Fidel Castro is dead

edko said:

Another boat full of Cuban refugees landed down here today. Maybe they didn't get the memo Castro died.

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Lendarios your ride is here!

Szlia said:

Reading this it sounds to me the Batista regime and american companies did a pretty good job at fleecing the cuban people and the american taxpayers!

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Not good enough. A competent general and a rabble of ideological peasants threw them straight off the island. And once american companies stopped fleecing, the entire thing fell immediately to shit.

I'm afraid that's one of those "you can't have it both ways".

The argument is not about if Castro was competent. He obviously was. Even people who despise him have to admit that. He was a successful revolutionary. The question is if his revolution met it's mandate. I would have to answer that it did not, but I suppose that it hinges on what you think the mandate was. If the mandate was "Cuba for Cubans" then I guess it came closer than if you think the mandate was "Cuba can be better".

Which is the specific reason that Castro used the word Colony, even when I have no doubt he understood he was framing the wrong relationship. Cuba for Cubans makes him look a whole lot better and allows supporters to ignore some things that maybe they shouldn't.

Is this going to be like one of those Sadam Hussein things where he was this horrible evil person that kept everything together and now we're going to have Cuban terrorist groups on Facebook recruiting our youth

In 3000 more years, if humanity is still kicking, they will still be blowing up deli's and shit there

Castro kicked the Jew Mafia out of Cuba. They were basically running the place.

At least that's what I learned from Godfather 2. The rest, I dunno.

iannis By a number of metrics, such as alphabetization, life expectancy at birth, peasants ownership of the land they work, price of electricity, of telecommunications and of rents, the cuban revolution markedly and quickly made things better for the people of the island. On other fronts, such as political freedom, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly... not so much.

When it comes to industrialization and economic growth, it clearly did not happen, but it's a bit difficult to lay the blame at the feet of the revolution when from the get go the US made a significant effort to make sure it did not happen. Castro mentioned in his 1960 speech (what's not in it?) how the US warned that Cuba needed the american companies to function properly, yet, defeating their own argument, still felt the need to bomb the mills and fire bomb the sugar cane fields in an attempt to thwart the work of the cooperatives that ran them just as well as their previous owners...

More than 5 decades after the revolution, it's a bit futile to try and imagine how would Cuba be today if it did not happen, or if the US treated the new government differently or if Guevara remained the ideological compass refusing an economical infeodation to the USSR. We can only hope that 50 years later, a neighbor that poses no geopolitical or ideological threat could be treated normally for the benefit of all parties.


As for the semantic problem over the word "colony", I guess from a political standpoint it can be argued how much of a hyperbole was Castro's statement, as in how much of a puppet government was Cuba's over the years. From an economical standpoint through the prism of anti-imperialism, you have companies from a single foreign power that is drinking all the Cuban milkshake without the cuban people tasting a drop of it, which is, as Castro is arguing in his speech, a de facto colony (I paraphrase: "Cuba had a different color on the map, but that was the extent of its independence").

Szlia said:

As for the semantic problem over the word "colony", I guess from a political standpoint it can be argued how much of a hyperbole was Castro's statement, as in how much of a puppet government was Cuba's over the years. From an economical standpoint through the prism of anti-imperialism, you have companies from a single foreign power that is drinking all the Cuban milkshake without the cuban people tasting a drop of it, which is, as Castro is arguing in his speech, a de facto colony (I paraphrase: "Cuba had a different color on the map, but that was the extent of its independence").

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I'll admit that much is close enough to true. But that is always going to be the case. Cuba is a medium sized island. The USA compromises the cohesive bulk of an entire continent. There will never be a time, as long as this remains true, that Cuba will be free of American influence. Influence which will seem at times purely dictatorial.

I truly do not see a political situation in which Cuba is not overshadowed by their giant neighbor. Hell, Cuba would be overshadowed by Florida, Lousiana, and Texas themselves. It doesn't take the other 47.

It's not really a semantic argument about the word Colony. Colony implies a level of regard which America has NEVER held for Cuba, and never will. It's not the word, it's the idea that the word represents. That was the hope and dream of some long defeated southern politicians -- for Cuba to become an actual colony, but even then Cuba was nothing but a tool to influence domestic politics. The relationship is vassalage, pure and simple. But there are different shades of that relationship. I happen to agree with you and lend up to a point. If the previous version of vassalage had been a bit more inclusive then Castro would have never had enough support to lead his revolt. But I also agree with Kissinger and Lithose. To pre-emptively stop that revolt would have cost more than America would ever gain in doing so. There comes a point where it just costs less to subjugate them.

I don't really want to see that, either.

But thinking Cuba can be truly free is the delusional dream of a dead man. All Castro did was trade masters. And then his new master collapsed. USA is still here, and the USA is a completely different order of magnitude.

lendarios can you prove your American citizenship

Lendarios said:

Also those communes you mentioned, it was almost forced labor.

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Welfare system is better for everyone, got it