“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.”
In theory yes, in practice no.
The theories that they promoted were simply lies, used to trick more people into supporting their attempts to grab power.
Marx was a revolutionary first. He only started cooking up his now famous theories after he was expelled from Germany for plotting a takeover. He just wanted a story (narrative is the current trendy term) to peddle as propaganda, to incite revolution and gin up more support for his takeover.
The genius of Marx, his main innovation, was to make it seem moral to take other peoples’ stuff.
Historically, it was common to recruit mercenaries, pirates or coup plotters with a share of the spoils as incentive. But moral reprobates willing to sell their souls for silver were usually a minority in Christian societies. So he developed a bunch of doubletalk, that made it seem morally justified in some intellectually tortured way.
Communism never made economic sense. Marx’s “Das Capital”, which supposedly makes the economic case, is purposefully dense and difficult to read, but the the main objective points and data he used to support his argument in that book have since been shown to have been deliberate fraud. Pure sophistry.
It has always been just a sweet sounding lie, used to gain power - absolute power, for its own sake.
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