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Fidel Castro has died

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Re: Fidel Castro has died

#741

Post by Trombone12 »

bzbarsky wrote: post #536
Trombone12 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10k over 50 years? Wow, that's a lot less than I imagined from how he is described as a mindless killer, and the dictatorship as drenched in blood. For comparison Puerto Rico have had about 10k murders in the last 15 years alone[1], and that's in less than half the Cuban population. From 1998 figures[2] and 2002 population numbers I guesstimate that officially about 820 murders occur per year in Cuba, and the 10k in…

> Wow, that's a lot less than I imagined from how he is described as a mindless killer, and the dictatorship as drenched in blood. Yep. Would it likewise surprise you to learn that the Pinochet government, which is described in similar ways, killed (at the high end of the estimates; the officially accepted ones are 10-20% lower) about 3200 people and "disappeared" about 1000, over the course of 17 years? Also, about…

Yeah, 4200 is way less than I expected from Pinochet's reputation. Works out about 50 % worse than Castro on murders alone (counting "disappeared" equally to other killings) on a per year basis. Not sure how to count the torture, maybe as fractions of a killing.

I'm also surprised that the population isn't more, Chile felt like a "big" country to me compared to tiny Sweden, but 11 is not much bigger than 8. Though by now it's 18 and 9 millions, so I child deaths seem to be down in Chile since the 80's.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#742

Post by [deleted] »

andrepd wrote: post #656
cmbailey wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I agree that Fidel Castro made many mistakes and is responsible for many atrocities. But the plight of Cuba is not his doing alone. In American English, the phrase, "He murdered thousands," can't be followed by the word "but..."

Obama didn't murder thousands? Yet I hear good things about him. FDR? Any US president basically? The people responsible for staging coups abroad to replace democratically elected leaders, install sympathetic dictators and overall fuck up life in a region for 50 years? Yet I hear good things about them too. Why can't the same be applied to Fidel? He committed atrocities and he did good for the country. And indeed muc…

[deleted]

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#744

Post by cmbailey »

andrepd wrote: post #656
cmbailey wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I agree that Fidel Castro made many mistakes and is responsible for many atrocities. But the plight of Cuba is not his doing alone. In American English, the phrase, "He murdered thousands," can't be followed by the word "but..."

Obama didn't murder thousands? Yet I hear good things about him. FDR? Any US president basically? The people responsible for staging coups abroad to replace democratically elected leaders, install sympathetic dictators and overall fuck up life in a region for 50 years? Yet I hear good things about them too. Why can't the same be applied to Fidel? He committed atrocities and he did good for the country. And indeed muc…

Obama didn't have his fellow-citizens shot by firing squad without a trial merely because they were political opponents, like journalist Yvonne Conde's uncle [1].

Agreed the sanctions were unproductive. More than anything else, US sanctions helped Castro stay in power for half a century.

But to blame the sanctions for his atrocities - or to say the good he did outweighed the bad - is to be willfully blind: When Cuban government ships spotted a tugboat full of refugees headed for Florida on July 13, 1994, they blasted it to pieces with high-pressure fire hoses. “Our tugboat started taking on water,” recounted one of the survivors, María Victoria García. “We shouted to the crewmen on the boat, ‘Look at the children! You’re going to kill them!’ And they said, ‘Let them die! Let them die!’” Forty-one of the refugees did. [2]

While you write about the good things he did from your comfortable home with high speed internet, with the rule of law in a capitalist liberal democracy, this is how desperate his citizens were to leave this country of “good things”, and how barbarous was Castro against his own people.

[1] https://twitter.com/YvonneMConde/status/802587003057410048 [2] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/...

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#745

Post by mrleinad »

laura2013 wrote: post #712
mrleinad wrote: post #679

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The country itself is poor, because of the blockade. If the US would let private companies trade with them and with the cubans freely, they wouldn't be poor.

Don't let Communist propaganda blind you. The blockade did not stop Spanish hotels from settling on the island (taxed at 50% by the state), or dealings with Russia or the Chinese, or gas trades with Venezuela. Do you know where all the wealth from those dealings ended up? The top ranking officials and their families.

Yeah, it ended up feeding millions that live in the island, training thousands of doctors, and providing all that's required for all the cubans. And it's not enough to live up to the standars of the rest of the world, which could live far better with better distribution of wealth.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#746

Post by 67726e »

dannypgh wrote: post #557
67726e wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do tell, when is the last time a sitting US president has murdered his political opponents?

Fred Hampton is the most recent in my mind that isn't (in my view) ambiguous. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton

Given the numerous trials and inquests, include one which made sure to include members of the community, it certainly seems ambiguous. I'll ignore the fact that I mentioned head of state for the purposes of discussion, but what in your mind makes the situation unambiguous? I've only know heard of Fred Hampton, outside of a Rage Against the Machine mention so I'm certainly not well informed on the matter.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#747

Post by Trombone12 »

geezerjay wrote: post #708
Trombone12 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's weird to call the foreign policy decisions of bordering nations "naturally arising". They are quite obviously very different consequences compared to pollution or traffic jams following heavy car subsidies.

> Well, it's weird to call the foreign policy decisions of bordering nations "naturally arising". So, you believe that the Cuban missile crisis was yet another misunderstanding that Fidel Castro had absolutely no say in the subject, do you? What an unfortunate saint, Fidel Castro has been. Those countless political asylum-seekers risking their lives in makeshift boats must be a whole bunch of ungrateful fools for not…

No, that is obviously a mischaracterization of my statement. Not only is the missile crisis a quite separate event than the imposition of sanctions, I was not discussing the agency of Castro but your assertion that the US had no agency over its foreign policy towards Cuba once Castro had power.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#748

Post by celticninja »

rgbrenner wrote: post #659
sspiff wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Fidel Castro made many mistakes and is responsible for many atrocities. But the plight of Cuba is not his doing alone. He leaves behind a Cuba that was embargoed by the US, their closest and largest trade partner after the US had staged a failed invasion to overthrow the government. This forced them into the Soviet sphere of influence for supplies and trade. Then, when the Soviet Union collapsed at the e…

You're forgetting some details there. In the 1920s, Cuba was a big producer of sugar, and their largest trading partner was the US. US companies owned 60% of the sugar production. But during the great depression, the US introduced tariffs on a wide range of goods (from everywhere), and the Cuban sugar industry collapsed. Then when Fidel came to power one of the things he promised was to reduce the reliance on US trad…

It didn't help that the US actively supported the previous dictatorship in Cuba that Fidel was red to overthrow. And whilst the US didn't really help batista to stop Castro it is hardly surprising that Castro did not want to deal with the US.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#749

Post by celticninja »

rgbrenner wrote: post #659
sspiff wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Fidel Castro made many mistakes and is responsible for many atrocities. But the plight of Cuba is not his doing alone. He leaves behind a Cuba that was embargoed by the US, their closest and largest trade partner after the US had staged a failed invasion to overthrow the government. This forced them into the Soviet sphere of influence for supplies and trade. Then, when the Soviet Union collapsed at the e…

You're forgetting some details there. In the 1920s, Cuba was a big producer of sugar, and their largest trading partner was the US. US companies owned 60% of the sugar production. But during the great depression, the US introduced tariffs on a wide range of goods (from everywhere), and the Cuban sugar industry collapsed. Then when Fidel came to power one of the things he promised was to reduce the reliance on US trad…

It didn't help that the US actively supported the previous dictatorship in Cuba that Fidel was red to overthrow. And whilst the US didn't really help batista to stop Castro it is hardly surprising that Castro did not want to deal with the US.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#750

Post by Animats »

apsec112 wrote: post #338
hkt wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fixation people have with expanding middle classes is odd. I'd say progress where the poorest are included in social gains is more valuable than any other kind. Otherwise we end up with societies like the US where some parts of the population live in ghettoes worthy of the worst of the third world.

With all due respect, that's a crazy exaggeration. There is nowhere in America where the entire neighborhood has no electricity, no running water, no sewage, and no paved roads. Such places are common in Africa and India. https://www.facebook.com/126979a/posts/10101269399749522

Such places are common in Texas.[1]

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/03/the-amer...

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