Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjaleshire | Hacker News Reader

Castro annihilated the land-owning middle class in the first years of his premiership [1], using the same playbook as Lenin wrt the Kulaks after the October revolution [2]: do away with the financially and thus politically independent asap.

Cuba consistently required Soviet subsidies to survive through the end of the 20th century [3]. That's all gone now.

[1] http://revolutions.truman.edu/cuba/aboutme.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Period

View on HN

Before Castro took over, almost half of all agricultural land in Cuba was owned by US businesses.

The agricultural workers almost all lived in shacks without power or plumbing.

There's a reason Castro was so popular at the time.

In exchange, Castro offered long term bonds, but I don't think anyone accepted.

And yet, you look at Hawaii, what was in a very similar situation, and a very different scenario occurred during the last century.

Pretty sure if you offered Hawaiians and Cubans the possibility to switch places, many Cubans would want to do it, but not many Hawaiians!

I don't see what's your point, that the US should invade Cuba against the will of their residents and incorporate it as the 52nd state so that eventually 50 years later the kids of the current generation may be favourable to it?

Now you're just shifting goal posts into absurdity and dodging the central point of the previous response, which isn't that the U.S should invade Cuba because of its awful, repressive, impoverishing government, but that despite all sorts of excuses for how Cuba was "saved" from U.S exploitation by the Castro regime, that regime still mismanaged it terribly in fundamental ways. Had the Cubans stuck to the sort of government that existed before Castro 8and it definitely was a corrupt, repressive government as well), they'd still have been better off by now due to evolving economic changes and entry into the wider open markets of the world.

More accurately, Cuba traded with the Soviet Union and received food in exchange for its exports. I don't think Cuba was ever fully self-sufficient in food before, either.

Other than that you are correct about land reform in Cuba.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com