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Comment by elsurudo | Hacker News Reader

A lot of that is due to their circumstances and the US embargo. I don't quite see what you are saying here – we may disagree with his policies and ideology, but he seems very candid and truthful here, admitting many faults of his country's system. This is something a "Western" politician would rarely – if ever – do these days.

You also need to be mindful of the situation in Cuba before the revolution, where the people felt that their country was becoming a satellite of the US, and losing control over its own destiny.

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So are you blaming all the human rights issues on the US embargo? One of my Spanish teachers grew up in Cuba. He was extremely vocal about how bad it was there, and he was well off because his parents were part of the government. He ended up getting snuck out on a sailboat with his grandparents and never saw his parents again. Perhaps his stories were unique and his visible anger misplaced, but I don't think so.

What particular stories of human rights issues, as distinctly separate from embargo-induced economic hardships, did he talk about?

Lack of freedom of speech comes to mind. As in being killed for voicing dissent.

It was ~20 years ago, so I don't remember all of the details. The main things centered around what we have all read and heard about. Lack of freedom and political dissidence landing people in prison or worse.

I'm sorry but no. They destroyed the lives of my parents. They convinced a generation that the future was at hand, that you only need to sacrifice a little more, and everything would be great. They convinced a generation that any other alternative was a treason against Cuba and humanity.

There is no justification for what they did.

I was born in Cuba and just returned from the island 3 days ago. I'm pretty mindful of the situation there. There is no one to blame for the dire situation in Cuba other than the regime and it's leaders.

The US has increased the regime's oppressive effects, though.

The embargo has created a dearth of medical supplies & knowledge, has negatively impacted nutrition, lack of resources, lack of tourism dollars, and provides a bogeyman for the regime to blame for all its ails. It has helped repress and impoverish the people more than anything else. The United Nations General Assembly has passed a resolution every year since 1992 opposing it.

It's possible that, like China, the oppressive effects of Communism could have been lessened (even if just a little) under the benefits of trade with a Capitalist democracy. Medical crises would have been dealt with quicker, and they would have had more cash on hand from tourism to invest in agriculture (or at the very least, import more food).

And you may feel differently about this, but I think the ban on travel really sucked ass for Cuban families who couldn't visit their relatives, and the bans on transfer of money to family members in Cuba. But that's not really a regime thing, that was just the US being dicks.

With respect to oppressive effects, how well exactly has capitalism (Or, if we want to split hairs, imperialism) worked out for Cuba's Carribean and Latin American neighbours?

Cuba is towards the top of that list, by life expectancy, caloric intake, GDP per capita, literacy, child mortality.

Cuba has a lot of problems... But still it turned out far better then, say, Haiti, or Honduras ever will be, despite all the benefits of open markets. This is consistently missing from the narrative.

Anything approaching what could be called a capitalistic/free market economy is basically nonexistent in Latin America, with rare exceptions such as possibly Chile, which by no coincidence leads the quality of life rankings in the region.

Other countries had brief experiences with more pro market governments (even if by necessity as opposed to ideology, such as in Brazil), or now in Argentina.

The results have always been positive, but we seem destined to be governed by populist left wing governments.

I don't know about its neighbors, but i'm talking specifically about Cuba.

Cuba was at the top of the list by the end of the 1950's, when its US-backed dictator had turned it into one of the leading developed nations in the world. Then the Castro regime comes in, and things don't go very well, but the Soviet Union floats it along for a few decades. Then things go down hill real fast.

Almost any regime that didn't have such an antagonistic relationship with the US would probably have done better. But it's clear the US was intentionally hurting them in order to pressure some sort of additional revolution so they could install a new dictator. That never happened, so the US forced them to suffer the continued loss of US trade. We could have lifted it during the 90's famine (the OAS lifted its embargo 30 years prior), but still no. I don't see why anyone would downvote my parent comment; the UN has been agreeing with me for 25 years.

If you're at the bottom of the ladder (possibly Afro-Cuban), you're better off in Cuba than most other Latin American countries.

If you're one of the educated white folks whose family lost a plantation or Havana mansion, I can understand you hate the Castros. It's like getting kicked out of Paris and 60 years later the city is literally crumbling. For a while it was like a civilization trapped in amber but infrastructure has gone over the line into complete decay.

On the plus side is good education, good health care, not a lot of crime, until recently a guarantee of a job that would keep body and soul together.

The Castros still have > 50% popular support, they have managed to maintain control of the country and the armed forces despite all their failures, foreign military adventures, withdrawal of Russian support, constant pressure from the USA.

It's a very mixed bag but not the one-sided disaster we constantly hear about from people who make a cottage industry of selling that story (someone has got the US to spend $500m on broadcasts to Cuba no one can receive, and that's just one example).

Moving to a more liberalized economy and attracting foreign investment without causing social unrest, giving up control will be a challenge, and the fact that all the educated people want to leave will not make it easier.

these were interesting http://fusion.net/story/116226/historic-poll-top-25-findings...

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/03/21/2157021/the-us-and-cub...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/cuba-after-obama...

https://medium.com/@dtemkin/spending-the-last-week-in-cuba-w...

You are just a victim of propaganda. Cuba had decent education and decent healthcare system by third world standards but the Cuban economy wasn't able to support either of them and everything came tumbling down when the soviet money stopped flowing in.

It would be also very interesting to know from where you get that figure that more than 50% of the population support the Castros as that data is famously unavailable.

poll is linked ... read the references ... Cuba's biggest source of FX is exporting doctors, plus just look at the public health stats. I've informed myself and, sorry, not the one who's the victim of propaganda.

for the record, it's an effed system and economy and a poor country, just not quite as effed as people would like you to believe. people flock to the US from Mexico too, and that's without the wet foot/dry foot policy giving Cubans automatic asylum.

if they do get decent Internet it will be a pretty good tech hub due to the education. Americans might even flock there for a cheap, beautiful and fascinating place to live. Cubans actually have the full US cable/media package via el paquete and eat it up.

while you're at it, read up on the Fanjuls, some of America's greatest recipients of corporate welfare, and why US sugar prices are a multiple of world prices. if you love free markets, best thing we could do for poor countries is not blockade them while subsidizing politically connected moguls. (who profit from boycott and generated the constant anti-Castro drumbeat and policy...until they decided they'd rather do business with Cuba)

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2001/02/floridas-fanjuls-2001...

https://www.aei.org/publication/protectionist-sugar-policy-c...

Right, all those white-ex-plantation-owners-mansion-living-elite risking their lives in the ocean to flee the country... Or asking for political asylum in every opportunity such as during Olympic Games...

They certainly don't seem to be fleeing to the capitalist paradises of Honduras, Bolivia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, etc.

If the United States had a wet foot/dry foot policy with the rest of Central America, it would be absolutely flooded with asylum seekers. It's already flooded with illegal aliens risking their lives, paying coyotes to smuggle them across the Mexican border - imagine what would happen if they were automatically legalized.

we absolutely do flee to any country that would have us, there are cubans in almost any corner of the earth

> like China, the oppressive effects of Communism could have been lessened (even if just a little) under the benefits of trade with a Capitalist democracy

The oppressive effects of communism were lessened because China lessened communism by introducing free market reforms. It wasn't just trade with capitalist nations that improved the welfare of China and its people, it was becoming more capitalist a nation itself.

Right... and it was becoming a more capitalist nation (technically a socialist market economy, otherwise known as state capitalism) due to influences by its Capitalist trade partners.

In a single year (1978-1979) new party leader Deng Xiaoping led economic reforms to the PRC, signed an accord with Jimmy Carter for the US to officially recognize the PRC, and attracted new business from Boeing and Coca-Cola. More reforms followed soon after. But it is absolutely clear that they thought the Capitalist model was what worked and they wanted a form of it, and used trade with the US as its beginning.

I make this distinction about the US influencing them because without the successful model (and attractive potential partner) of the US, the push for a market economy may not have worked.

Cuba could have done the same, except we were still giving them the finger.

'its leaders'.

The Castros are the main responsible for the dire economic situation of Cuba. Regardless of all the international relationship mistakes he made, Fidel Castro stands as one of the most economic incompetent of all communist dictators, with the notable exception of the ones in North Korea. Despite the embargo which affects mainly the commerce with the US, Cuba has always had commercial relations with many countries that were largely unaffected by the embargo. He basically had the whole country under his control. Think about a CEO of a very diversified industrial and agricultural conglomerate. He managed to screw it all and there was no other reason than his incompetence.

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