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A day using money in Cuba

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Re: A day using money in Cuba

#141

Post by namdnay »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #74
riffic wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 actual elephant in the room is 60 years of brutal communist dictatorship.

"elephant in the room" refers to something that is huge but that nobody talks about. Everyone agrees with the fact that marxism doesn't work, and everyone talks about it, so I don't think we can call it an elephant in the room. there is far less discussion (especially in the US), about the impact of the US sanctions

the same discussion applies to venezuela

Re: A day using money in Cuba

#142

Post by brmgb »

ethbro wrote: post #88
cptaj wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But the dictatorship is the cause of that embargo.

Well, the political ideology of the dictatorship and its unwillingness to be a puppet state of the USA are the cause of that embargo. As diplomacy in the Arabian peninsula shows, the USA has no issue with dictatorships and hereditary absolute monarchies provided they buy American weapons and fight on the appropriate side of proxy wars.

Re: A day using money in Cuba

#143

Post by car »

m0zg wrote: post #2

This is what the Soviet Union had, except, of course, all prices were quoted in "internal" rubles. The dollar was always 70 "foreign" kopecks, but you couldn't get dollars, or convertible rubles unless you were a party apparatchik who could shop in "Beryozka": a network of stores that sold Western goods to those who imposed socialism on others, but did not live in it themselves, which it how it usually works. Foreign…

A similar system existed in Soviet occupied East Germany, the oxymorinically named ‘German Democratic Republic’, or GDR (DDR in German).

The chain of stores was named “Intershop” (later famously adopted by the first German online shopping software provider). There, western goods were available for cold hard West German Mark’s, sent from relatives on the other side of the iron curtain, as many families had been separated when the wall went up.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intershop

Re: A day using money in Cuba

#144

Post by meerita »

riffic wrote: post #33
lordnacho wrote: post #11

I actually went to Cuba on holiday, and I used the tourist dollars. It's incredible how this separates society into haves and have-nots. Basically everyone wants to be near the tourists. They'll invite you into their homes for food, they'll offer to take you around town, sell you some cigars, and so on. Since you have tourist bucks, you also have access to the tourist nightclubs, where you run into some regional cele…

> 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 communists don't believe in world commerce, why an embargo will affect them after all if they don't want people to trade or have private property?

Re: A day using money in Cuba

#145

Post by [deleted] »

brmgb wrote: post #142
ethbro wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But the dictatorship is the cause of that embargo. Well, the political ideology of the dictatorship and its unwillingness to be a puppet state of the USA are the cause of that embargo. As diplomacy in the Arabian peninsula shows, the USA has no issue with dictatorships and hereditary absolute monarchies provided they buy American weapons and fight on the appropriate side of proxy wars.

[deleted]

Re: A day using money in Cuba

#146

Post by Taniwha »

vinay427 wrote: post #40
kmonsen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really see why though? I’m a socialist (the Scandinavian kind), but that seems a petty good description of what happened back then.

> socialist (the Scandinavian kind) Surely there exists better terminology for this than a highly regionally contextual qualifier. Perhaps democratic socialist, or social democrat, or something involving welfare? Overloading the word with other meanings just adds fuel to the fire of inaccuracy and hyperbole in political discourse, perhaps recently most often in the US.

I think the word you wanted to describe the USSR was "communist", there west is full of countries with socialist social welfare systems that genuinely care for their citizens

Re: A day using money in Cuba

#147

Post by masonic »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #99
empath75 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the dumbest comments I’ve seen on this site. It’s been 500 years. 500 years ago, the catholic church was burning people at the stake for heresy and vlad tepes was impaling peasants. I’ve spent a lot of time living with the Maya people in Guatemala. I was raised Irish catholic and they’re more catholic than my family is for sure.

Yep, the Aztec might have been brutal, but its hardly like the Spanish were any less so, and for similar religion fueled reasons even.

The Spanish would have been quickly squashed all the way to the sea were it not for essentially every other native group allying with them against the Aztecs because of the brutal treatment they suffered since the rise of the Aztecs.

Once the Spanish had a foothold, European diseases did most of the killing.

Re: A day using money in Cuba

#148

Post by ajuc »

Communism tends to create these patterns. It was the same in pre-1989 Poland. Owning USD was illegal, you were supposed to turn them to authorities and get "Polish issued USD" instead. It was a separate kind of currency different from the regular (worthless) Polish currency. But the official exchange rate was order of magnitude worse than the real USD-Polish złoty exchange rate, so nobody did that if they could avoid it.

There were special shops "Pewex" that had all the foreign goods and the best Polish export products - you could only buy that stuff there for Polish USD. It was a way for the state to extract hard currencies from the population.

There was a whole class of people that exchanged USD to Polish currency on the black market (with the real exchange rate). They were called cink-ciarz because they stood in touristy places and whispered "ex-change" in broken English to tourists. It sounded like cink-ciarz to Poles. Lots of fortunes were made that way, and people were in prison because of that.

Re: A day using money in Cuba

#149

Post by Proven »

lordnacho wrote: post #11

I actually went to Cuba on holiday, and I used the tourist dollars. It's incredible how this separates society into haves and have-nots. Basically everyone wants to be near the tourists. They'll invite you into their homes for food, they'll offer to take you around town, sell you some cigars, and so on. Since you have tourist bucks, you also have access to the tourist nightclubs, where you run into some regional cele…

> It's incredible how this separates society into haves and have-nots.

It doesn't. It only highlights the poverty. If there were no tourists the poor would still be poor and the haves would still have (slightly less than now).

Re: A day using money in Cuba

#150

Post by Darmody »

kragen wrote: post #112
pnako wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Than the Aztecs who used human skulls as construction material?

Yes, by orders of magnitude. The Aztecs sacrificed thousands of people; the Spanish sacrificed millions.

Why not trillions?

While it's true they killed a lot, like most empires 5 centuries ago, they weren't as bad as the others.

Hernan Cortes defeated the whole Aztek Empire with 600 men. How? Easy, he had multiple tribes helping him because almost everyone of them wanted the azteks gone. That means they waged war against natives and they won. It has nothing to do with sacrifices.

From a total population of around 45 million, around 95% of them died smallpox and other deadly viruses.

Cortes even married an indigenous woman and had children with her just as a lot of other conquistadores did. The Catholic Kings legalized and promoted mixed marriages almost 500 years before it was legal in the US. That's why from Argetina to Mexico you can find millions of natives, millions of mixed people and millions of europeans.

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