While you may be right about your particular area, you're not correct about Africa as a whole, nor about sub-Saharan Africa collectively. For the past decade, economic growth in Africa has been higher than in East Asia. In sub-Saharan Africa, incomes are up by two thirds since 1998.
Since 1960, life expectancy for women in sub-Saharan Africa is up from 41 to 57 years, and the fraction of children attending school is up from low 40s percent to over 75%. Almost any poverty indicator you care to measure shows improvement.
This is not to say that the problem of poverty is solved -- far from it. But the problem is steadily getting smaller, not bigger.
Inequality is not a good metric for whether or not things are getting better.
As Thomas Sowell said, “Now the history of the United States in the 20th century shows an incredible increase in prosperity over that century, and it was brought about not because [the poor]’s slice of the pie got bigger — the whole pie got bigger. And so everybody had an increase in prosperity.”
And anyway, "income inequality" actually increases the more your government has subsidies for the poor. The more the poor are subsidized, the less incentive they have to work longer hours, the less they receive in income. It's not a coincidence that income inequality was lowest when countries had no government welfare programs at all.
That depends on your definition of "better". Given the fact that relative deprivation has a demonstrably very strong negative subjective disutility, demonstrated in many studies, its pretty darned important if you want to understand increases or decreases in actual suffering.
This doesn't fit the simplistic way lots of people would like to think economic indicators should map to human experience, but that's a problem with the simplistic models.
If you only look at inequality PER COUNTRY it will look lower than the US. Of course, the same would be true if you broke up Connecticut and Mississippi in your income statistics.
Cuba is a totally different story, they have a maximum income law that says you cannot legally make more than $20 USD per month (except for doctors, who are allowed to make $30 USD per month). Can't really compare incomes in a country which artificially sets the legal income.
Possibility one -- you have good data, but you're looking at post-tax income data, which would be skewed because of our flatter tax structure, fewer transfers, low long-term capital gains tax rate, and our relatively high income tax as percentage of total tax burden.
Possibility two -- the Gini coefficient you're looking at took national rates and then averaged them, rather than actually comparing incomes of specific people across the EU.
I believe that if you compared pre-tax data across the EU (rather than national data, averaged) you would see the EU having considerably more income inequality.
Just speaking from first hand experience, I've seen the difference between the lives of the wealthy and poor in the US (from Connecticut to Mississippi), and the wealthy and poor in the EU (from Bulgaria to Norway). The difference is much starker in the EU.
I'm sure it probably doesn't sound very scientific, but I'm inclined to trust my own eyes over statistics. If the data shows otherwise, I have to imagine the data is skewed in some way.
As one would expect; in the short term those subsidies produce less post-transfer inequality of outcome, but that also equates to less inequality of opportunity, and therefore long-term less pre-transfer inequality of outcome, as well.