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Comment by wintom | Hacker News Reader

What exactly happened after the U.S. severed ties with Cuba? You make it sound like we lost something.

They are still stuck in the 1960s, their economy is absolute garbage and the people are dirt poor, they lost multiple generations of opportunity.

Have you been to Cuba? It’s like going back in time 70 years.. the country itself is beautiful if they had taken a different path they could be incredibly propsorous. A small country like Cuba could get by on tourism alone and do much better than they do now.

Everyone needs to take their own path, if suppressing people’s religions and no freedom is that path the Chinese want to take then that’s their choice.

Our government and our corporations should not support that.

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My point is simple: If the US had not severed ties with Cuba and instead engaged with Fidel (as he initially tried to do with the US), chances are Cuba wouldn't have alienated itself with the Soviet Union, and Christians (and everybody else) would have been much better off.

Repression of the Church didn't happen until years after the revolution and the Soviet Union had become its main ally.

Cuba is worse off today than it was 60 years ago by the way, so in that sense, they aren't "stuck in the 60s".

What did the US lose? An ally and a potentially strong economy to trade with a few miles from US shore. Cuban music had quite some influence on the music of New Orleans, particularly jazz. Cuban musicians would regularly travel back and forth from Havana to New Orleans before the revolution (and the other way around).

They make it sound like they lost something. As in, if they wouldn't have been isolated it might have turned out better for the average Cuban.

It’s not certain that it would. But participation in the global economy is one way to get a country hooked on the economic crack that is the modern financial system. Once they’re hooked, economic sanctions (sometimes just the threat of them) are much more effective in achieving desired behavior.

Perhaps the point was that if we had remained involved in Cuba, they wouldn’t be stuck in the 1960s?

> A small country like Cuba could get by on tourism alone and do much better than they do now

Ye they could have done that if America hadn't enacted travel bans.

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