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Comment by EarthIsHome | Hacker News Reader

If communism and socialism is so bad, why is there even a need for an embargo? Surely these socialist countries will collapse under their own poor economic policies and not need a 60-year embargo to help tip the scales, which prevents them with interfacing with the rest of the world at the same level as other countries. This embargo that actively stifles their economy and is punitive to the people there is making things worse. If we wanted better for the Cuban people, the US would lift the embargo. After all, every year, the UN votes almost unanimously to lift the embargo (with the US only voting against).

This is somewhat related, but for those here who are interested in how local elections work in Cuba (they have 90+% participation!!!!), this is an excellent video on Cuban elections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aMsi-A56ds

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Cuba's main trading partners include Venezuela, China, Spain, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and the Netherlands.

https://www.docdroid.net/nGEFnWs/08-sector-externo-2019-cuba...

Page 9 to 17 to see their trading partners. It's in Spanish but I think it's understandable.

It comes from the ONEI website but access is tricy, so I uploaded it.

I mean it's pretty obvious to me where Cuba has to go for trade, and how to avoid US embargo.

> If communism and socialism is so bad, why is there even a need for an embargo?

Given that Cuba's regime was responsible for putting nuclear weapons next to the border and pointing straight to the US, and given the fact that a sizeable portion of the population of a swing state lived Cuba's oppression in the first person, only the most nieve can believe this has anything to do with ideology.

Events don't happen in a vacuum. The US placed missiles at the border of the USSR and pointed them at the USSR [0], and in response, the USSR placed missiles in Cuba. It was the US that provoked those missiles. These are responses to US aggression. Look at it from a historical perspective.

> In response to the presence of American Jupiter ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey, and the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion of 1961, Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev agreed to Cuba's request to place nuclear missiles on the island to deter a future invasion.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis

A bit of context to this factoid:

- The US backed a coup that put Fulgencio Batista in power

- Batista murdered over 20,000 Cubans (not my words, that's what John F. Kennedy said)

- Cubans were in horrific poverty exactly because of US policies

- When Cubans overthrew the dictator who was murdering them by the tens of thousands, the US attempted to invade them, the most likely aim being another US-backed dictatorship

The US embargo is purely sour grapes over losing access to a country's natural resources it wanted to exploit coupled with, as you point out, a dysfunction in the way US elections work. Pointing nukes at a ruthless, amoral enemy with vast resources was a perfectly valid reaction for Cuba given the context.

Batista feel because the US cut off arms supplies and withdrew its support. Obviously, they weren't aware that Fidel Castro was not just a typical rebel and would become one of the cruellest tyrants in recent history.

> The US backed a coup that put Fulgencio Batista in power Source? Not even Cuban propaganda have said that ever, read a little bit of history.

Given the US track record with coups in Latin America[1] in the 18th and 19th century, I would place the burden of proof on anyone claiming that a Latin American coup was not US-backed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

That's not how it works, before Batista's coup, the president was Prios Socarras, that had no beef with the US, I would say the opposite. Batista's coup, was an inside job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista#Military_cou...

> In 1952, Batista again ran for president. In a three-way race, Roberto Agramonte of the Orthodox Party led in all the polls, followed by Carlos Hevia of the Authentic Party. Batista's United Action coalition was running a distant third.

Batista was losing to a left-wing candidate, did a coup, and there was no election. Then he continued to support US corporate interests. This doesn't track at all with, you know, *gestures broadly at US intervention in Latin America* to you?

The problem was and is not in communism per se. It's the Cuban leadership policies that produced a lot of protests in the U.S., repeatedly. See the timeline.

https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-cuba-relations

I think most think communism is so bad that it's worth accelerating its collapse. As for the video, I don't want to hear about elections from a Marxist.

The argument would be that communism/socialism is not the root cause of the embargo rather it's a peripheral cause. The root cause is not incompetence on the part of the Cuban government but malice and while communism/socialism may be a red flag :-) for malice it's not why the embargo exists.

Now is that true? I don't know but I'd bet that's more or less what you'd hear from a supporter and the easiest move is to just take them at their word.

> Now is that true?

No. The root cause of the embargo is, manifestly, that the Cuban Revolution ousted American capital interests from the island and gave the preverbal finger to US economic hegemony. All else is secondary, after-the-fact justification. Broadly similar story for Iran. The US has proven time and again that it ultimately has little interest in things like democracy and freedom, but if you fuck with the money, woe be to you.

Communism and socialism are bad and have never worked anywhere because they are contrary to human nature and can only be implemented through corruption and force (often times escalating to violence).

Leftists always want to hold up places like Sweden as socialist success stories, but Sweden is a capitalist society. They tried socialism for 20 years, it was a dismal failure, so they pulled out.

Venezuela is an abject failure. North Korea is an abject failure. The USSR was an abject failure. China is a failure. New Zealand had a great GDP before going socialist and nearly bankrupting themselves. The list goes on and on and on. Sure, the US embargo against Cuba may have hurt the Cuban economy, but the people of Cuba wouldn't have benefitted if the embargo didn't exist. Any extra wealth would have gone to the ruling class, just like it always does.

How many failed runs do you have to have at communism and socialism before you admit it's a stupid idea and that Karl Marx was a megalomaniacal loser who destroyed his family in his pursuit of self-aggrandizement?

Regarding Cuban elections, you might want to talk to some Cubans about that.

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