Posted on 08/11/2015 7:25:42 AM PDT by fredericbastiat1
What is it about dictatorships that make Americans swoon?
Juxtaposing two recent articles published within 24 hours of each other on Cuba is instructive.
First, a Wall Street Journal article titled "Amid Thaw, First Authorized U.S. Yacht Sails to Cuba on Hopes of Travel Surge" reads:
The 78-foot Still Water docked in the marina late Wednesday after a four-hour jaunt. Aboard the sleek yacht were three crew and 12 passengers eager to see Cuba before the sharp economic and social change that many Americans expect to sweep the country as a long-frozen U.S.-Cuba relationship thaws. Some also hoped to sniff out business opportunities that such a transformation might spawn.Contrast this sunny view with what is actually happening on the island to non-apparitchiks:“Being born in the 50s and being indoctrinated the way we were, it’s interesting to be able to see this,” said 57-year-old passenger Jack McClurg, who manages his personal investments from Colorado and sails the Caribbean in his own 115-foot Italian-made yacht. “I’m just wanting to see this change happening.”
... Though Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro agreed in December to restore diplomatic relations between their countries, the trade embargo remains largely in effect. But officials and entrepreneurs in both countries are chipping at its edges, hoping to marry U.S. investors with Cuba’s hope to revive its economy.
“The genie of free enterprise is out of the bottle and it is a powerful genie,” Jose Viera, a retired senior Cuban diplomat, assured the yacht’s group in a private briefing. [Emphasis mine]
(Excerpt) Read more at benweingarten.com ...
Makes the Marxist media & Hollywood swoon.
Is anyone surprised? China has proven that a pseudo-capitalist state can work with a totalitarian regime, at least for awhile, so long as nobody tells the regime to stop mistreating their people.
But, let’s be clear. It is liberals who swoon. Many Americans are not fooled by the propaganda.
The best counter to communism is economics. It worked in the USSR, it is working in China, and it will work in Cuba.
I am all for normalizing relations with Cuba as it would help set them free, plus it is an amazing piece of real estate. Capitalism will dominate the place and displace communism.
IIRC current Cuban workers dealing with foreign visitors are still paid in worthless Cuban money. Foreign tourists had to exchange their money for Cuban.
Likely any industry that employs Cubans will pay wages to the Castro crime family which will trickle down useless change.
Before the USSR fall the Czechs sent tech workers abroad, took an employment agency cut from the employer and required payment from the worker. One of our architects explained this to me when caught skillfully doctoring copies of the W2 forms he was required to send back along with his prorated payment. Family back home held hostage to this payment. He fought the system the only way he could...a real artist. ;>)
Side bar note:
Recently revealed the late Hugo Chavez left more than four billion dollars in various accounts to his daughter. Jeff Spicolli declined to comment.
One thing I could never figure out about the so-called embargo was that the rest of the world was trading with Cuba, and we were the only country refusing to get on the bandwagon. If we were the only country not trading with them, but everybody else was, why is the country still an economic mess? Communists at the helm is why.
“Those who ignore history are dammed to repeat it” George Santayana.
China still is a repressive Communist regime even after adopting economic capitalism. In Russia the more it changes, the more it remains the same, Communists changed names by not their principles. The Russian bear has invaded Ukraine and is menacing to invade the Baltic countries in spite that they are part of NATO. Raul Castro assured to the useful idiots that in Cuba Communism is irreversible and increased the repression against the Cuban dissidents.
In May 2001 Fidel Castro during his visit to Iran addressed the Iranian students at University of Tehran that are chilling when read in light of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
According to news reports, during the visit Iranian Supreme Leader Khamenei “assured Castro that Iran and Cuba can defeat the U.S. hand in hand,” to which Castro agreed, adding that America was “extremely weak today,” and that “we are today eyewitness to their weakness, as their close neighbors.”
At Tehran University he stated to the thunderous applause of students and faculty, (AFP, May 10, 2001) proudly proclaimed that “Iran and Cuba reached the conclusion that together they can tear down the United States.” (IPS, May 10, 2001)
As an irony of history the words of Fidel Castro in May 2001 were prophetic, in the short period of 14 years, and at the time, we are witnessing an American president that dishonored the United States by unconditionally surrender to the two main sponsors of terrorist in the world, Iran and Cuba. Thanks to Obama’s treason, the American taxpayers will play the role of sugar daddy to keep afloat the Cuban Stalinist regime, a role played before by the Soviet Union and Venezuela that brought both of them to their bankruptcy.
You are obviously too young to remember the USSR when communism was in place and cannot possibly understand that what they have today is far better.
Certainly, the Russian are better that under Stalin, but undoubtedly far from being a status to be envied for.
In Cuba’s case we have indeed a brutal Stalinist regime frozen in time for over 56 years. Castro’s have killed and imprisoned more Cubans that during the worst of the Stalin terror era in relation to its population.
It is a fact that Castro has sent more than 20,000 Cubans to death at the “paredón” (firing squads) and that he is responsible for the death at sea of more than 40,000 men, women and children who fled the Cuban hell in fragile makeshift rafts preferring certain death at the Florida Straits rather than continue living in slavery. Castro is also responsible for the imprisonment and torture of over 500,000 Cubans (including children) during his 56 years of tyranny.
According to the best world authority in Cuba’s History, English scholar Hugh Thomas, referring to the Cuban tragedy, (The Spectator, 7/12/1986) he affirmed that: “The comparison must be with the account of Nazi concentration camps. Although there are yet no gas chambers in Cuba, there have been experiments of a criminal biological type designed to see how far an individual can survive starvation, beating, solitary confinement, and many various kinds of ill treatment. Valladares’ account of working in a stone quarry is not dissimilar to, and no more humane than, the many accounts extant of ‘life’ in Manthausen. Nor should one forget that the brutalities in Nazi Germany lasted at most 12 years and the gross cruelties in the Auschwitz camp continue for four years.”
It is despicable that Obama embraced and legitimized the most brutal tyranny in the history of this hemisphere, and a swore mortal enemy of U.S. that tried to nuke our cities and spread communist terrorism all around Latin America and Africa.
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