121–130 of 186 posts
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> most of the island is mired in poverty the elephant in the room is the 60 year old embargo and its third-rail effect on American politics.
They can trade with the rest of the world, right?
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This right here. Cuba is under a DICTATORSHIP. Stop defending the damn thing. The embargo is NOT the reason they're poor. Ask any cuban. But PLEASE if you're not going to bother to listen to the people who actually live in the place, just be kind and shut up. Your support literally kills people over there.
I mean, the US embargo is a big cause of why they're poor. But the dictatorship is the cause of that embargo. If Cuba could trade freely with the US, their economy would be better. If Cuba were under a more free government, their economy would be better: also, they wouldn't be under a US embargo, and their economy would be even better. Whether an ideological stance is worth the economic collateral damage is a value j…
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> most of the island is mired in poverty the elephant in the room is the 60 year old embargo and its third-rail effect on American politics.
The 'Elephant in the Room' is 100% Fidel Castro Inc. and his militarized island empire, and totalitarian suppression of everything and everyone. A more extreme but reasonable comparable would be North Korea. List of dictatorships [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regimes
Nor the hideous racist regime in Israel.
Castro and I would not get along, I am a dissident by nature, so I cannot bring myself to support his regime. But we cannot blame the economic failures on Castro, now dead, RIP.
The Cubans have done well to survive more or less intact for this long in the face of the sanctions.
It is my belief, some one here may know better, that it was the sanctions that pushed Fidel into the Soviet camp in the first place. He was a nationalist, not really a communist to begin with.
Whatever he would still have been a hideous dictator like most of the surrounding countries.
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This right here. Cuba is under a DICTATORSHIP. Stop defending the damn thing. The embargo is NOT the reason they're poor. Ask any cuban. But PLEASE if you're not going to bother to listen to the people who actually live in the place, just be kind and shut up. Your support literally kills people over there.
I mean, the US embargo is a big cause of why they're poor. But the dictatorship is the cause of that embargo. If Cuba could trade freely with the US, their economy would be better. If Cuba were under a more free government, their economy would be better: also, they wouldn't be under a US embargo, and their economy would be even better. Whether an ideological stance is worth the economic collateral damage is a value j…
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It would be... unfortunate... if the truth leads to downvotes. If it is really the case that people downvoted for that reason I would really like to know the reason why as it would indicate either a failure of their history teachers or an ideological stance.
Because its an irrelavent inflamatory political dig. How true it is is beside the point. As an example with a different context, if someone was talking about the efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to eliminate malaria, and then in the middle randomly added a dig about how MS had mean bussiness practises in the 90s, i would also downvote them, regardless of how true that might be.
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I grew up in the Soviet Union though. As they say in Russia, "не учи отца ебаться". My parents have never been inside a Beriozka, nor any of my relatives. Shopping there presented an economic impossibility: you either had to have foreign currency (outright illegal for Soviet citizens, with severe punishment for possession, so that meant you'd be a foreigner) or convertible rubles ("invalutny ruble", not illegal, but…
i grew up in the soviet union too. даже если мы согласны с тем что коммунизм не был идеальным это не значит что берёзки доказывают это. so my point still stands.
The most strenuous, impassioned diatribes against the Soviet system come from older people, and from the non-Russian satellite soviet states.
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Similar situation, although not as intense. I bought a skewer of grilled meat from a poor elderly woman in central Colombia. The skewer was 5,000 COP and all I had was a 50,000 note (which I discovered when the food was ready) which is about a day’s wage. She had to leave the grill and go out in the search for change. Felt terrible.
God forbid either of you let them keep the change
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I’ve caused it, although approx 15 years ago when I was in Cuba for a month. First time, an obviously dodgy couple in Havana approached me at night shortly after I arrived. I will usually be friendly and talk with anyone without prejudice. I enjoy talking to grifters and operators, and I will happily pretend to be a victim when it amuses me to do so if I only risk a few dollars. I have travelled enough to be somewhat…
> I think normal salary was USD5 per week, so they would have taken ages to pay it. Pretty sure they would have made that money and more with just one foreign client for whom they were the scene
That said, virtually anyone you met in Havana would be after something from you, even if just a drink. It seemed cultural, far beyond the normal percentage of hucksters a tourist might expect to find in a tourist area of a foreign country.
They were sometimes after money, but were taking risks of jail to get it (due to desperation). Hard to blame them when my disposable income might easily be more than 1000 times more than theirs. What I casually spend on a night out at home might be a year or more of savings for them.
I do try to be generous, especially in poor countries since it is easy to do so (I absolutely loath tourists bargaining over a few dollars when they are effectively millionaires in a locality, often bargaining with someone who really needs the income to feed their family). You soon learn to recognise when a person is truely desperate, versus locally very well off from tourist income.
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> коммунизм не был идеальным (communism wasn't ideal) Understatement of the century, quite literally.
bruh. is the RF better or worse now? how are those term limits working out for you? was the west better or worse during the years 1932-33 during the famine (the same years that the US hit peak unemployment)? were the pogroms and the gulag better or worse than jim crow and segregation and racism? was state owned means of production better or worse than the gilded age? like you're sitting here glibly dismissing somethi…
Hell, Australia in the 1890s was richer than most of the world in the 1950s
1 - No.
2 - Hopefully not, and hopefully they'll finally get rid of Communism.