Hacker News Reader

Comment by helloworld11 | Hacker News Reader

>Of course because of the economic blockade against Cuba they are forced to be creative on how to use the available resources.

Yes of course, Cuba's economic woes and abysmal civil/tech infrastructure are entirely due to the economic blockade. several decades of a certain repressive, individuality and development crushing political system and its economic theories have nothing worth mentioning to do with it.

This itself is more than a little piece of misinformation, blaming Cuba's problems entirely on the US (though the US and its misguided blockade have their share of faults)

View on HN

You are making up a straw man.

The economic blockade by the US has the goal of destroying the political and economic order of Cuba. And just to be clear, this blockade is not just blocking Cuba from trading with the US but is effectively blocking Cuba from a good portion of the world market except for a few small allies. And even those trades with allies can become vastly more costly because of the blockade.

There are not many countries that would survive such a blockade not to mention thrive in it.

Are there internal problems in Cuba? Sure there are. Does it make my quoted sentence incorrect that said:

>Of course because of the economic blockade against Cuba they are forced to be creative on how to use the available resources.

No, it does not. It does not state that there might not be also other problems in Cuba.

There is lots of internal problems one can talk about and if someone has honest questions, please ask.

Just don't use these internal problems to minimize the injustice of the blockade against Cuba. (Not to imply whether this is what my former poster intended to do or not).

> the US but is effectively blocking Cuba from a good portion of the world market except for a few small allies.

It is not. Every country is free to decide if it wants to trade with Cuba or not.

> Just don't use these internal problems to minimize the injustice of the blockade against Cuba

There is no injustice. Cuban people can end it whenever they want. Their government too.

Countries are not free to decide if they trade with Cuba or not. If they decide to trade with Cuba, the US government threatens sanctions which can lead to economic ruin and death, by using violence or the threat of violence to prevent the trade of crucial materials.

Before this regime, the US simply deployed the Navy to fire on anyone who went to Cuba.

> If they decide to trade with Cuba, the US government threatens sanctions which can lead to economic ruin and death, by using violence or the threat of violence to prevent the trade of crucial materials.

Sounds like a choice to me. Is it better to keep trading with a free allied country or give it all up to be allowed to trade with a dictatorship?

Yes, it's as much of a choice as when I put a gun against your head and ask you to do me a favour.

The "choice" is based on literal state violence. Both in internationally enforcing intellectual property laws (with your military) to force you from buying medicine and other crucial supplies from the US, and from using violence to prevent those from being sold.

> Countries are not free to decide if they trade with Cuba or not. If they decide to trade with Cuba, the US government threatens sanctions which can lead to economic ruin and death

Nearly everyone except for the US trades with Cuba, including the US’s main allies like Canada and the European countries in NATO. The US is content to maintain its own ban on trade with Cuba because its politicians want to woo the Cuban exile vote, but it has been decades since it put pressure on other countries to maintain the same harsh policy.

And yet you'll constantly hear folks whining that Cuba would be so prosperous if it wasn't prohibited from trading with one country...

It's all America's fault, certainly the local Cuban warlords did nothing wrong.

Cuba already is quite prosperous, amongst the best in South America and more prosperous than the average.

It's not prohibited from one country alone. If you trade with Cuba, you are under threat of American sanctions. Go to Cuba for a bit, you will see the extent of the smuggling necessary even for non-American goods. I have.

Yeah, no, this is not correct.

Trade from other countries to Cuba is still incredibly limited because of secondary sanctions to entities that deal with Cuba. Go spend some time in Cuba and you'll see what that means in practice - equipment is bought above market price and smuggled routinely.

Yeah, I’m sure their political system’s success / failure wasn’t impacted at all by US intervention.

Oh, HackerNews. I love you.

Yes, because non-blockaded communist countries have been such glowing successes.

I mean, even the ones that were not just blockaded, but genocidally invaded, still turned from really bad feudal peasant states into modern industrial nations faster than any previous countries.

Which countries would that be?

For instance Russia, China

Well in my country between 1945 and 1990 many good things were done in regards to education, healthcare, science, housing - millions of people got their first urban home for free. Of course it had a fair share of problems but I think it is at least comparable with capitalist states.

Which country was that? Did you live there then or were you born after that date?

The Soviet Union was a pile of rust by 1990. I’m not sure how you can justify the immense suffering and indiscriminate persecution just for that...

Ehh, did you live there let's say in between 1960 - 1990? Just for the record - no, it wasn't a pile of rust by 1990. It had free universal healthcare, free higher education, no need for mortgage, abundance of jobs.

And in my family there was a history of persecution during Stalin time, surviving Holodomor, so I know these things first hand. I don't need lecturing on what went wrong from Westerners.

And what about immense suffering after 1991? - Ethic conflicts, absolutely atrocious poverty, would have been much worse if not for some remnants of socialist safety net (de-facto free healthcare). The new capitalist society was not exactly a much of improvement on many areas.

For example in 1993 Boris Eltsin (president of Russia) ordered shelling of Parliament by tanks. And that was fine with the West. Somehow.

That depends on how you define success. If your main measure of success is economy, I wouldn't tag China as an economic failure exactly.

I wouldn't tag China as a communist country for at least a couple decades now.

Then, all we have is a 'not true communist scotsman' spiral all the way down.

If a country directed by a party named the Communist party is not communist, who could claim that tag for themselves?

Not North Korea. A country frozen in time and obsessed by xenophobic purity, dictator worship, army and control of the citizens. This is the very own definition of dystopic fascism, bordering isolated religious cult. Definitely not communism, that always was a mixed bag of anarchists, misfits craving power and other undercurrents moving in similar directions before turning ameboid and splitting again or eating alive the other groups.

Russia? is very "capitalism of the mob" now. As US, is just too big to define it, but it definitely has components of Neofeudalism and tug dictatorship IMHO with several thin layers of shiny democracy put strategically over it to cover the ugly rust. Communism has influenced the society, but is a thing of the past now (probably, I could be wrong).

The "no true scotsman" argument is very valid in many political and economic topics, but it doesn't remotely apply to China or Russia, two countries that have long since abandoned even the semblance of socialism or communism in favor of systems that more closely approach economic fascism. One can criticise countries thatt have failed at communism validly by citing real examples such as Cuba, which genuinely spent decades trying to implement and maintain these ideologies with rigour that closely resembled hardline socialism in practice. Nothig about today's China or today's Russia invalidades that criticism or those that are similar.

I like the 'economic fascism' definition, seems useful to define a lot of the current events all around the planet.

We'll never know what Cuba could have become in normal circumstances. Is not fair to expect shiny results when everybody is boycotting your economy for decades or trying to murder the president all the time.

If we learn something about this strategy is that validates and reinforces the government after creating a situation of "keep the power at any cost or we will kill you". The same error has happened in Siria for example.

I'd include personal freedom and democracy in the definition of success.

Billions of people disagree with you, though.

Personal freedom and democracy are both weasel words, by the way. Liberal personal freedom is based on the idea that only negative rights are valid (except when they are necessary to enforce the violent relations of the existing system, of course), for no reason besides the fact that it legitimized a property-based system of politics and power.

That is, you don't have the personal freedom to walk where you want, but you do have the personal freedom to kill people that walk on the land you gained through theft and theft profiteering, for some reason.

As for democracy, you have the choice between two people - primaries aren't constitutionally required and can be done however the last guy to win the primary thinks they should be done - which both are funded by the same set of donors. Which is why there is no statistically significant correlation between the will of the demos and that of the kratos.

The two problems in this interesting conversation are that 1) there is not such thing as a communist country, only countries that "wear communism" for a while, in the same way as people wear mullets, and 2) Capitalist countries didn't performed better necessarily.

Not in some aspects that we correctly criticize in communist countries but accept as perfectly okay in friend countries. If freedom is the definition of success, we could take a look to the countries with highest ratio of their population jailed. Be prepared for a nasty surprise, they are not exactly communists. Not at all...

You're engaging in as much hyperbole as the post you respond to, and you are also a HNer.

Cuba has a GDP PPP per capita of around 25 000$, which is above the worldwide average.

This is despite being prevented from trading with all but a handful of countries.

It's by very far the wealthiest country under US embargo, and better to live in than most of the world.

Given their current, fairly high standard of living, they would probably economically be a first world country without a US embargo - as it is they're already quite close.

Those of you making defenses of Cuba here are flatly deluded if you make these claims seriously. Cuba was only able to sustain itself with enormous Soviet backing and this regardless of the economic embargo by the U.S. Once the USSR collapsed, the Cuban government made hurried attempts at introducing partial capital-friendly reforms in certain sectors (especially tourism) which still never really brought major benefit to its people because the rest of the stagnant, suffocating socialist bureaucracy remained in place for most of daily life.

I am absolutely no fan of the U.S embargo and think it was a an idiotic disaster in terms of both PR and practical terms, a useful blame point for decades of corrupt, criminally repressive Cuban government propaganda, that allowed that state to conveniently deviate attention away from its own very real failures in trying to stick to ideology in the country. None of this is to even mention the very real dictatorship of one single political party running that country for so long under conditions that simply cannot be compared to those of most democratized countries. To say otherwise of this is a blatant game of whataboutism which normally gets derided on this site but apparently, by what I see in replies to my original comment above, is supported when it comes to Cuba.

It's absurd to see so many HNrs, living under largely privileged market friendly conditions and fully enjoying the benefits of the market in their own personal and professional lives, defending the grotesque little experiment in social and economic repression that is Cuba simply because theyre either ideologically fixated on throwing (partially deserved) shit at the US or emotionally sentimental about a country that few of them would want to actually live in as the locals do, for decades on end.

"at country for so long under conditions that simply cannot be compared to those of most democratized countries"

Well let's compare Cuba to most democratized countries in the Caribbean. Or in South America. Or to any place that is not US or EU+Switzerland and Norway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com