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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

The US didn't ruin Cuba's economy. Cuba did it to itself with the nationalization of all industry, prohibition of any private enterprise, limited access to information, and restricted freedom of movement, among other things. The Castros don't care about the well-being of the Cuban people, only their own hold on power. In the 90s, after the collapse of the USSR and its subsidies brought the Cuban economy to its knees, the Castros temporarily liberalized parts of the economy. As soon as the situation improved enough to prevent a revolt, they renewed the crackdown on private enterprise with a vengeance.

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In the most generous remotely tenable reading of the facts for the US policy, it protected the Cuban policies you point to by providing an easy, convenient, and credible PR scapegoat for the deleterious effects of the Cuban policies, thereby reducing pressure on the regime to alter them.

> The US didn't ruin Cuba's economy. Cuba did it to itself

This is almost entirely fiction, although I'm sure this is the common political narrative. Cuba is a small island in the middle of the Caribbean cut-off from it's biggest and most developed trading partner, which would have been what 70-90%+ of the economy?

But yes of - course the arch-villain fidel castro and those damn commies.

Suppressing the middle class, nationalizing industries, disaffecting business people all contribute to tanking their economy. Didn't the cutting-off happen AFTER all that?

> Suppressing the middle class,

This is the modern narrative for revolutions in Latin/South America? "Middle Class", really? Because well fed people providing for their families decided to take up arms? Or because the well-fed were a tiny minority, and the rest lived in poverty under the economic oppression of former colonialists?

Don't know what that's all about; sorry to press your hot button. But a stable society needs a middle class. You take businesses away, drive people to leave their homeland, its gonna be disruptive.

Castro solved that problem. Poverty for everyone.

Communism doesn't work. I don't understand why so many people here with anti-US bones to pick won't or can't understand that The idea Castro's Cuba would have been wonderfully prosperous while Pol Pot, Stalin, the Jong-un dynasty, etc all have failed is ridiculous. Cuba did model itself after these regimes politically, with requisite horrible human rights abuses to keep the population from asserting their natural rights as free citizens who should be able to petition their government, hold property, start businesses, etc.

China is only doing well because it liberalized so much so quickly and more or less run a capitalist market economy.

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