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10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023

miamiherald.com

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Re: 10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023

#171

Post by sremani »

wkat4242 wrote: post #11
giancarlostoro wrote: post #6

I wonder what a sensible way forward for Cubans is, and their government. What would it take for the US to lift sanctions (I assume a radical shift within Cuba's government), and for Cuba itself (as a whole) to restructure their government in a way that would benefit them and everyone. Cuba would be a great travel destination. Their cigars aren't as on par anymore as far as I know, but there's potential there, Nicara…

Why does the US still have sanctions on them anyway? The missile crisis was 50 years ago. It's time to forgive.

A hostile regime 90 miles from US mainland will be treated differently. Cuba is not some vanilla leftist regime that has no love for America. Cuban intelligence and elite for the past 50 years have been active subverting US interests. A unilateral withdrawal of sanctions would mean rewarding bad behavior. Do not let the small size of Cuba underestimate them, they are behind all major anti-American activity in Latin America. They were are major force supporting Maduro in Venezuela.

Why does not the Communist regime in Cuba "open up"? Because they know the day Cuba becomes a multiparty state with elections -- they have to run out of the country. Both Cuban and Venezuelan elite along with many Caribbean states are active in Drug Dealings and Money Laundering.

Yes, the hawks in US have a role but they are not only active players, there are hawks in Cuba too.

Re: 10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023

#172

Post by pton_xd »

labrador wrote: post #107

I support immigration and oppose the Republican anti-immigrant platform because it seems to me there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success. For example, in this article is about white collar crime, it points out that many Somali-Americans were professionals back in Somalia. I'm not concerned about the crime because that seems like a somewhat higher tendency unt…

> the Republican anti-immigrant platform because it seems to me there is significant brain drain from many countries to the U.S. and that contributes to our success.

Explain how unskilled illegal immigrants contribute to our success. I'm open minded but I've yet to hear anything convincing.

No one is opposed to the legal immigration of skilled workers.

Re: 10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023

#173

Post by swexbe »

bawolff wrote: post #117
fdsafdsafdsfsd wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe ask the Cubans who left the country?

People who leave a country tend to leave it for a reason. If they liked their life in Cuba presumably they would have stayed. They are probably not a neutral source on Cuba.

Most immigrants don't have anywhere near as bad an opinion of their home country as Cuban-Americans.

Re: 10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023

#174

Post by bdjsiqoocwk »

wordsinaline wrote: post #69
vundercind wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of Floridians who are, or are descended from, folks who had their land and businesses seized during the revolution are holding grudges and won’t let go of them until they’re given their stuff back or a ton of money, which, this far on, isn’t happening. Florida is important in Presidential elections. US elections are structured such that dumb stuff like a relatively small—but loud—and also hopeless interest in…

I would still hold a grudge. I hold historical grudges going back centuries.

Native Americans called, they want their land back.

Re: 10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023

#176

Post by mullingitover »

samatman wrote: post #159
tehjoker wrote: post #91

Cuba's economy is not doing well because of the illegitimate and illegal US embargo. End the blockade. Take Cuba off the completely farcical State Sponsors of Terror list. Let Cuba live! Cuba developed its own COVID vaccine but couldn't give it to its own people because they could not buy metal for syringes. Its fucking crazy.

There is no blockade, and there hasn't been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. An embargo prohibits US citizens and US-owned businesses from trading with Cuba. A blockade would be the US Navy preventing anyone else's ships from entering Cuba to trade. Cuba is poor because Cuba is Communist. The US is not the only trading partner in the world, but a country has to have something to trade in order to engage in trade, and…

> Cuba is poor because Cuba is Communist.

Is Cuba even that poor, though, compared to its Latin American peers, and is communism the reason?

Aside from the recent weirdness with their GDP spike in World Bank's numbers, Cuba's GDP per capita is basically the same as Mexico's, and it's higher than Brazil's, neither of which are communist.

Furthermore, aside from raw GDP numbers it's higher in the UN Human Development Index rankings[1] than Brazil and Colombia along with a slew of other very capitalist countries.

If you make apples to oranges comparisons in demographics, you can make any country look bad. The UK is basically Mississippi if you take out London. The US also fares poorly if you don't count the wealthiest 15% of the population. The median Cuban isn't well off, but they aren't wildly different from others in their region.

[1] https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/country-insights#/ranks

Re: 10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023

#177

Post by inglor_cz »

OJFord wrote: post #160
inglor_cz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the old joke from behind the Iron Curtain said... Q: "What would happen in Saudi Arabia if Communism triumphed there?" A: "First, shortage of oil, later, shortage of sand." Edit: for all the downvoters, shortages were our daily lived experience when I was a kid. I still remember chasing such rare stuff as "kid's sneakers" or "toilet paper". And Czechoslovakia was still better off than neighbouring Poland, where yo…

Wasn't that deliberate oppression though? Not that I'm pro-communism as an ideal or anything (I favour free-market conservatism) I'm just not sure it can be blamed for ineptitude/mismanagement there as the joke implies?

It was mostly incompetence mixed with a lot of corruption and petty theft.

Publicly owned businesses had no incentives to compete on quality, had to fulfill centralized plans designed by distant bureaucrats that weren't completely attached to reality. Western products were mostly unavailable or extremely costly, so no substitution possible. Lots of ossified monopolies. Factory leaders were often chosen on the base of being someone's nephew or protégé rather than expert.

If you applied for a phone line (plain old copper wire), you could wait up to 10 years before you actually got it, as there was a waiting list of 300 000 applicants in a country of 15 million ... ugh. The mess.

It is hard to describe the omnipresent dysfunction of everyday life back then. Communism was a theoretical system dreamed out by intellectuals who never engaged in any commerce. All the violent oppression aside, economic side of Communism was just crazily inefficient.

Re: 10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023

#178

Post by epolanski »

kjellsbells wrote: post #137

The problem commonly skated over is that two views cam be true at once. For example: - the "Batista" regime was dictatorial and repressive. The people fought back with Castro. The first wave of people to land in Miami were essentially the moneyed class who lost everything. Unsurprisingly they hate the Castro regime and its descendents. The US government were happy to accommodate them under the guise of anti communism…

> the "Castro" regime is dictatorial and repressive.

As someone whose family comes from the former Soviet union, and has friends that come from other repressive places let me tell you that this really doesn't matter.

Economy and how you are doing are what matters in the day to day life of people.

People really don't think about the oppression or lack of elections, they care how much they need to suffer to put food on the table, whether they can afford vacations on the beach, how expensive it's gonna be, etc etc.

I consistently asked my grandparents and people from oppressive places whether they cared about politics and no they didn't.

They knew that people across the borders lived the same lives they did, but they could afford a better car and better vacations that's all.

The average Joe does not care about politics, even those who talk about it and share on social media don't care.

The amount of people that campaign, try to get elected, try to do anything even in their own neighborhood has always been low and probably never as low as now.

Re: 10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023

#179

Post by BurningFrog »

wslh wrote: post #166
BurningFrog wrote: post #163

Note that it's only the US that has an embargo against Cuba. The rest of the world trades pretty freely with them.

The article exactly says "US embargo".

Sure, but a lot of people seem to think Cuba is cut off from world trade. They're only cut off from one country.

Someone called it a "blockade" on this page.

Re: 10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023

#180

Post by greyvddhb »

jmyeet wrote: post #106

I really want people to understand that a sterile term like "economic sanctions" really means "starving them to death". It's not just food. It's the infrastructure necessary to grow food and to have clean drinking water. It's basic medicines, life-saving stuff. What we, as a country, have done and continue to do to Cuba is absolutely unconscionable. It affects us too. Over the last 60+ years there have hundreds of th…

> There is absolutely no justification for continuing 60+ years of sanctions just because our puppet was deposed.

Two weeks ago Russia landed an armada there in a show of force right off the US coast. It’s not an easy black and white situation where you can just say “USA bad.”

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