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Comment by catlikesshrimp | Hacker News Reader

What can Cuba offer? Same problem with Haiti, what can Haiti offer? Not even China seems interested in paying peanuts for them (The way they are buying Nicaragua and Venezuela)

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Cuba's exports are $2B, Haiti's exports are $63M. They are a little different.

Did you ask AI about Haiti's exports. 63M might be a monthly average of some year. I think they are higher than $1B

Did the same AI tell you about Cuban exports? At least $2B is in the same ballpark, but definitely lower.

You're right, the haiti numbers were way off.

According to Haiti's Central Bank, total goods exports in 2022 were 1.07 Billion. GDP per capita estimated at $1,748.3 USD. [1]

Cuba is harder to pin down. OEC says they had 1.07 Billion in goods exports in 2022[2], whereas the WTO puts it around 2+ Billion[3]. The World Bank puts GDP per capita at 9,499.6 in 2020 (a bad year)[4], but Cuba doesn't really have a GDP and it changed its monetary system in 2021, so an economist who specializes in Cuba should weigh in here.

But in general, even with the lack of transparency on the Cuban economy, it's quite clear that with Haiti's complete breakdown of government and its historically low GDP per capita, Cuba and its people are in a much healthier economic state and are a much more attractive trading/business partner than Haiti.

[1] https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/haiti-market... [2] https://oec.world/en/profile/country/cub [3] https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/countries_e/cuba_e.htm [4] https://data.worldbank.org/country/cuba

Their main economic source was tourism which US has successfully strangled (rolling back the relaxation from Obama era)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/travellers-visited-cuba-last-11-1...

They have a lot to offer.

Why don’t we let the markets decide?

I hear their cigars are pretty good

Cuba is a pretty popular tourist destination, if nothing else. Cigars and rum are pretty big exports too. Definitely in another league compared to Haiti, as even communism beats anarchy.

What could communist Poland of late 80s offer? It’s a shame that USA cannot help their neighborhood into a better economic position.

Poland's economic success has more to do with the collapse of the USSR than any US', or any other particular nation's intervention

I’d say that NATO and EU membership helped. Note that there are many other countries that fell out of the Soviet sphere of influence and didn’t share the same level of success.

They can offer being humans.

That's not what you should give away in exchange for something.

But being human is indeed valuable in a purely utilitarian economic sense, too: it's a prerequisite to being able to teach machines. Services like the more and more elaborate marking / description of data sets are often outsourced to countries that have low-cost labor. It's intellectual work, in a sense.

Unrelated to your current comment, but you mentioned "I let promises of being a millionaire working for a start-up drive me to eating shit for well over ten years...All it cost me was the prime of my life..." [1]

I'm in college and looking to work for a startup when I graduate. I want experience, I want to learn about what building a company is really like - because I have ambitions of starting my own. Your comment felt to me very raw and real, and I'd love to talk more about your experiences working for startups.

And if these comment threads are insufficient, please feel free to contact me at ruchirkavulli[at]gmail[.]com

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39022547

quality medical care

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