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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>However, the man has committed grievous crimes

Way less crimes than those who accuse him. Never sprayed Vietnamese with Agent Orange or napalms for one, never dropped nuclear bombs on civilians, never supported Pinochet et co, doesn't have 25% of the world's incarcerated in just 4% of the global population, and lots of other things besides.

>keeps 'his people' in abject poverty

A 40+ years embargo has something to do with that too...

>More than 85% of the economy is in the control of the military - his private Army.

It's in control of the state, which is how things are supposed to work in communist countries. Not necessarily worse than having it in the hands of corporations...

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>Way less crimes than those who accuse him. Never sprayed Vietnamese with Agent Orange or napalms for one, never dropped nuclear bombs on civilians, never supported Pinochet et co, doesn't have 25% of the world's incarcerated in just 4% of the global population, and lots of other things besides.

That's a logical fallacy. You can't say that Castro's crimes against humanity are okay because the US has committed worse ones.

>A 40+ years embargo has something to do with that too...

Only a US embargo. That leaves more than 80% of the world GDP to interact with.

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

Tu quoque fallacy, for the record

It's only a fallacy if it is being employed to absolve Castro of every crime. I think the point of the comparison was to remind pots not to call kettles black.

What makes you think it requires a total absolution to be tu quoque? If I murder 100 people and punch a grandma, and I point out it was OK to punch a grandma because I just saw YOU do it, it's still tu quoque despite the fact that nobody discussed the 100 I murdered

> ...and I point out it was OK... because I just saw YOU do it...

This is tu quoque, because you're trying to say bad thing you did was OK because someone else did a bad thing too. However, you'll notice the above poster definitely did not claim what Castro did was OK.

Only the argument is that the US has cause much much much greater mayhem than Castro, domestically AND globally, and yet it has the gal to take the hollier than thou stance.

Heck, US cops alone have probably killed much more people than the Cuban regime in those 50 years. And the place with 25% of the world's prisoners and 4% of the world's population is rich to call other places "police states".

> Only a US embargo. That leaves more than 80% of the rest of the world GDP to interact with.

That's a naive view. Do you really think the rest of the world can just straight up ignore the US's embargo and play nice with Cuba, while still staying on good terms with the US?

I suppose I agree. The US' embargo was probably quite tough on Cuba. But I don't think the state of the economy in Cuba can be entirely pinned on the embargo.

Of course it can. Cuba is an island nation and relies on trade to acquire the vast majority of the goods those of us in the West take for granted. Block that trade and you basically stifle all economic growth.

From wikipedia:

>>Cuba produces sugarcane, tobacco, citrus, coffee, rice, potatoes, beans and livestock.[2] As of 2015 Cuba imported about 70-80% of its food.[51] and 80-84% of the food it rations to the public.[52] Raúl Castro ridiculed the bureaucracy that shackled the agriculture sector.[52] Before 1959, Cuba boasted as many cattle as people. Today meat is so scarce that it is a crime to kill a cow without government permission.[53] Cuban people suffered from starvation during the Special Period.[29]

Yes.

My impression was then when America tried to force other countries to participate in the embargo they told them to shove it.

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

Also yes Cuba has trade with the rest of the world

http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/cub/

> Cuba is the 140th largest export economy in the world. In 2014, Cuba exported $1.74B and imported $5.91B, resulting in a negative trade balance of $4.17B.

> The top exports of Cuba are Raw Sugar ($392M), Refined Petroleum ($314M), Rolled Tobacco ($236M), Hard Liquor ($116M) and Raw Nickel ($108M), using the 1992 revision of the HS (Harmonized System) classification. Its top imports are Wheat ($234M), Refined Petroleum ($228M), Concentrated Milk ($207M), Corn ($204M) and Poultry Meat ($196M).

> The top export destinations of Cuba are China ($311M), the Netherlands ($157M), Spain ($141M), Senegal ($92M) and the United Kingdom ($67.3M). The top import origins are China ($1.05B), Spain ($920M), Brazil ($507M), Canada ($389M) and Mexico ($360M).

Of course geography still matters, the US is nearby, large, and rich. Exporting to the US would be a huge plus for the Cuban economy but it wouldn't change everything.

>> My impression was then when America tried to force other countries to participate in the embargo they told them to shove it.

Your impression is wrong.

An example knock-on effect relevant to HN is that as a UK company, we couldn't sell windows software to Cuba because things like windows run-time libraries would be covered by the US export embargo. In theory, they wouldn't even have a legal copy of any US operating system.

I'm sure there were similar knock-on effects across all industries that had US products, suppliers or connections in their business.

This is naive

As even you said, Cuba was not supposed to have Windows copies, but I'm sure they had

Iran theoretically couldn't have access to Boeing parts (and this was a stricter embargo), but they had

There's always a way of solving things.

Most of Cuban problems were caused by themselves, not the embargo.

> There's always a way of solving things.

Except, not really.

You can’t put any app using any encryption technology up on the Google Play Store or the iOS App Store, if you also distribute anything to Cuba.

For the first you need to get an approval from the US DoD, which requires that you never interact with Cuba.

Yes, but you don't sell it directly to Cuba, you sell it to $COUNTRY which might eventually sell it to Cuba (and you don't even know about it)

It's not you selling to Cuba, it's Cuba buying through intermediates.

(Of course if you really want you can sell things directly to Cuba, but you need to find a way of disguising it)

You're (or, were) also forbidden from bringing Cuban cigars to the US, but if you arrive from a flight from Panama with a box of unmarked cigars nobody is going to do anything.

You could sell apks

I can’t sell anything to Cuba while also providing anything in the Google Store or the Apple App Store.

That’s part fo the issue.

>> This is naive

What? This was the real world, a matter of first hand experience. We could not consider jeopardising sales to our biggest market (the US) by breaking US embargo for a barely significant market.

You're right, you shouldn't consider doing it unless there are significant gains to be had.

But see my other comment.

(However, I don't think Cuba has qualms about pirating software, if this was hw it would have been a different issue)

You could write your software in another operating system, giving a middle finger to oppressive Uncle Sam. Not doing so shows you did not appreciate Cuban market enough.

Same goes for other products. Don't base them on U.S. technology if you plan to trade with America's enemies.

Further they received significant aid from the USSR.

And their economy wasn't half bad back then (from a communist standard). In Canada we always had a softer tone with Cuba. A lot of the US PoV seems propaganda driven. Sure, there is a vocal expat group that had very good reasons to leave and were definitely harassed/prosecuted/persecuted for their views/lifestyle. The same kind of minorities exists in the US (watch Trump speeches from the last year). On the other side, until the USSR collapsed, it went from the bottom of the list to near top on education, health access and [a few] other areas. Of course it stayed as corrupted as it was for the last 150 years, but don't blame the Castro regime for that, most Latin America and Caribbean nations are as bad in that regard, if not worst. As for the "capitalism is good, communism is evil" propaganda fueled argument, there isn't much to say. I prefer Capitalism. I acknowledge single party is more prone to corruption and nepotism while democracies es is at risk of populism waves, electoral counter intuitive promises and both are just as vulnerable to corporate/power influences. You have to wonder if for lesser economies, you are better off enslaved by landlords like during Batista days or kept poor, but with a proper social net, in the Castro state.

" In Canada we always had a softer tone with Cuba."

Partly because we are not the US and did not have a direct confrontation.

But partly because Trudeau Sr. was a communist-revolutionary apologist, in the French intellectual sense - and chilled with Fidel to boost is 'socialist hipster' cred and to thumb the eye of the Americans.

As a young man, I found it admirable. Now that I know many ex-Cubans, I find it utterly repulsive and a stain on our history. It's one thing to have 'relations' or 'diplomacy' with another nation - it's altogether another to chum around with a thug. If it was in the name of getting Fidel to let his people off the island, or encourage democracy... sure ... but it was not that.

>But partly because Trudeau Sr. was a communist-revolutionary apologist, in the French intellectual sense - and chilled with Fidel to boost is 'socialist hipster' cred and to thumb the eye of the Americans.

As opposed to a right-wing capitalist pig, like most other leaders?

The name-calling can go both ways.

It would be a logical fallacy if coldtea actually made that claim. He did not. He simply pointed out that edblamey moral high ground is a fallacy in itself, when so many of those Western nations stand accused of worse.

Western nations have not 'done worse' in modern times.

The logical fallacy I think is yours for trying to compare Cuba to the USA in a tit-for-tat comparison of misrepresented facts and issues.

Dropping a nuclear bomb seems 'bad' until you put it in the context of what the Japanese were doing, and the costs otherwise.

The North Vietnamese that the Americans & South Vietnamese were fighting against were 10x worse than Castro (they executed 100's of thousands in the streets - and put millions in concentration camps after the Americans withdrew) - and using 'agent Orange' was an act of reasonable desperation on the part of the Americans as it was used only to clear foliage near American firebases, the casualties were mostly American and of course it was not done with the knowledge people would be hurt - the author of the note makes it seem like it was used on purpose to hurt Vietnamese which is a gross misrepresentation.

Americas role in the world is fundamentally different than that of Cuba (and of course there is the issue of scale) which makes it futile to compare the USA to Cuba, tit-for-tat in terms of 'things done'.

But the comparison is resolved rather more pragmatically:

People literally risk everything, including their lives to flee Cuba to get to America.

Never the other way around.

> the casualties were mostly American

It isn't really clear if this is true, there is a clear bias of studies to focus on the effect on American veterans, but there are 1-4 million Vietnamese affected depending on what non-American source you believe.

>Western nations have not 'done worse' in modern times.

The US has bombed and invaded Afghanistan for the crimes of a handful of (mainly Saudi-backed) loonies (after first sponsoring Bin Laden in the 80s), have invaded Iraq under BS false pretexts (WMDs etc) and created huge losses, chaos, anarchy and civil war, have helped destabilize Libya with the same outcome, have targeted the Syrian regime and in the process helped ISIS grow, and so on. And that's just the open actions since 2001...

>The North Vietnamese that the Americans & South Vietnamese were fighting against were 10x worse than Castro (they executed 100's of thousands in the streets - and put millions in concentration camps after the Americans withdrew) - and using 'agent Orange' was an act of reasonable desperation on the part of the Americans as it was used only to clear foliage near American firebases, the casualties were mostly American and of course it was not done with the knowledge people would be hurt - the author of the note makes it seem like it was used on purpose to hurt Vietnamese which is a gross misrepresentation.

Wow, I am Vietnamese, and this is so shockingly far from the truth. FYI, the total number of American casualties in the Vietnam war amounted to something like ~50,000, while the conservative estimate for the total number of Vietnamese deaths was at least one million- the majority of which were civilian. What's worse, Agent Orange's effects were far reaching. Long after the war had ended it continued creating unimaginable damage, to the environment, to the people, to the economy [1]. Conveniently downplaying this horrible crime (which the US has still not owned up completely) is misrepresenting the facts. And yes, Western nations have done 'worse'. Much of the tragedies around the world in the 20th century had much to do with the Western countries' imperialiastic mindset.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange#Effects_on_the_Vi...

> That's a logical fallacy. You can't say that Castro's crimes against humanity are okay because the US has committed worse ones.

Correct, but it can help a lot of people come down off of their high horse.

May I also add that short but extreme crimes feel different than prolongated even if less violent ones ?

> Only a US embargo. That leaves more than 80% of the world GDP to interact with.

Nope. The US brutally punished countries which traded with Cuba. The best and most macabre example of this would be the 1974 Bangladesh Famine, which had a death toll of 1-1.5 million, and was almost entirely preventable.

After the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation war, when Bangladesh achieved its independence from America-backed Pakistan, US initially refused to recognize Bangladesh as a country and trade with it because Bangladesh wanted to prosecute Pakistani war criminals, responsible for the worst genocide since the Holodomor(and committed using American arms). Infact, Nixon and the US refused to condemn Pakistani actions, and actively worked to suppress evidence of their crimes.

When the famine started in 1974, the US initially promised food aid to Bangladesh, but refused to deliver because Bangladesh exported jute to Cuba(Cuba was one of the first countries to recognize Bangladeshi independence). By the time Bangladesh agreed to stop all trade relations with Cuba, and US aid finally arrived, the famine was pretty much over and had claimed its 1,500,000+ victims. Now, to make it clear, the US had 2 million+ tonnes of grain pretty much ready to deliver, but held back at the last moment while hundreds of thousands were starving to death. This was also while US was giving huge amounts of grain as food aid to surplus food producing South Vietnam, which the Vietnamese traded for weapons.

> Way less crimes than those who accuse him. Never sprayed Vietnamese with Agent Orange or napalms for one, never dropped nuclear bombs on civilians, never supported Pinochet et co, doesn't have 25% of the world's incarcerated in just 4% of the global population, and lots of other things besides.

Yes, because comparing the capabilities of a small, poor island nation is the same as comparing the capabilities of the most powerful country in the world.

Castro had no capability to do what the US has done, had he had the chance how would've done much worse.

"Soviet propagandists during the cold war were trained in a tactic that their western interlocutors nicknamed “whataboutism”. Any criticism of the Soviet Union (Afghanistan, martial law in Poland, imprisonment of dissidents, censorship) was met with a “What about...” (apartheid South Africa, jailed trade-unionists, the Contras in Nicaragua, and so forth)." - http://www.economist.com/node/10598774

And why not? Whataboutism is only fair: it means people discuss both sides, and judge things in relation, not in isolation.

A discussion that doesn't contain a "what about" element is one-sided. Those criticizing "whataboutism" only want their own shit to be left out of the discussion.

That some would call whataboutism a bad thing just goes to show how much some pots are used to be the only ones allowed to call the kettle black.

do you see anyone defending those responsible for the crimes you listed?

No, but I do see people calling a leader/country/regime "evil" etc for doing 1/10th of what theirs, which they'd never think of calling evil, did.

If you have a better word, surely suggest. what is the word for "clinging to power for seven decades and taking the country through economic hell, year after year, all the while jailing political opponents and at times getting rid of them"

Many many words are better than "evil". How about "autocratic" or "dictatorial" or "power-hungry" or "delusional". Or perhaps a phrase like "ruthlessly uncompromising". All of them convey much more actual information and still have your judgemental tone.

For what its worth, I think "evil" is a word that shouldn't be used outside of storybooks. It is a binary word that is far too overgeneralised to the point it is meaningless to ascribe. It doesn't serve any persuasive or descriptive purpose.

I don't know. What is the word for "playing world cop, being full of crazy religious and racist nuts, having created KKK, being the worlds top incarceration rate, still having the death penalty, starting wars and protecting your "interests" right and left all over the globe where you have no place, getting in bed with all kind of dictators and fascist regimes --as long as they were not communist dictators they were ok-- , dropping nuclear bombs on civilians, and having the guts to point a hollier than thou finger on the rest of the world"?

Even that, I wouldn't call "evil" -- self-serving imperialistic and post-colonial would fit better. Evil is a BS biblical notion for pre-modern people. It's no way to look at history with a rational mindset, and doesn't offer any explanation of various acts, nor a historical perspective.

Although I agree with your content, it's not relevant to Castro.

> Never sprayed Vietnamese with Agent Orange or napalms for one, never dropped nuclear bombs on civilians

Yes, on the North Vietnamese invaders who had a track record of murdering civilians well before the US was ever involved. And the Japanese who perpetrated the Rape of Nanking, etc.

But even so - the US has voted out these previous politicians whereas Cubans were and are not able to do that.

So the US as a nation is evil.

BTW, you are wrong: cubans do vote, too.

Really? There have been free and fair elections in Cuba, where anyone can start up a political party, campaign for their positions without any fear whatsoever of government retaliation, and successfully get elected to office, even if they have anti-Communist views? Wow, I hadn't heard about this. You seem to be pretty confident about stating it, though, so perhaps you can go into some detail about these elections.

I'm also wondering why so many people were so desperate to leave Cuba in rickety rafts even though they could have just voted out the Castros instead in one of these elections you mention, but I'm sure you can explain that too.

+ "It's in control of the state, " - actually, it's in control of the Army directly.

+ The US sprayed 'agent orange' on trees near their firebases, and the vast majority of the 'victims' were American soldiers, not Vietnamese. Obviously, they didn't know what it would do.

+ The 'embargo' is 100% the fault of Fidel. He put nuclear weapons 40 miles away from florida, from those who backed by the credible threat of using them, thereby putting hundreds of millions of lives at risk. That's why the embargo started - he had ample time to wind it down. Jimmy Carter, Clinton, Obama - and even Bush Sr. would have made a deal of Fidel agreed to have elections.

What do you think about the wisdom of putting nuclear weapons 160 miles away from the USSR in Turkey? The Cuban deployment was a direct response to American provocation.

What's notable about Castro's conduct during the missile crisis is that whilst it was actually Khrushchev that made the decision about locating the missiles in Cuba as an arguably proportionate response to America's own missile locations, it was Castro's private correspondence that urged Khrushchev to be prepared to actually use them.

(Khrushchev, not known as one of the Cold War's more pacifistic figures, responded that he found Castro's suggestion quite disturbing)

Could you add references? Not accusing any credibility, I'd just want to learn more details.

> the vast majority of the 'victims' were American soldiers, not Vietnamese.

That's straight up false. Between 3-4 millions Vietnamese suffered from it[1], and its devastating effects are still very relevant today. Concerning US soldiers, "By April 1993, the Department of Veterans Affairs had compensated only 486 victims, although it had received disability claims from 39,419 soldiers who had been exposed to Agent Orange while serving in Vietnam."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange#Effects_on_the_Vi...

> He put nuclear weapons 40 miles away from florida

And the US isn’t putting nukes into NATO states? Italy and Turkey already have had some before Cuba got some, so what’s next? Estonia?

No, the US is definitely not putting nukes in Estonia.

Original comment was:

> And the US isn’t putting nukes into Estonia?

Honest question: Where is this coming from? I'd hate to call this war-mongering and spreading misinformation, but this is a great way to polarize a conversation in one fell scoop.

The problem is just that you have to see it a lot more nuanced.

It was the cold war, and the US had already put nukes into Italy and Turkey, well within range of Moscow.

In such a game-theoretical standoff, the USSR had had to react – to keep the balance of power.

It’s a completely crazy situation, and I’d consider both sides of the conflict as Evil, but I’m not sure why so many people try to claim the US was Good, while the USSR was Evil. Both stood for some good, and some very bad principles.

I edited the comment to reduce the conflict potential, but keep the general idea of it.

Please keep in mind I was responding only to the original comment, which I quoted in its full glory. It had nothing to do with what you assert above, just a mistaken assertion that US is keeping (now was implicit in what you said) nukes in the Baltic States.

Given Russias interest in toying and more with its neighbors, misinformation like this goes a long way of "normalizing" those conflicts. It prepares whomever is reading your comment to say, "huh, the both sides here are shades of gray" and just accept that conflict as normal.

So yeah. There are no US nukes in Estonia. If there are, please back up your sources.

> US was Good, while the USSR was Evil

Objectively? They were both Evil. If you compare them, the USSR is hands down the evil one. I really hate this whitewashing of USSR's history just to put down the US. I'm pretty sure nobody here defending Castro or Cuba ever had to live under a communist dictatorship.

It's as simple as:

Ask anyone from Eastern Europe or even Cuba on whose sphere of influence would they had rather been. I'm willing to bet everything that 90% of the answers will be NATO.

Most of that is true.

But comparing the US and USSR isn’t nearly as easy. Both were (and are) horrible to non-citizen. And while the US was mostly okay to the white citizen, minorities had to suffer for quite a while. And nowadays, the US mistreating its own citizen is getting extreme.

> Ask anyone from Eastern Europe or even Cuba on whose sphere of influence would they had rather been

That question isn’t nearly as easy either.

In Germany we’re having a huge group of people who lived under communism – and want it back. In some states (those which lived under communism), up to 20% of the people.

(This also answers the "I'm pretty sure nobody here defending Castro or Cuba ever had to live under a communist dictatorship" question, I guess? I didn’t live myself under communism, but I know quite a few who’d want it back, because they had it better)

> But comparing the US and USSR isn’t nearly as easy. Both were (and are) horrible to non-citizen.

Go ahead and compare how the United States treated the citizens of, say, France, with how the USSR treated the citizens of, oh, say, Czechoslovakia. We'll wait.

> And while the US was mostly okay to the white citizen, minorities had to suffer for quite a while.

It's telling that you are attempting to draw an equality between segregation -- which was legally ended in 1957 as part of an open and democratic process -- with the USSR's extensive gulag system, intricate controls on freedom of expression and freedom of thought, and general lack of civil rights for everyone, which lasted right up until the day it disintegrated.

> In Germany we’re having a huge group of people who lived under communism – and want it back.

If Communism was so great, why did you have to build a wall to keep people from running away from it? That's the unanswerable point here.

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