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Comment by davidcollantes | Hacker News Reader

Brazil is a democracy, Cuba isn't. Just as North Korea, but much closer to America, Cuba is above all a curiosity, a place semi-frozen in time, where ingenuity is no luxury, if you want to live.

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Putting Cuba and North Korea in the same basket is wildly misleading.

Although Cubans do not enjoy complete political freedom, most people there have a higher standard of living than before the revolution, almost everyone knows how to read and write and most social services are free (Cubans have better healthcare than US citizens).

The 80% poor may have had their standard of living raised by the revolution in 1959 but the rich and middle class had it lowered. In the 55 years since, the standard of living of the middle class and opportunities for the young in other similar countries has advanced past Cuba's while Cuba has stagnated and remained a 1970s soviet-like low-tech state.

Not sure if it is worth the ulcer, but i do wonder how much the Helms-Burton Act (and similar) has had to do with that...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms%E2%80%93Burton_Act

I really did not mean to put them in the same basket. I simply said (which applies to North Korea as well) that "Cuba is above all a curiosity, a place semi-frozen in time, where ingenuity is no luxury, if you want to live."

Far from trying to make them equal.

Cuba is way ahead of North Korea in terms of basic human rights. The Cuban government aren't saints by any means, but to put them on one level with whatever/whoever is ruling North Korea is unfair to them.

In Cuba, the authorities even have trouble locking dissidents up, more often than not. In NK, mass executions and mass imprisonment are the norm, and the differences between prison, labor and army service is at best murky.

Never mind that Brazil has had its "fair" share of dictatorships.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_military_government

And i really wonder how long the democracy will last if they get too uppity towards US policies...

In the end the Monroe doctrine still seems to be adhered to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine

I think the ability of the US government to influence democracy is largely overestimated. They can't introduce it and they can't exactly stop it, either.

They tried their damnedest to stop it in Iran...

The thing is that there have been US interventions and we tend to assume that it has an effect. But that can't ever be confirmed or ruled out. In Iran's case, who says without US interventions a democracy would have survived the conservative muslim beliefs in the population?

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