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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

Cuban GDP is actually the highest it's every been, thanks to the opening up of the tourism industry in the early 2000s and the introduction of direct foreign investment in 2018.

This isn't a money or embargo issue or even (directly) a communism issue. The current regime is simply incompetent: They don't have any expertise and refused to cooperate with other countries on developing their infrastructure. Venezuela's economy collapsed and Cuba was free loading on them. And Cuba has a bad reputation among other trade partners other countries want to trade with.

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The reason why communism is always destined to fail is because it cannot process large amounts of information from the market. It's like a single core CPU trying to run a large operating system with millions of processes and services. There has to be a decentralized system for markets to grow to the scale of a first world economy, it's the only way to handle that much information and as a consequence growth.

I’m curious why was this downvoted, sounds like an interesting idea to me.

Seems to be a reference to the debate on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem

Replace "communism" with "centralized economy" and I think you make a fair point about a single CPU.

Communism can be centralized or decentralized (see the early definition of "soviet", which was a local and decentralized council-based power structure, intentionally created to counteract centralized Czarist influence... how full circle we've come).

Communism tends to give rise to centralized committees controlling the economy, but so can fascism, or even relatively benign democratic organs like the EPA. Communism has other faults, unrelated to centralization. Notably, the removal of economic incentive, and its replacement with wishful thinking about man's higher instincts to donate personal time and effort to fellow man, doesn't align with reality in either a centralized or decentralized economy.

Communism will never work due to human ambition. There will be corruption, nobody will ever be equal. I have no opinion on who determines what other than corruption.

Cuba is full of rich and futile soil ripe for crops but the government owns the land and forbids it.

No system with humans will ever be perfect but communism doesn’t seem to be the answer.

Has it ever worked?

Some people seemed to have some ideas/visions about that, but failed to implement them:

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

Maybe some other people wanted them to fail, considering the time and place, and what else happened there in around that timeframe.

I kinda thought tourism would have been in the dumps since the US bans you from the visa waiver program just for visiting Cuba as of Jan 12, 2021 (a last breath by Trump after losing the election but not office).

That doesn’t impact Canadians, but Canadians aren’t going to Cuba as often as they used to.

There are still some flights to/from Russia, but it has to take the long route.

Maybe they get enough to make up for all that from South America.

Wikipedia tells all: Canada, the US, Italy, Germany, Russia, France and the UK are the top sources of tourists.

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

As of 2018

What does this mean? AFAICT, it's either a minor detail, hardly worth mentioning, or it implies that there have been notable changes since then. If you did intend to imply that, could you elaborate?

Canada is probably also in large part “the US” - there are no direct flights there from the US. Why we keep up this idiotic embargo is anyone’s guess.

Lots of Canada flies directly to Cuba (Halifax, Montreal, Toronto[0]). There are (or were?) some historical "can't use US airspace" rules about flights travelling there (so western Canada has to connect).

[0]: https://www.aircanada.com/en-ca/flights-from-canada-to-cuba

There’s only one direct flight and that’s from Miami with American Airlines.

You have a lot of research to do if you think the problem is the embargo.

Wasn’t aware there’s now a direct flight from Miami. I went there through Canada back in the day.

Actually there is also direct from Houston via United Airlines.

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