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How else will tankies pretend that Cuba is a place worth living? Maintain the sham, you cowards.

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The crazy thing to me in the article was that 3% of the country’s population escaped to the US last year. I’m sure all of the communist apologists are like “this is fine.”

> Many of an estimated 300,000 Cubans who left for the United States last year - nearly 3% of the island's population - remain on the voting rolls, he said.

Holy shit is this accurate? I figured it was a few thousand, that’s insane.

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There’s no way that’s accurate. The U.S. has about 1 million immigrants annually and Mexico is the biggest source of immigrants to the U.S.

Lots of tankies on Reddit don’t realize how much of a shithole Cuba is. It’s somewhere between North Korea and China in terms of human rights abuses/standard of living.

Asylum vs immigrant calculated differently I guess?

^ My best friend growing up was Cuban. And the US tracks legal vs illegal immigration separately.

700k immigrated to the US legally last year.

300k were intercepted at the border after coming through Honduras. Biden revoked their exception to immigration limits in January because of the wave

Sieze the means motherfucker.

You’ll usually get some Canadians who’ve been to Varadero and did a bus tour of Havana preaching about how nice it is.

The funny thing is, they really don’t need much to raise the standard of living, but their government is just retardedly incompetent. The US embargo is no excuse when everybody else can trade with them.

I've had people on reddit unironically argue that Cuba is basically a utopia and that the healthcare there is the best in the world.

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the embargo extends to other corporations (foreign) doing business in Cuba. If a for example German Company worked in Cuba, they would be barred from trade in the USA for a decent amount of time. Tell me if I'm wrong.

The main problem is that people like you are unaware of anarchism. You have fallen for the Bolsheviks' propaganda that what they were doing is communism.

We can have a discussion on the merits of these systems but it seems most reactionary are wilfully locked in "they said they are socialist/communist therefore they are" as if the only requirement for these systems is that you self identify as such and never mind about changing anything.

Another deeply stupid idea that is widely accepted by these people which I am sure is profoundly insincere, is the idea that government ownership of companies results in socialism/communism and ownership of companies by private individuals is capitalism.

This gross oversimplification misses the point that if the material conditions of the workers remain the same, you just changed one capitalist boss for another. If tomorrow the company I work for is sold or taken over by the government, nothing really would change for me.

If we can have those two points clear, then we can have an honest discussion about socialism/communism. Or we can just throw feces at each other in typical Reddit fashion.

Yeah, they have been under embargo for 50+ years, but the experts on Reddit go "if they just pulled themselves by their bootstraps".

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My personal theory is that Cuba’s economy would be as strong or stronger than China (per capita, of course) if it weren’t for the embargo. Cubans have a very high level of university education attainment, even higher than the USA, and much higher than China. With solid tourism and good access to the US markets, Cuba could have been an economic powerhouse.

Whenever the State Department sets their cap for annual refugees, they earmark 50% or more of the Latin American applicants just for Cuba. This to ensure that they can be used as a Cold War talking point and that the majority of refugees fleeing from US backed states like Honduras, Guatemala or El Salvador don't come in such large numbers to influence US anti-communist foreign policy goals even though these countries have around 600,000 people trying to escape from these narco-states.

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I see you have chosen the throwing feces route.

All of your questions have reasonable answers, but to be honest your comment comes across as unhinged and confrontational. That puts me off from continuing to respond to you.

Ending the embargo would drag Cuba kicking and screaming into Capitalism. I guess we haven't learned anything in the past 50yrs.

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What 60 years of blockade does to a dude

Would be more surprising if it wasn’t a shithole

Clearly it worked out great for Cuba. /s

That just sounds like an overwrought way of saying “real communism has never been tried.”

Some people can only argue this subject by falling prey to the two points I made.

Which is pointless, time consuming, annoying, when they don't listen. Kind of what you are doing right now.

Somewhere in between. The law is called the helms-burton act and it’s pretty easy to circumvent. But Cuban beaucracy still gets in the way

If that was the case, they would have at least been able to optimize agriculture and feed their people.

I agree with your theory under ideal circumstances and disagree with the US embargo. But the current government there is also a clusterfuck of incompetence.

I generally get what you're saying; that when the government seizes the means of production and runs it for the benefit of themselves and their cronies, that's really no different than capitalists owning the means of production, and that isn't how communism is supposed to work. In its true manifestation it would be largely stateless. So you're saying that I'm arguing in bad faith when I attribute the conditions of Cuba or say the former USSR to communism.

However I think its equally bad faith to always resort to that argument any time the outcome of an example of communism is examined. If it was possible to implement an ideologically pure version of communism successfully, someone, somewhere, would have have done it in the past 175 years.

Now this is something I can work with.

Thanks for letting me know your thought process.

The reason why you can't examine an example of communism is because it was conceived as an utopian ideal society, therefore there could never be any examples of it in reality.

I think we are both in agreement that communism cannot be implemented. I also think we are in agreement that government tyranny is a bad thing. Putting those two things together, we can conclude that a government trying to achieve communism can only lead to disaster and that has more to do with the inherent tyranny of the government than with the idea itself.

However, there is one point I would like to raise. Socialism, unlike communism, can actually be implemented. A society based on cooperation instead of competition. Catalonia was an example of a successful yet short lived socialist society. I would argue that anthropologically speaking that has been the norm throughout history. The system brought about by capitalism is what is unnatural. Where workers are alienated from themselves and their work.

Why wouldn’t we put economic repercussions on a regime that practices horrible human rights violations?

I think the incompetence of the government would prevent that

Didn’t Catalonia last for like 4 months under that economic system? I’m skeptical because I’ve never seen an example of a strictly socialist economy working. Mixed economies, sure, but not full blown socialist.

Oof

It lasted 3 years. There are plenty of accounts of the situation there if you are interested in the history.

I’ll read up on it. I’m a political scientist but will admit have not studied that specific period extensively.

This is bullshit, if that was the case, the US would have embargoed half the world today.

Where else do you think we should put sanctions for human rights violations?

We'll, let's begin with Saudi Arabia, and then we can continue down the list.

But the point here is that Cuba is under embargo, not just some economic sanctions, which means that their economy is severely isolated from the rest of the world. Their government may be garbage, but no government anywhere could have made a significant difference in a situation like this.

75 deaths per 100,000 people versus 452 for the US? They handled the pandemic much better than we did

I saw people arguing why Cubans who left their county opinions and experiences are invalid, and why those Redditors, living comfortably in some first world country, know better.

I even had people telling me that my accounts of growing up in Eastern Europe are skewed by Western propaganda.

More like “what 60 years of attempted communism does to a dude”.

Anarcho-syndicalism and communism are different things, though both equally nonsensical.

I never said they were the same thing. I highly doubt you have any reasonable argument for why anarcho syndicalism is nonsensical.

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It’s the same argument you see people make for anarcho-capitalism. Same issues, only that socialists are afraid of admitting that anarchy in general simply doesn’t work (on a scale that would represent modern countries).

First off, how do you prevent people from returning to a capitalist society, forming their own states or even ensure the core idea of equal distribution? What do you do when some start working more, produce desirable items and thus accumulate more wealth than others? As soon as you start using force to prevent these things, you’ve created a state and are back to square one.

Anarchy is only feasible amongst likeminded people, but the broader society is anything but likeminded. So the solution to this issue usually is “educating” the people (which doesn’t work, as Atatürk’s failed attempt of educating his country in liberal democracy demonstrated) or killing them (which I unironically saw being suggested here on Reddit), since that’s somehow “the lesser evil”?!

Where else besides Saudi Arabia?

>First off, how do you prevent people from returning to a capitalist society, forming their own states or even ensure the core idea of equal distribution?

By virtue of people having better lives. They won't want to go back to wage slavery.

>What do you do when some start working more, produce desirable items and thus accumulate more wealth than others?

Nothing. You are free to accumulate as much wealth as you want.

If these answers were not the ones you've expected, may I suggest for your own personal edification and intellectual nourishment to go and read as much as possible with regards to anarcho syndicalism.

You seem to be operating under a series of misconceptions.

With countries like Cuba the official numbers are crap, look at the excess deaths numbers, which was 550 per 100k for Cuba.

Worse than the US.

They just lied! lol