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Fidel Castro has died

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Re: Fidel Castro has died

#761

Post by dannypgh »

67726e wrote: post #746
dannypgh wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The FBI reports to the head of state. Are you somehow arguing that it's /better/ if the politician relies on others to do their violence for them? (As if Castro himself was the sole person to arrest or execute his enemies...)

Suggested reading as to why it's not ambiguous: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4375527

The history of how the FBI suppressed Black, Native, Latino, and New Leftist organizations more generally is a bloody one. Cuba has never had a monopoly on authoritarian behavior in the Western Hemisphere.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#762

Post by evbots »

mrleinad wrote: post #679
evbots wrote: post #674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism in Cuba has at least remained true to its roots, imposing, for more than half a century, a juvenile notion of egalitarianism on the masses. Rather than uplifting them, this has reinforced the lowest common denominator: Everyone is poor. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/426334/cuba-working-cl...

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.

Free trade between private corporations and individuals is a capitalist concept. After all, free trade is predicated on the ability for a single actor to decide how to allocate goods and services.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#764

Post by mrleinad »

laura2013 wrote: post #700
hisham_hm wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most Cubans live in very poor conditions with no means to improve their lives because of low wages and high cost of living (by Cuban standards, tourists will find it cheap so that should show you how little money they make). Also, government oppression against those who speak up is a great deterrent to changing the current socio/economic situation. You talk about levels of education like a grandiose achievement, it i…

Can you be intellectually honest and say the first global superpower in the world had NOTHING to do with the poverty of the cuban people?

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#766

Post by IslaDeEncanta »

varjag wrote: post #714
ommunist wrote: post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They cannot. The US is not a direct democracy Swiss style

They did, and the world is steel reeling from announcement. There is now a huge change in political course following the election results, no matter how one tires to explain that away with nitpicking. On Cuba, even suggesting change of leadership is enough to put you in prison.

That's not remotely true about Cuba.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#767

Post by eng_monkey »

dharma1 wrote: post #382

I once spent 2 months in Cuba, about 12 years ago as a musician. We lived and rehearsed in Havana for a month with mostly a local band, and spent another month touring the country, big and small cities. The level of poverty I saw as someone from the Nordics was new to me, and while things like hospital visits were free (even for me as a tourist), people really had so little money, to the point it drastically affected…

> taxi drivers who get paid in dollars and receive dollar tips easily making 20-40x more per month than doctors

And what is wrong with this? Or should physicians continue using health to become rich as it is the case in so many other countries?

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#768

Post by phs318u »

erokar wrote: post #365
jknoepfler wrote: post #119

I would encourage the commenters in this thread who see Fidel's legacy as a black-and-white matter of an "evil dictator who did bad things and was wrong about economics" to step back, bear witness to the objective facts about Fidel Castro's life ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidel_Castro ), think sincerely about what could lead a highly intelligent and charismatic person to become or follow Fidel Castro (as many ha…

On the contrary, it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is. Of course it might be wise to try to analyze what genetic/family/social/economic/political factors shape people like Castro, Gaddafi, Franco etc. — but if you think you're dealing with people like you and me you fail to grasp the phenomenon. Dictators that prosecute and murder their opponents, like Castro did, share a very predictable set of psychop…

It seems to me that Americans have a huge blind spot that lets them focus on Fidel Castro, without reference to the many dictators that the US government installed or supported (Noriega, Pinochet, Karimov, Sadam, Shah of Iran,...) often by helping to overthrow democratically elected governments. Seriously, are you guys not aware at just how hypocritical this appears?

Bottom line, as has been posted already, and much to the chagrin of demagogues and their supporters, the world is not comprised solely of "goodies" and "baddies". Realpolitik is shades of grey. It's possible for leaders, governments, regimes, parties, to have done both good and bad things. This applies as much to "us" as "them". Sorry to rain on your[1] patriotism parade.

[1] 'you' collectively. Not erokar individually.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#769

Post by samirillian »

bad_user wrote: post #732
samirillian wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'it's dangerous not to call out evil for what it is' Really have to question this reification of "evil" per se. Evil is most immediately a religious construct. Or, in the words of Hannah Arendt, it is "banal." When did calling people evil ever lead to more justice in the world? As if George W Bush having the courage to call Iran and Iraq and Libya the "Axis of Evil" led to the US promoting peace in those countries? N…

> Evil is most immediately a religious construct. No dude, "evil" is a social and cultural construct. We are doing this as a species, as in relying on taboos and moral rules, in order to survive. It's why we don't fuck our relatives, kill our children or eat our dead. This inherited culture is how 7 billion of us live on this earth without killing each other. And we need it because frankly many of us are too stupid t…

I'm not saying that the term "evil" should have no currency at all (I used it later in the comment). I'm questioning the usefulness/honesty of the metaphor for describing political actors. If we call Fidel Castro evil, it is either for essentially propagandistic purposes or, if used in earnest, it leads to a slippery slope. Heads of state always wield the power of life and death over some group of people--since, in the words of Weber, to be a state is to have a monopoly on violence. How many people have to unjustly die or be imprisoned as a result of a leader's choices for that leader to be evil? If we try to avoid this sorites' paradox (how many grains of sand make a pile) by psychoanalyzing the leader, then we must talk of pathology rather than morality. But psychoanalyzing a head of state leads to wild speculation/sneaking the assumptions back into the question (well, he must be a megalomaniac because he killed x people). So, we discover that neither morality nor psychology are particularly useful conceptual tools when addressing essentially political/structural actors (as Gramsci observed). In practice, calling people that the USA doesn't like evil is just lazy, and usually justification for making the population of said state even more miserable than already were under their "evil" leader.

Re: Fidel Castro has died

#770

Post by laura2013 »

mrleinad wrote: post #764
laura2013 wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most Cubans live in very poor conditions with no means to improve their lives because of low wages and high cost of living (by Cuban standards, tourists will find it cheap so that should show you how little money they make). Also, government oppression against those who speak up is a great deterrent to changing the current socio/economic situation. You talk about levels of education like a grandiose achievement, it i…

Can you be intellectually honest and say the first global superpower in the world had NOTHING to do with the poverty of the cuban people?

nothing is a big word, of course it had an impact. but totalitarianism, oppression, indoctrination, etc. were not caused by outside factors, they are direct actions by the dictatorship.
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