“I wanted to experience Communism firsthand.”
I had the opportunity to wander Eastern Europe for three weeks in the summer of 1992. After everything fell apart. Eastern Germany looked much like a postcard from 1972, and had stagnated there.
The east was an entirely different story. The cities were clean, and reasonably modern, but once you got into the countryside, where few westerners had been in decades, things changed DRAMATICLY.
Dirty, barely functioning trains and transit, and people still bring their crap out of the house in the morning in buckets, to dump.
I was shocked, but it taught me a lot. The worst, by far, was Slovenia.
There is an interesting report written by the Mexican Marxist economist, Juan F. de Noyola, who was invited to Cuba by Che Guevara.
Noyola, who had a large experience in Latin American economies having worked with the CEPAL, was put in charge of a group of foreigners planning the Cuba’s projects for industrialization as well as the study of the Cubans’ technical capabilities.
Noyola wrote: “Considering the supply of technicians and skilled labor, Cuba seems to be in much better position that other Latin American countries. In reference to skilled labor of a level inferior at those to the professional technicians, the level of literacy of the Cuban population is –in Latin American terms – rather high. There are only two countries in Latin American with a higher literacy, Argentina and Uruguay.
On the other hand, the Cuban worker, including those in agricultural activities, who constitute a great reserve of labor, have an educational elementary lever, but they are familiar with the modern techniques thanks to they contacts with sugar industry and the use of agricultural machines, something you don’t find in other countries.
The farmers in other Latin American countries, including those more developed, have a lower educational and technical level than the Cubans.
We are not comparing the Cuban workers with those in the highland of Peru; Bolivia or Mexico, even when compared with the Chilean farmer, the degree of familiarity with modern techniques of the less qualified Cuban laborer is remarkable. As a result, Cuba has a relative advantage in the training of its workers.” (Cuba Cenit and Eclipse” by Salvador Villa, pages 28, 29)
“In reference to the professional technicians, the problem, said Noyola, could have been grave, but the due to the unemployment of the 1930s and the high development of the Sugar industry it produced an excess of professionals in certain areas. For example, affirm Noyola, we find many Cuban physicians in United States; in South America it was brought to my attention that many of the big enterprises had Cuban accountants. Apparently, the unemployment problem and the fact that Cuba had an standard of living very high in the 1920s, allowed for a great sector of the population to have a high level of formal education, including at the university level” (Cuba Cenit and Eclipse” by Salvador Villa, page 29)
When Castro took over on January 1959, Cuba was a country rapidly developing with a solid economy and a well-educated population, a people with a high degree of self-reliance and entrepreneurial spirit.
Those traits have been proven everywhere they have had to settle in their quest for freedom after witnessing the ruin and brutal oppression imposed over the unfortunate people living under Castro’s totalitarian communist regime.