Cuba slashes size of daily bread ration as ingredients run thin
reuters.com
reuters.com
People have been harvesting fish from the ocean for thousands of years. They have been making bread for even longer.
Sanctions are not why Cuban's aren't able to eat. Cuba can and does trade with the rest of the world.
Cuban's can't eat because of how poorly their government allocates resources. This is the problem with all centrally planned economies - they eventually stop being run well.
It’s astonishing the amount of excuses people give for the extremely corrupt, dysfunctional, and undemocratic Cuban government.
It's shocking the lack of credit you're extending to the decade's long embargo for doing it's job of keeping Cuba poor.
Still, plenty of it out there, at this point it's more due to local disfunction more than anything.
Also, of course the extra effort that go to constrained sectors can't be expended for food production.
And a lot of the world follows US sanctions.
Calling "commies bad" is oversimplifying the situation. Ps China is a centrally planned economy that is the biggest in the world now.
But really the US should stop these sanctions. It's crazy that they still exist.
"From 1978 and for three decades afterward, China moved from central planning and autarky to a market-oriented economy."
I have heard from some Cubans they would love to see the embargo lifted just to expose how many of the problems are created by the government/army.
There's also the fact that it's far cheaper to ship goods to Cuba from the US then it is to ship goods from Europe or China. This means that even if they can buy some goods, they're often much more expensive then it needs to be.
The origin of the sanctions goes back decades, to Cuba's land reform, where the government took back land from private corporations, such as United Fruit Company, who then lobbied the US to go after Cuba on their behalf.
The United States has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba… Despite the existence of the embargo, Cuba can, and does, conduct international trade with many countries, including many U.S. allies; however, U.S.-based companies, and companies that do business with the U.S., which trade in Cuba do so at the risk of U.S. sanctions.
Cuba was settled 6,000 years ago according to Wikipedia - long before importing goods was even a concept. They did not, and still should not need to import anything to feed their population. The resources are misappropriated by their government - it's that simple.
Cuban's rely on the government to ration/provide ingredients to make bread. And just like the USSR, the government eventually fails to provide and the population - who became entirely dependent on the government - are left with no alternative means to support themselves. It's a tragedy that has bestowed damn near every single communist nation that has ever existed.
There is no valid excuse for not being able to make enough bread.
Of course they can't make competitive CPUs. That's perfectly understandable. But provide ingredients for bread?
Growing a little grain is possible with ancient technology, but a lot of people starved back then, as they do now when agriculture is practiced without oil, pesticides, herbicides and advanced (keeping in step with population growth) machinery.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Winter_W...
20 LOOT the economy.
30 ANNOY the US enough to get sanctioned.
40 BLAME every economic problem on US sanctions.
50 GOTO 20
Cuba is an island nation that has full political and trade relations with industrialized countries around the world. Plenty of other island nations have no trouble in their agriculture sector. Cuba's inability to make their economy work has everything to do with their lack of democracy and excess of Marxism, and nothing to do with their neighbor, the US. We have seen food shortages after Marxist takeovers pretty much everywhere that has suffered that fate.
Wheat simply does not grow in the tropics (though as I pointed out elsewhere, the Brasilians are developing this).
This is echoed by contemporary left-wing thinking in "the West." Small business is often championed while "big pharma", "big tech", "banking" and other industry giants are derided and viewed as shady at best, criminal at worst (note I'm not calling all left-wingers communists! I'm just saying that this dichotomy in left-wing thought is very common... heck, it's even common among many right-wingers).
I'm not defending communism by saying that, while "black markets" undoubtedly exist, small trade is not typically looked at as "black market capitalism." As I understand it the idea isn't to prohibit trade itself but to "control the means of production" in an attempt to achieve prosperity by removing the profit motive from industry.
- North Korea
- Cuba
Three communist and socialist countries with starving populations.
North Korea trades freely and shares a border with China. Venezuela has no sanctions applied to it by the US.
We can now easily rule out sanctions as the cause of their woes so what is the other common factor between these countries?
Actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_during_the_Venezuela...
We actually have a really nice unintentional experiment. The Biden administration removed sanctions from Venezuela, they still had starvation after sanctions were removed.
The dictator managed to get food while the country was starving however: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDebIITJ1x0
My theory is that it's all about everyone trying to preserve their position instead of everyone giving up a little bit of what they have to increase the wealth of everybody including themselves.
A few years back just before the death of Fidel Castro I went to 2 weeks vacation in Cuba and tried to steer clear from the main tourist attractions and came to the conclusion that there are 3 types of people in Cuba: Those who have access to tourists, those who have access to the government and the rest. I wouldn't claim that I understand Cuba just from two weeks being there but I lived in quite functioning and quite dysfunctional countries and IMHO there's a pattern and the pattern is about how much people believe in the social contract. This fundamentally defines their behavior, game theory, I think.
Land reforms decreased Zimbabwe's productivity somewhat but more importantly other regions have become massively more productive with wheat and corn production on the continent increasing 4x over the last 60 or so years.
So they aren't and weren't ever really a "breadbasket". It's just everywhere else was largely unproductive and those regions have now caught up.
Wasn't there a case I vaguely remember from the British empire though when they loaded ships from what was then Rhodesia with grain and dumped it in the ocean, to stop prices falling through the floor (while, in other parts of the empire, people where still starving)?
"Effect of the U.S. Embargo and Economic Decline on Health in Cuba" (PDF). Annals of Internal Medicine. 132 (2): 151–4. doi:10.7326/0003-4819-132-2-200001180-00010
Kirkpatrick, Anthony F. (November 30, 1996). "Role of the USA in shortage of food and medicine in Cuba" (PDF). No. 348. The Lancet. pp. 1489–1491
https://oec.world/en/profile/country/cub?yearlyTradeFlowSele...
That’s such a tiny amount of bread, what even is the point??
> For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.
If you actually read the article, this is about Cuba slashing its rations, aka, its government food assistance to people, during a time when incomes don't allow many individuals to buy enough on their own without assistance.
Look in the mirror. This is the same "austerity" behavior that western capitalist countries have been doing for years to the cheers of right wing supporters.
- North Korea
- Cuba
Three communist and socialist countries with starving populations.
North Korea trades freely and shares a border with China. Venezuela has no sanctions applied to it by the US.
We can now easily rule out sanctions as the cause of their woes so what is the other common factor between these countries?
At the end of the day, I don't understand why those countries aren't allowed to be independant.
I think you don't understand how the scientific method works.
Venezuela had sanctions removed, they still starved. North Korea trades directly with the massive economy of China, the people are still starving and poor.
The problem is communism and socialism, not sanctions. Stop being a stooge for dictators.
Regarding starvation, it happened under capitalist, slavery-based and feudal regimes aswell. One recent example is how the very capitalistic UK engineered a terrible famine that nearly killed 200mio Indians. For most of the western world, Churchill was very much a saviour, but for Indians, he was a brutal dictator.
If you lived in a low-performing socialist country, I guess it's tough to blame you. But keep in mind that socialism, like any democratic experiment, is different based on the country's initial historic and material conditions.
One can pin point at China, a high performing democratic experiment and say they are doing fairly well, "despite" being a socialist Republic.
However I'm curious what you refer as "horrors" of communism.
Mass starvation and murders to start.
Oh but I forgot, when we do it, we are the good guys. My bad.
Unlike in communist countries where famine occurs because there’s literally not enough food to go around.
No offense, but it seems you’re trolling with the way you bring up unrelated points.
Also war blockades are illegal, but again, when the west does it, its fine. With such mentality, no wonders they hate us.
Kim Jong Un Executes Officials Over Deadly Floods in North Korea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxLLk90i-Ek&t=2s
Next month there will be news how North Koreans are eating their own children with comically large spoons and y'all are gonna fall for it.
"There can be no freedom of the individual, no democracy, without the capital system, the profit system, the private enterprise system"