Under US embargo, not USSR.
Being permanently locked out of the most lucrative deals obviously is going to have an economic impact.
And I'm not sure I'll continue to reply to this thread. Somehow I find myself repeatedly defending the Cuban system, of which I am not a fan!
And again the embargo doesn’t stop most countries from trading with them. They could host tourists from Europe and do, but almost no one wants to go there. I know people who go regularly for various reasons and they have to bring food with them because there’s so little on the island due to their insane agricultural practices.
The Soviets were spectacular at chess; that doesn't make me pine for 1960s Moscow.
What could they possibly sell to the US? Even with endless Soviet support in the form of fuel, tractors, and agricultural experts they never produced as much food as the island did before the revolution.
The fact is that what little the government earns from trade they’ve always spent on exporting revolution. Cuban intelligence for example was helping run Venezuela’s SEBIN and secret prisons.
I’m shocked that people on hacker news defend a place that bans the internet, and locks up people for reading banned books.
You're confusing defending with pointing out objective fact. I don't have to like Cuba, it's current regime, or really anything about it to point out that acting like the state of it's economy and industry isn't massively shaped by the embargo is silly.
Hell, if it wasn't, then we could say the embargo is pointless and not having it's intended impact. We're not embargoing them just to go "Well, we at the United States of America think you guys suck." We're explicitly doing it to make them feel economic pain for their policies. It's a very strange conversation we're having where I am pointing out the embargo has worked and you're providing ethical justification for why we should embargo them but also ignoring the actual (desired!) outcome of the embargo.
In the 2000s China was buying hundreds of tons of sugar from Cuba but stopped because the Cuban government mismanaged production and couldn't meet agreed upon deliverables. There was also a steep decline in Chinese investment from 2017 to 2022 because euphemistically Cuba couldn't protect Chinese investment, or read another way the Cuban government kept stealing from the Chinese.
These failures are NOT BECAUSE OF THE EMBARGO.
> pointing out objective fact
It's not objective fact though. You're falling for Cuban propaganda.
To be clear I'd end the embargo tomorrow if I could, but it's crazy to think that it's what held Cuba back. I won't be lectured by someone who doesn't know anything about this topic.
You mean a small island nation didn't develop a massive trade relationship with a country on the other side of the planet when their closest neighbor embargoed them? Color me shocked. What did Cuba have to trade with Russia and co that would make it worth the cost to ship to the other side of the globe? Cigars? Produce that would no longer be fresh by the time it arrived?
> Other communist countries outside of the Soviet orbit like Vietnam also developed local industry and the ability export some agricultural products despite also not trading with the West for a long time, but Cuba's government couldn't muster the focus or ideological flexibility to do so. When most of the communist regimes reformed agriculture and small scale industry int he 1980s, Cuba refused and continued on its ruinous course. They only slightly limited the size of state run farms in the mid 1990s, but it still didn't yield sufficient results to feed the island.
You mean countries geographically located near ideological partners traded more heavily with those ideological partners than a country that wasn't? Also, nice to leave out the fact that their farming during the subsidy period was made possible by the USSR providing them with fertilizer - something that they could not produce locally and obviously makes a huge impact on farming efficiency and crop yields. So no, it's not surprising that their post-USSR attempts to improve farming struggled when lacking something as basic as fertilizer, much less all of the high technology innovations that have been pouring into farming since the 70s.
> These failures are NOT BECAUSE OF THE EMBARGO.
You continue to act like all of these happen without the context of decades of embargo and being cut off from their closest potential trading partner - that also happens to be the wealthiest nation in the world.
> To be clear I'd end the embargo tomorrow if I could, but it's crazy to think that it's what held Cuba back. I won't be lectured by someone who doesn't know anything about this topic.
You're posting on a public forum. You can ignore me, but as long as I'm following the rules, I can reply to your messages. So, uh, enjoy continuing to get "lectured," whatever you seem to think that actually means in this context.
Cuba can both be a shitty place with it's own issues and also be severely impacted by being embargoed for half a century. The UN estimates over 100b in economic damages. The US State Department in 1960 explicitly said the purpose of the embargo is to 'make the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.
If you think that Cuba would not be significantly better off from an economic perspective today without the embargo you're nuts. They can still be in a subpar position because of their own corruption issues, the fact that communism doesn't seem to actually work particularly well, etc. etc. - yet also be getting completely fucked by the fact that they can't trade with the US, that ships docking in the country can't dock in the US for 6 months after, etc.