How am I going to comment civilly? This is a dictator and there are people praising him here! WTF. This might be easy for you to comment on when you didn't lose your entire life because of this man but people have.
It's crucial to remember that Castro silenced all who disagreed with him. He condemned an entire nation to poverty! His most notable achievement with regards to Africa was sending soldiers to extend the life of wars.
It's stripped of the insults to those that disagree with you and complaints of down voting. In my experience users on HN will down vote tone more often than they will down vote disagreement.
I agree it doesn't have the punch of your original post. I don't have much experience writing emotionally charged comments, though I'm sure there are ways of doing that without resorting to insults.
It sounds like you may have some personal stories to share. These would definitely add to the power of your comment, if you chose to include them.
That's more because of the embargo than anything Cubans did. And even given that, they do way better than most latin american "free" nations.
>His most notable achievement with regards to Africa was sending soldiers to extend the life of wars.
Let's not go into which country, besides Germany and USSR, started more wars, meddled in more places, held more peopls down by installing friendly dictators in power, and caused more hurt in the 20th/21st century...
The embargo was with the US. Other countries (as long as the company doesn't do business in the US) were free to trade with Cuba.
Sure the embargo didn't help, but the poor state of the Cuba economy mostly lies at the feet of the Castro.
I just have to ask, does communism require trading with capitalist nations to be successful? Because there are many nations under embargo by the US that are significantly more prosperous.
But clearly, when Marx was talking about a communist revolution he clearly meant that you should allow yourself to be exploited by your nearest capitalist neighbor.
You keep on going back to this. No, they don't. But an island nation does. It's ridiculously hard to produce literally all the things your country needs when it's 100x smaller than the US, and it's even harder when you have no land borders. Trading with other nations becomes ridiculously important at that point.
HN is a place to gratify one's intellectual curiosity. Part of the fabric of the community is that we engage in a civil, substantive way. There are various topics that don't always make that easy, but it's important that we try.
There is only 1 ideology responsible for killing more than 100 million people in the existence of human civilization. Try considering that for a second.
We will likely not understand what Fidel has done to the Cuban people for a few more decades but I will take the role of oracle and tell you. 100 years from now Cuba will still be poor and it will still be an inexpensive tourist destination for rich white people from Canada and Europe.
If you're curious about the philosophy here, have a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
The decisive difference between HN and other sites is that here, it almost doesn't matter what you believe, so long as you express your beliefs in a thoughtful and constructive way. You can still challenge beliefs you disagree with. But if you're looking to express outrage or if you're showing up to do ideological battle, you should be aware that it won't be tolerated here.
Please understand, HN has been around for about a decade. The community is the sole distinction between here and other sites. And as soon as the community consists of people commenting in anger rather than in thoughtful critique, the more thoughtful people will move elsewhere. We have to make it a priority to defend ourselves from that outcome.
Try to have the spirit of being among trusted friends, searching for the truth in a topic. It's not easy, especially when someone says something controversial. But HN is all about good conversation. That doesn't mean you have to be nice, but it means you have to be thoughtful and substantive. It's almost always better to say nothing than to convey anger.
What is misleading about anything I've just stated? Because that is one of the requirements for something to be propaganda.
HN is a place for discussions. That means being open to people having ideas other than your own, and acknowledging that those ideas may have merit. You don't have to agree with them; I don't agree with everything said on HN. That said, you do have to be open to accepting that others have different viewpoints and that they're not crazy for doing so.
That's why there's policies in place for civil commenting, and the like. To foster a discussion between people with potentially opposing viewpoints without devolving into a personally-charged argument.
Tons of people have lost their entire life because of US actions. And in places the US had no role to be at all, to boot.
It's beyond double standards...