Formosa, now Taiwan, was an island like Cuba in natural resources and population in the 1950’s. In both countries the principal industry was the Sugar Cane production. Cuba was at that time a country in development with standards of living much higher than Taiwan, the rest of Latin America and also Europe, including Western Europe.
Taiwan took the capitalist road and Cuba in 1959 embraced communism. Very soon Taiwan was transformed in a developed and prosperous “first world” country. In the other hand, Cuba, under communism went from enjoying one of the highest levels of living before Castro, to compete with Haiti for the dishonorable place as the poorest country in Latin America, and what is even worse, thanks to the communist regime, the Cubans are the less free people in this hemisphere.
The results of imposing the communism in Cuba confirmed, once more, the superiority of capitalism over communism. We saw it in the split of Korea and Germany. In South Korea and West Germany capitalism promoted freedom and creation of wealth for all their people. In the communist North Korea and East Germany, in spite of that at the split of those country the communist side was the best developed, in both countries the communist utopia brought to its people only misery and brutal oppression.
Under capitalism the people of two cities, Singapore and Hong Kong, enjoy the freest economies in the world and also benefit from one of the highest standard of living.
As Spanish philosopher stated: “Those who ignore history are damned to repeat its errors.”
History repeats itself, Venezuela, a very rich country with great reserves of oil, was taken over by communists puppets of the Castro’s brothers, now is going bankrupt and its people are suffering the same lack of the most elementary staples of modern life, just as the Cuban people have been suffering for more than five decades.
Modern capitalism offers freedom and progress. Socialism, in all its forms, brings less freedom and more misery. It seems that many people in Latin America prefers to live under communist even though it only brings oppression and misery.