Posted on 11/27/2016 3:34:29 AM PST by Rummyfan
Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 science-fiction film Elysium, starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, takes place in Los Angeles, circa 2154. The wealthy have moved into an orbiting luxury satellite—the Elysium of the title—while the wretched majority of humans remain in squalor on Earth. The film works passably as an allegory for its director’s native South Africa, where racial apartheid was enforced for nearly 50 years, but it’s a rather cartoonish vision of the American future. Some critics panned the film for pushing a socialist message. Elysium’s dystopian world, however, is a near-perfect metaphor for an actually existing socialist nation just 90 miles from Florida.
I’ve always wanted to visit Cuba—not because I’m nostalgic for a botched utopian fantasy but because I wanted to experience Communism firsthand. When I finally got my chance several months ago, I was startled to discover how much the Cuban reality lines up with Blomkamp’s dystopia. In Cuba, as in Elysium, a small group of economic and political elites live in a rarefied world high above the impoverished masses. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, would be appalled by the misery endured by Cuba’s ordinary citizens and shocked by the relatively luxurious lifestyles of those who keep the poor down by force.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
In Cuba, every one lives on $20 a month.
Except there’s nothing to buy and even traveling within the country costs six months to a year’s wages.
And all the free stuff is only a reminder of what is lacking.
Che Guevera wanted to abolish currency altogether but Castro realized the economy would grind to a complete halt without some means of economic exchange so that insane idea was nixed.
But everything else implemented left Cuba worse off and the only thing worse there is the scale of the brutal repression of tiny freedom movements on the island.
Communism has its own logic - and because it wasn’t imposed by Soviet troops makes it feel like a parody of the Latin American caudillo state.
Only caudillos didn’t care what their people did as they long as they could steal the spoils. Castro cared about what people shouldn’t do and he still managed to steal from them.
Cuba is a country trapped in a time warp in more ways than one. Its like a world time has passed by in which nothing will change. That makes all the fulsome and disgusting international praise of Castro distant from the island’s real state of affairs.
Under socialism-communism the influential (government) become rich and powerful. Under capitalism, the rich are influential.
The bottom really fell out with the collapse of the USSR, which had heavily subsidized Cuba to hide the failure. When that spigot was turned off, we started receiving many Cubans who weren’t even political refugees - they were economic refugees, and some politicians wanted to change our policy towards them (where any that reached US soil could automatically stay) to reflect that.
Blaming the US was absurd because we had an embargo, not a blockade; the rest of the world could (and did) trade with Cuba, and they simply had nothing of value to make such trade beneficial to the average Cuban.
Some of those praising Castro today point to the healthcare and education; this may have been an improvement over the Batista government but hardly compensated for everything else they sacrificed (freedom & social mobility, for instance). Like Nigeria, they now have educated people who can only find work tilling fields...
Like I said, Communism is great as long as you have freedom.
No one with any intelligence actually wants to live under it.
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
The last Soviet ruler was an intelligent and by all accounts, a humane man.
He came to realize in the end the system could not survive without brutal repression.
When he had to make the choice between letting the system collapse and continuing with the brutal repression, he chose the former.
Someone else might have wanted to keep it going but it was clear to every one in the Soviet and East European Communist elite the writing was on the wall.
The idealism that motivated a lot of people in the the late 40s and early 50s completely evaporated by the late 80s. Faith in Communism was gone.
And the Cold War was history.
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.
I pointed that out to an American-Cuban. He looked like I had hit him with a board.
The narrative in Cuba is that their lack of ( fill in the necessity here ) was because of the US embargo.
He never questioned it even after living in the US for years. It was so deeply ingrained that it was like questioning the existence of God.
I pointed out that Canada, Mexico, Europe, almost every South American country traded with Cuba. There is nothing that they do not produce that is produced exclusively in the US.
So the idea that the US embargo is the cause of any lack in Cuba is a total lie.
After he got though being stunned he got very angry. Not that he had been lied to by the Cuban government, he expected that, but that the American media and schools pushed that narrative as well.
That’s right; OUR media lied to him.
I almost hated to disillusion him.
That’s a good point; as we were the “anti-Cuba”, he probably assumed we didn’t have liars in the media...
The idea that they would lie to make the US look worse does not make sense to him. Shouldn't they love their country and want their side to win?
It would sort of be like finding out that Ernie Pyle was sending back false reports of Japanese victories and US "war crimes". It is just unthinkable.
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