Cuba a progressive elites utopia, should be the headlines
I sometimes wonder about sentiments like that. Didn't Engels essentially continue to live off the family fortune? I know that there was a joke about the Trotskys making the revolutions but the Bronsteins paying the bills. 'Vows of poverty' seem pretty rare in socialist circles.
Mr. niteowl77
Thanks for posting. We had Cuban friends when we lived in NM in 1972-1986. They visited Cuba to help his father. It was bad then, but not this bad.
This makes me even more angry at the O_tard.
I think that's the appeal of socialism, and the main reason that so many leftists in America want it.
It is not enough to have personal wealth. It means little when there is a large middle class that isn't wealthy, yet lives comfortably. How can you bask in your wealth, in your obvious superiority, when the little people live almost as well as you? But when those little people are kept oppressed, when they can barely survive day to day because of extreme poverty--*that* is when the fruits of wealth taste very sweet. Your superiority is evident by the fact that you have opulent wealth while the masses are writhing in the mud. You have endless opportunity to show your generosity towards the unfortunate by throwing them a bread crust here, a penny candy there. You can spend whole days pondering how much you care about the unwashed rabble and exulting yourself for working so hard to make sure every person is equal and that there are no income disparities.
Indeed, socialism is good, for the elites at the top.
Stolen from a Star Trek TOS episode, “The Cloud Minders”
No, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels knew exactly what they were doing the same as today’s lib pols because they were already using their bilge to live off others without working a real job.
One more time: The primary beneficiary of a socialist program/policy is the socialist politician.
Cuba is missing a great opportunity in not recruiting all those Hollywood leftists who promised to leave the US if Trump were elected. Certainly they would just love to live in this socialist utopia. Why Cuba probably has the lowest carbon footprint on the planet with few cars, no air conditioning and limited electricity and thus is doing more to save the planet from climate change than any ther country except North Korea. According to Michael Moore, Cuban health care is better than in the US and of course free. Never mind those few Cuban malcontents who are willing to tie themselves to inner tubes and hope to cross 90 miles of open ocean to escape this paradise.
Cuba is two societies - one that foreigners and the Communist elite live in and one that the vast majority of Cubans live in. They are really worlds apart and foreigners seldom see the real Cuba and if they did they would be shocked at the extent of its misery and deprivation.
No one has ever convincingly explained why the regime’s touted achievements required a totalitarian state to keep every one down. And even those achievements are a lie since no one can dream of having a better life. The Communist regime’s monomaniacal insistence on absolute equality at all costs has prevented Cuba from advancing socially and materially.
Its not a place any one would want to live even for a short period of the time. And even the Communist regime’s leftist Western fellow travelers certainly don’t want to live there. Communism loses much of its appeal when there is no real freedom.
Let’s keep that in mind as the world mourns Fidel Castro in spite of the enormous suffering he inflicted on his own people and the devastation his regime wreaked upon the country. Even Cambodia’s Pol Pot did not seek to preserve his country as a living museum of man’s inhumanity to man. This is Cuba today in the aftermath of Castro.
The world’s indifference to Cuba’s fate is as much an indictment of it for failing to look beyond the Communist regime’s propaganda and doing real reporting to bring about needed change. Cubans, unlike East Germans, don’t have a free Cuba to compare their country to and the Communist regime has systemically deprived them of every means to rise up against it and overthrow it. A impoverished and brainwashed people are hardly in a position to know freedom.
At least where the US is concerned, we don’t have to legitimate this wretched state of affairs. We can reinstate the embargo and terminate our newly minted relations with the Communist regime. We should persuade our allies to cut off the hard dollar trade that keeps the country barely afloat. The Communist regime will only disappear when even the elite realize their fantasy of living better than every one else can no longer help them to justify the oppression of the rest of their fellow countrymen.
In a word, we didn’t compromise with apartheid in South Africa. And the last thing America should do is make the chains of Cuban slavery more manageable for the slave masters who run the island. Our policy should be to insist the Communist elite give up their absolute power to run their country like a gulag. We should insist on human freedom and democracy and this is the natural right of nearly every people on earth. Only then will Cuba’s long national Communist nightmare finally be over.
Interesting article...I think I’d rather vacation in Detroit than in Cuba...
I did.
Czechoslovakia in 1972.
Four years after the Prague Spring. We could still see the bullet holes in the walls of Vaslavske Namesti (Wenceslas Square).
Walking around it was like being trapped in a black and white TV show. Lifeless. Restaurants had menus with all sorts of things, but nothing to actually order: you went down the menu until you found something they had that day.
It was obvious to me that it would never last. Humans don't live like that: there was only sadness and paranoia.
I gave it 20 years back then. There was too much filtering in from the West: magazines, records, jeans...the Communist thugs tried to hold back the tide, but they could only do so much.
I was pretty much dead on. By 1992, it collapsed.
Cuba lasted far longer because of the complicity of the filthy elites in the United States and Europe. They nullified any attempt to gut the Cuban regime. And because as noted here, it devolved into a parody of a Caudillo state. No Caudillo bothers with using an absurd ideology to legitimize himself. He just oppresses because he is The Big Man.
The dissolute and depraved Hollywood and Washington "liberals" are the ones who gave Castro oxygen. It's their crime, their disaster that left 12 million in desperation. If GW Bush had had any of the moxie he postured as, he would have dumped Fidel in an hour and freed the Cubans from their jailers.
We can't even talk about garbage like Sean Penn, Bill Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama. They see "the little people" as just backs to stand on, so they become the Big Men.
bfl
I walked out of Elysium less than halfway through. I found the film’s plot incomprehensible.
Oh please!
You think that pair of mooches would be horrified by the behavior of the Cuban rulers?
The only thing that horrified those two was the prospect of having to get an honest job.