequality combined with US-foreign-affair meddling with Cuban domestic affairs, perfectly illustrated by mafia movies depicting Cuba as the play…

The Cuban revolution was a part of the broader anti-colonial struggle in the post-war period. Many of the leaders of that movement were inspired by some components of a kind of Marxist-Leninism but it was by no means the only influence. Nor was there universal adulation of the Castro-ites by Marxists around the world. There is a lot of criticism of the Cuban revolution, and debate whether it was in fact a revolution…

> A very sad incompetent and shameful history that Obama looked like he was finally willing to confront.

A historically seldom act of courage it was for a leader of a state what Obama did there. Not as thorough as the Warsaw Genuflection by Brandt, but not far away either.

Nations cannot admit their past wrongdoings although unquestionable. Creating tensions, a foreign one, often a domestic one too (ie. Turkey and the Armenians, or Turkey and the Kurds). Former "patriots" are revealed as actually hurting their nation just as breaking such a cycle of having to act stubborn becomes unquestionably patriotic, once viewed from the distance of history.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#728

Post by bad_user »

hisham_hm wrote: post #657
tehwebguy wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could you possibly assume that no children in Cuba sleep on the streets?

I know it's mindboggling, but really there aren't. This is one thing that Westerners typically don't get about the Communist-bloc countries, or don't seem to care. Whereas in average the standard of living was always much higher in Capitalist countries, if you looked at the Eastern European Communist bloc for example, there's no extreme poverty, because the state takes care of that (and it's an extremely important th…

I was born in Romania under communism, which fell in December 1989.

We didn't have children living on the streets either. But the reason for that was that giving children up for adoption was essentially illegal, the women of our country being denied contraception, having a mandate to reproduce and raise offsprings. And also foster homes were essentially prisons, some in really poor conditions; at least those that had the children with special needs were absolutely horrible (i.e. the new men couldn't admit the existence of the handicapped).

So you know, the actual reason many of these countries haven't had children on the streets is because the police wouldn't allow it ;-)

And I feel compelled to mention this for those among you that might get romantic ideas about how communism happened to be in practice.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#729

Post by throwaway89012 »

formula1 wrote: post #415
k-mcgrady wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "Why are cubans in miami celebrating his death?" Because they didn't like him and got out. There were people who celebrated Margaret Thatcher's death. There would be people who would celebrate the death of some current world leaders. On the other hand there would be people who would mourn those deaths.

Did Magret Thatcher execute people? Did she create an air of fear and enforce isolationism at the expense of a country they ruled? These are apples and oranges

Margaret Thatcher sent British troops to train the Khmer Rouge, I doubt Castro ever did anything as sick as that.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#730

Post by ifdefdebug »

mzw_mzw wrote: post #725
ifdefdebug wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some points of propaganda: > Fidel does not allow his people to leave, with the threat of punishment. Everybody is (now) free to leave Cuba. But OK, I think that's fairly recent. > Fidel's private Army own's 85% of the economy "Fidel's private Army" is just an ugly sound byte. It's the Cuban army and it's not going to be dissolved now that he's dead. > Cuban's live in relative poverty While poverty is a prob…

I can't help but notice that you skipped over the little details about a lack of democracy, a lack of free access to information, and how dissidents are punished. > On the other side, western propaganda blanks out a lot of facts about Cuba. Among those is the fact that a significant percentage of Cubans approve their government. I can't help but notice that you skipped over the little details about a lack of democrac…

I was pointing out propaganda and those I skipped well, those look like facts unfortunately.

And it is a dictatorship, so no elections. I wrote significant not majority.

Just wanted to point out that it's hard to get a realistic picture in the middle of all the propaganda. For instance, there's no starving in Cuba and health care for everybody. You cant say that about all countries with elections.

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