31–40 of 186 posts
Little Cuban girl heads out running through the neighborhood to scrounge up change for a $20 because that’s almost a month’s salary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that this separation is more due to the fact that you’re rich, than any formal currency arrangement. Foreigners in the 1990s got the same treatment, before any formal dollarization or dual currency system existed. Cubans who make their money only from official sources are desperately poor. Those with connections abroad, connections to tourism or to the black market are richer. The money difference merely makes i…
> The police arrest those who spend too much time with foreigners. This is news to me. Do you have a source for this claim?
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…
the elephant in the room is the 60 year old embargo and its third-rail effect on American politics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that this separation is more due to the fact that you’re rich, than any formal currency arrangement. Foreigners in the 1990s got the same treatment, before any formal dollarization or dual currency system existed. Cubans who make their money only from official sources are desperately poor. Those with connections abroad, connections to tourism or to the black market are richer. The money difference merely makes i…
> The police arrest those who spend too much time with foreigners. This is news to me. Do you have a source for this claim?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
do you know what socialism means? also what he/she claims isn't in fact true. one of the two chains did allow normal people to shop there >One chain belonged to the Vneshposyltorg (Foreign Mail Order Trade) and was intended for Soviet citizens who received some income in foreign currency. Some of them were forced to sell their currency for ruble-denominated Vneshposyltorg checks, while others never laid their hands o…
State owned production and distribution. The things these markets sold were (most likely) not state produced or distributed, since they were Western goods.
wonderful! so then you must understand why these stores were orthogonal to communism right?
And as a tourist, you’d always get change back in the wrong currency (worth 1/25 the original). And to make matters worse, the change will also be wrong in their favour. Hated being assumed that I’m a dumb foreigner.
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…
Note that this separation is more due to the fact that you’re rich, than any formal currency arrangement. Foreigners in the 1990s got the same treatment, before any formal dollarization or dual currency system existed. Cubans who make their money only from official sources are desperately poor. Those with connections abroad, connections to tourism or to the black market are richer. The money difference merely makes i…
Outside the cities it's a bit better. Hitchhiking is common in Cuba and when we visited it was both fun and instructive to talk to the people to whom we offered a ride. Also talking to the people at CUP bars and restaurants like Dona Yulla was fun. We spoke Spanish though (or a mix of Spanish and Italian).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The police arrest those who spend too much time with foreigners. This is news to me. Do you have a source for this claim?
Seems plausible. Some guys offered to feed us lobster so we went to theirs, but they insisted on hiding the cars we'd rented. People seemed pretty careful about cops.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>to those who imposed socialism on others, but did not live in it themselves I'll violate the rule but I'll comment you were probably downvoted because of this part of your comment.
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.
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.