Castro steps down

Mystified

I have been scratching my head over the Cuba situation for years (not that I'm any expert or anything).  

We don't like the communist Soviets, so despite the arms race we still engage in diplomacy.

We don't like the communist Chinese, so we funnel unimaginable amounts of money to their state controlled companie, apparently in the hope of making them the capitalists they are slowly becoming.

We don't like the communist Cubans, who sit 90 miles off our coast, so we become the ONLY industrialized democracy to cut them off completely.

It's just bizarre to me.  Why not engage with them and flood the island with our tourism money?  Wouldn't that change things?

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by: SuburbanHomo @ Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 07:58:10 AM CST

Yes there would be change.

The folks in Cuba would live a lot better. Castro would still rule and corporates would have little chance of pulling the crap that they pull in the rest of the world. Hence it's regime change that is needed.

Got to open them up to the good ole free market enslavement economy. Get those Cubans into McMansions that are mortgaged to the eyeballs. No good being friendly if they wont let you run there country for them is there?

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by: Carbonchild @ Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 09:27:40 AM CST

[ Parent ]

Regime Change

I agree we need to get rid of the Castro Cabal. (Of course, we need to get rid of the Bush cabal, too, but different topic ;-) )  My point is that our 50 years or so of boycotting the island clearly has NOT changed things.  Nothing like sticking to a policy that has failed for so long.  Much like our North Korea policy.

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by: SuburbanHomo @ Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 09:57:21 AM CST

[ Parent ]

I agree we need to get rid of the Castro Cabal.

Not at all. THEY need to get rid of the Castro cabal. We need to mind our own business and interact fairly in regards to trade and economics. A good way would be to open travel and let Cubans open tourist opportunities etc. Anyone who has been there will tell that food on the table trumps democracy everytime. They would work it out eventually on there own without B52's delivering democracy.

As for Bush, you nice folks need to excise that cancer before he gets around to his next excellent adventure and we allarrive in the stone age.

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by: Carbonchild @ Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 10:13:24 AM CST

[ Parent ]

And not to mention our drug policy.

In fact, do we have any policy that is successful?

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by: konagod @ Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 11:32:00 AM CST

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I can name one

Our policy of propping up brutal middle eastern oligarchies (reads as: "the Saudi royal family") in order to protect OPEC's control over the world's oil supply is working just fine.

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by: SuburbanHomo @ Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 12:23:03 PM CST

[ Parent ]

The USA is VERY happy to play ball with communists

...all over the world; particularly China. Indeed, the US has funded the Chinese ascent almost single-handed without trying to impose the slightest intervention in centralized party rule. They delude themselves that market forces alone will intervene in totalitarian communism and prompt democracy. This is ludicrous. with a fully-fledged centralized state in place, capitalist free-markets can only lead to one possible outcome, particularly if any fuel crisis or economic disaster acts as a catalyst.

Fascism. Extreme centralized power, a sense of desperation, a vast industrial complex, a large restless military and an elite determined to cling to power funded by corporations is, by definition, fascism. A nd that is what we have, in Putin's Russia and in the China of the future. Maybe even in the America of the very near future (though you are administratively still an unruly federal association and may be safe for a while.

Cuba's communism seems very benign by comparison. Castro's entire reign of terror probably amounts to one month of Chinese executions.

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by: steerpike66 @ Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 15:14:31 PM CST

[ Parent ]

PS: communism is easy to maintain

when you have a huge militarized state and a secret police. A large component of Castro's political longevity, immune to the attacks from exiles and all the power of the US for fifty years (an impossible achievement, really and worthy of respect from the most anti-communist spectator) has been the relative integrity of the Cuban people. Their consent. You may not like it but it is unthinkable that Fidel stayed in place through terrorism. They supported him. They still do. they have longer live-spans than you do.

Life-span is a unanswerable index of social health; you can't live long without good food, social cohesion, decent medicine and a sense of psychic pride and strength. They must have it. QED.

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by: steerpike66 @ Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 15:20:19 PM CST

[ Parent ]

Check your numbers, steer.

In the first few years of his reign, Castro and his government, and in particular Raúl, who was in charge of such things, executed tens of thousands of people, surpassing the number of executions in former dictator Batista's seven-year tyranny.  That's not benign in my book.  Comparing it to China, with its anti-gay pogroms among other things, may make it look good, but it's a huge number of executions given the population of Cuba.

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by: Tomistocles @ Wed Feb 20, 2008 at 06:02:38 AM CST

[ Parent ]

I'm not here to glorify Fidel

Press and internet freedom, false imprisonment: that is all absolute crap in Cuba. But it seems to be consensual crap. That's all.

And the tens of thousands killed? 'Collateral damage'  The revolutionaries might say, or the US army for that matter. the fact that Che and Castro won against Batista and US, and continued winning for fifty years, even after the end of the Cold War, is proof enough.

Yes he may be a psychopath, as may have Che, but they were and are popular. That is my only point.

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by: steerpike66 @ Wed Feb 20, 2008 at 09:15:02 AM CST

[ Parent ]

"consensual crap"?

I'm not interested in being sucked into the capitalism versus communism debate.  But, please, please, please:  calling 49 years of one-man dictatorship (soon to be passed on to another male in the family) as "consensual" by the population is an incredible statement.

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by: Pollyanna @ Wed Feb 20, 2008 at 14:40:38 PM CST

[ Parent ]

And please don't use the word pogrom out of context

A pogrom is an organized riot, massacre or social war, not a continuous low-level campaign of repression. Kristallnacht was a pogrom.

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by: steerpike66 @ Wed Feb 20, 2008 at 09:17:16 AM CST

[ Parent ]

No, steer, I'm not referring to oppression in general,

I'm referring to roundups of gays and a massacre that followed  during a demonstration in Shanghai.  It was like Kristallnacht in its swiftness and thoroughness, if not in numbers or stealth.

For that matter, Castro went through several roundups of gays in bars in Havana, just to harass them and 'clean up' the city, not to kill them.  Then he met with opposition among his own people, writers and movie stars, so he eased up.  In one of the roundups he picked up Almodóvar and a Latin-American writer whose name I forget, and that was an international embarrassment.  After that they stopped harassing gays.  Recently, now that they don't have to follow the outmoded Soviet Union style and can think for themselves, they have made a big turnaround and toyed with civil unions...

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by: Tomistocles @ Wed Feb 20, 2008 at 12:58:08 PM CST

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And I'm not very respectful of the numbers game

when it come to human rights violations; just because China has more people doesn't make the illegal murder of one innocent Chinese any less awful. Proportionally speaking, a murder is a murder.

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by: steerpike66 @ Wed Feb 20, 2008 at 09:19:13 AM CST

[ Parent ]

You are not changing the Chinese into capitalists

In  the sense of free-market capitalists. What is the point of a free market if freedom only extends to markets and not to people. Are markets the ONLY things to be set free. The most free market would sell drugs, child-porn and humans; since the people would be just produce; the markets would still be free. What we are talking about is fascism (which Mussolini said should properly be called corporatism; the rule of corporate power over individual freedom). The State is free. The agents that control the state are free. The people are watched, enslaved, bought, sold, tortured, fired, demeaned and discarded.  

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by: steerpike66 @ Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 15:28:44 PM CST

[ Parent ]

All good points

Can't really say I disagree with any of it, steerpike.

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by: SuburbanHomo @ Tue Feb 19, 2008 at 21:05:49 PM CST

[ Parent ]