171–180 of 276 posts
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I highly recommend reading "Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot" which explain how dictatorships can pick a handful of indicators and elevate them to first-world levels while still making everybody's life miserable. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Perfect-Latin-American-Idiot/pro...
Michael Moore needs to read this book.
I've visited Cuba on a Canadian passport. Aside from the beautiful beaches the thing that struck me most was the desperate poverty of people living in shacks outside the 5 star resorts. While I hesitate to predict that this change will be all for the good, I do believe that the poorest in Cuba will benefit significantly from increased trade.
On the other hand: - average life expectancy in Cuba is almost the same as the USA (and higher than Mexico, Belize, Bahamas, Brazil, etc.). - literacy rate in Cuba is higher than that in the USA - Physicians per 10,000 people: Cuba has 67, USA has 24 In the Ebola crisis, Cuba has been leading from the front.
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I felt the same way visiting San Francisco, the abject poverty of the people downtown outside $400 a night hotels is just incredible.
It's because we don't criminalize homelessness as aggressively as other major cities and the homeless population is concentrated near downtown where the SROs and social services are located. Keep in mind that it's generally not simply poverty but mental illness or a history of abuse/violence that separates the homeless here vs. the working poor in the favelas and slums of the third world.
I don't think that matters - the op's point still stands. Do you think criminalising homelessness solves the problem? It just (poorly) hides it. There may be a different between the 'working' poor and the mentally ill that you point out but I'd be willing to bet the mentally ill aren't left to live on the street and fend for themselves in Cuba.
I'm thrilled to see this. This is the sort of hopey changey I was looking for from Obama. Maintaining the status quo in re Cuba is just mindless stubbornness at this point.
It seems like people commonly raise the fact that Cuba still jails political dissidents. However, while accurate, it ignores the many MANY countries the US hasn't embargoed which do similar or worse.
For one example, the US and Saudi Arabia are "best buddies" but yet the Saudi government is often doing extremely anti-freedom stuff. I mean this is the only country on earth where women are forbidden from driving.
So my point is less "Cuba is the good guy" and more "if they're going to continue the embargo then keep it consistent, hit Egypt, Pakistan, China, Yemen, and so on" for it also.
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Unemployment is such a funny thing. In a free market economy, unemployment is a necessity but seems to be treated as a universal evil.
Unemployment is a feature of a regulated capitalist economy. The primary source of unemployment is the minimum wage. There are a nearly unlimited source of jobs available if you would accept $1/hour as payment, and if you have no other employment then at least it gets you experience/recommendations and enough to buy some food. The minimum wage is a trade off. You create e.g. 10% unemployment so that the ~4.3% of peop…
A food, anyway, provided you aren't spending your $8 a day on rent.
How would social services work in this system without minimum wage? Would people making below a minimum wage deemed necessary to house and feed and care for oneself be eligible for benefits?
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Or that cigar imports is probably the most utterly trivial and selfish thing to consider in this move.
I find that anyone against this reunion is doing it because of something utterly trivial and selfish.
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I find that anyone against this reunion is doing it because of something utterly trivial and selfish.
It's a good thing, but Cuba is about to be gentrified. I really wish I had visited before now, Cuba is going to lose a lot of culture in the long term. I can envision McDonald's and Starbucks everywhere.
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I highly recommend reading "Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot" which explain how dictatorships can pick a handful of indicators and elevate them to first-world levels while still making everybody's life miserable. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Perfect-Latin-American-Idiot/pro...
Michael Moore needs to read this book.
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One of the lasting myths emerging from American rhetoric is that Cuba is starting from a low base. In fact the per capita GDP (as well as quality of life) is approximately on par with Panama and far exceeds the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, and Nicaragua. Tourism will remain the major source of foreign currency, but I think this change will lead to further development in pharmaceuticals and telecom.
Cubans enjoy greater economic and medical security under socialism than their counterparts in capitalist neighboring countries, even without subsidies from Russia and even with a strict embargo with the US. The country is surprisingly politically free for a tiny nation facing an existential threat from a hostile super power that has invaded, attempted to assassinate it's leader, and funded militants dead set on viole…
Despite the fact that I spend much of my working life writing "if" statements, I am going to ignore everything after the sixth word of this sentence and express disbelief at how you can claim that Cubans are politically free.
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What does the heterogeneous populations of the US have to do with it? Maybe when it comes to life expectancy you're right, because genetics is a large factor in that. But when it comes to literacy rate and the proportion of physicians that's entirely down to government policy. Do you really think the US couldn't beat Cuba on those metrics if they decided spending money on those topics was more important than spending…
I believe the point that is being made is that the US was designed from the outset with the idea that diverse factions compete against factions, and that was the only way such a large and varied democracy could work. See Federalist 10. Citizens of the US have wildly varied views about what it means to be a good American, and we often have greater cohesion to groups such as race or state, etc. Just about the only thin…
The parent was comparing the proportion of physicians in Cuba v.s. the US and claiming that the US couldn't match Cuba because of its heterogeneous population.
Now if you look at the WHO report on density of physicians[1] you see first-wold countries like Japan and Canada ranking below the US on the number of physicians per-capita.
I think numbers like these have a lot more to do with how the health care system is structured than the sort of population you have. E.g. maybe nurses in Japan and Canad have a bigger role in health care than the US.
1. http://www.who.int/gho/health_workforce/physicians_density/e...