Castro is dead

[buys popcorn, sits back in anticipation]

Let’s hear for the urban vegetable gardens, and the family doctors, and the infant mortality rate that was lower than the USA’s.

Let’s give them and Castro credit for what they did right in the face of enormous opposition. It’s inspiring to me what they managed.

I’m not from the US, so have no axe to grind, and don’t think Castro was a particularly egregious ‘leader’ – but neither was Honecker and the GDR was still a pretty awful place to live, healthcare etc. notwithstanding. So I find this praise for Castro rather puzzling and slightly degoutant as it tends to paper over the many petty human rights abuses and denials of basic freedoms (movement, speech, development etc. ) – if you have to deny people, until very recently, the right to leave, maybe you’re doing something wrong.

There’s far too little space on this blog discuss the list of actions prohibited by the dictatorship on the island of Cuba for the last fifty years: start a newspaper, form a movie company, open a bookstore, import magazines and educational materials from other nations, travel freely, publish and teach without fear of persecution…every single person – man, woman, and child born on the island over last fifty years a captive of a totalitarian state…

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-36375807

“Of course”!

@Tim Worstall, too right! Time we lifted that blockade of Puerto Rico and see what they can really accomplish.

@David, where is this immaculately conceived nation?

Last I heard, Puerto Rico was drowning in debt and trying to declare bankruptcy. A real capitalist success story, I guess.

Fidel was one of history’s great heroes. He will be fondly remembered by the Cuban people whom he served.

Brad DeLong has already made a post referring to your 2008 post, and critical of it. Lol.

Castro is Paul Kagame plus 50 years. Same dictator deposition, same dictatorship, same rising living standards, same intervention in African civil wars on probably the right side.

As we saw with the latest US election, apparently the bar for political leaders is set mighty low as long as they hate the right people.

Sam T-H
Castro is Paul Kagame plus 50 years. Same dictator [disposition], same dictatorship, same rising living standards, same intervention in African civil wars

But, among other things, different economic models, no?

Hasta siempre, comandante.

The outcome of the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962, showed that the ruling class of the US could do pretty much as it pleased with Cuba. Given the violence which they have chosen to visit upon other countries, much larger and much further away, including millions of civilian deaths and other casualties, it seems that they could have removed Castro and company if they had wished to. The Soviet Union was even good enough to supply an irrefutable casus belli. So why didn’t they, if Castro stuck in their craw?

nick s @ 26

even if you want to make a ‘best of all possible worlds’ argument, one only needs to provide a counterfactual case with Castro, but running a state to provide much better opportunities and outcomes than he actually did.

And if you still think that the actual result was the best possible (via a ‘best of all possible dictators’ line of reasoning?), then I’d say you have provided the perfect argument against revolution and totalitarianism in general.

Thanks Dave.
I too think trying to be judgmental and ledgerbound in our thinking is problematical. He was what he was, and the times were what they were. We should study history without the straightjacket of our current obsessions.

Now clearly the missile crisis exposed tri-partite recklessness, which nearly lead to a disaster orders of magnitude greater than the issue of the day. Since then Castro was able to use the hostility of the USA as legitimization of his regime. Now that he has passed -and not just retired, I hope that our opening up can continue, although I suspect Trump may try to undo it.

“The US blockade cannot be used as an excuse.”

This is an arbitrary and too-convenient rule. The embargo is clearly a factor in the impoverishment of Cuba, and ruling it out as a factor for ideological reasons is just hand-waving. If you’re going to blame Castro for economic conditions in Cuba (and to some extent you should), you need to blame US policy as well. There is good reason to believe that the unique US hardline stance with Cuba is responsible for extending the period of suffering. Contrast the positive effects on the lives of Chinese and Vietnamese people since rapprochement with those countries, with the state of affairs which obtains in Cuba.

‘I don’t see Americans fleeing their country’.

Could I just nail this one on the head: I meet Americans ‘fleeing their country’ all the time. If by ‘fleeing’ you mean: people who left their country for (amongst other reasons) political reasons. And they all say the same thing (don’t get me wrong: plenty of Americans simply can’t get a job in the US and have to leave, seeking work. But this isn’t an ‘either/or’).

They all say (more or less all, using this phrase) ‘ It’s the ‘culture”. I have heard that phrase so many times, always in the context of ‘why I couldn’t go back’ or ‘why I won’t have my kids raised in the United States’.

You will all be amazed to hear that Donald Trump has something deeply stupid to say about today’s events.

‘Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades. Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights.

While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve.

Though the tragedies, deaths and pain caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty. I join the many Cuban Americans who supported me so greatly in the presidential campaign, including the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association that endorsed me, with the hope of one day soon seeing a free Cuba.’

Hidari’s first rule of political discourse: anyone who uses the word ‘totalitarian’ is invariably an asshole.

“I’m reminded of the historian A.J.P. Taylor writing somewhere or other that what the capitalists and their lackeys really really hated about Soviet Russia was not its tyrannical nature but the fact that there was a whole chunk of the earth’s surface where they were no longer able to operate. The same thing goes Cuba, for a much smaller area, and it hurt them particularly to be excluded from somewhere that plutocrats and mobsters had once enjoyed as their private playground. (Other countries, far more repressive, got a pass from successive US administrations.)”

Really? That would be big news to the Koch family, which got immensely rich selling oil cracking technology to Stalin, or the many foreign firms that got lucrative concessions under detente. Hell even Lenin claimed ‘the capitalists will sell us the rope we use to hang them’ when justifying foreign capital investment during the NEP. A more informed/intellectually honest historian than Taylor might regard that, in combination with the large-scale and pervasive violence needed to maintain literally every communist regime that has ever existed, as a sign that the political economy of communism was a fundamental malign and unworkable one. Personally, I’ve always found the Great Terror to be bad because it involved the murder of millions of people and the application of savagery and cruelty on an industrial scale, with particularly baneful effects for the USSR’s many minority communities. But then, AJP Taylor never did use his fantastic mind-reading powers on me, so maybe I’m an outlier.

More to the point – as several commentators here have already pointed out, universal literacy, healthcare and other progressive goals are very realisable under liberal democratic regimes. The boycott movement that grew in multiple Western states – that is, states that allowed independent civil society organisations to grow and thrive in contrast to Cuba and literally every other Communist regime that has ever existed – was just as important in ending apartheid than Angola, if not more so. And if you really want to hail Castro as a champion in the struggle for racial equality, you might start by looking at the deeply racist society he himself governed.And then, y’know, stop talking after realising how wrong you are.

Seriously though – the Castro-cult is not only entirely unwarranted by Cuba’s ‘achievements’ it makes it much, much, much easier for reactionaries to discredit the left as a whole. A stance of ‘Castro’s dictatorship, like all dictatorships was fundamentally inequitable and wrong, and led to obscenities such as his willingness to see his people incinerated in an unwinnable nuclear war, his support for the Prague spring, and the barbarous practice of punitive pyschotheraphy. There is no justification for that, whatever his ‘achievements’ in office’ has the benefits of being more strategically astute, as well as infinitely morally preferable, to repeating the ‘revolutionary’ slogans of a pretty unpleasant political regime and pretending its crimes were justified because reasons.

I wonder if Desmond Tutu will remember Cuito Cuanavale? But maybe the Nobel is all it takes to revise history to reserve credit to him and Mandela (Nelson only! Not Winnie!)

It seems to me to require little more than honesty to compare emigration rates for different islands. Not just Cuba and Haiti, but Cuba and Puerto Rico, or Cuba and Ireland. If it’s Communism driving people off the island in droves, when did Puerto Rico and Ireland turn Communist?

And anyone who pretends that death squads in Colombia; dirty war in Argentina; Ton Ton Macoutes/FRAPH in Haiti; gang warfare in Mexico; cops shooting street kids in Rio and Sao Paulo, Rios Montt’s genocidal assault on indios; the contras in Nicaragua, well, this is getting too depressing to keep up, even for completness’ sake. On average for Castro’s entire rule the average citizens, especially poor ones, have been much, much safer in their persons than in almost anywhere else in Central and South America. No doubt conservatives put zero value on poor people living better in Cuba than in favelas and barrios, but there you are: Some, perversely, do.

As for the economic effects of a single country blockading another, suppose the US had blockaded Canada, but England, France, Spain, Japan, etc. hadn’t? It is manifestly silly to pretend that meant the blockade was ineffective.

If you like to keep score, you can note which alleged thinkers shamelessly recite the most absurd allegations, putting all their confidence in the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the right thinking people who have surmounted obsolete Communism.

I went looking for the source of that A J P Taylor quote and didn’t find it. But I did find this: “In my opinion, most of the great men of the past were only there for the beer – the wealth, prestige and grandeur that went with the power.” Hey, he explained Donald Trump. How ’bout that?

I visited Cuba with my kid on a school trip jeez 20 years ago and one serious complaint that people had was you had to go to neighborhood meetings and listen to people argue about tedious stuff like trash collection and the upcoming regional assembly. So it goes.

… also saw a REAL green flash, like an emerald the size of the moon. Didn’t last long.

Hidari, Trump was right. That’s not a sentence I thought I was ever likely to say. The Cuban regime is founded on denying the Cuban people any political rights.

Castro ran a totalitarian regime. Totalitarian is a technical term and Castro’s dictatorship was totalitarian. Putin runs an authoritarian regime. The difference is that a totalitarian regime basically rejects the idea of independent civil society while an authoritarian regime is fairly indifferent to apolitical civil bodies. Basically a totalitarian state wants to control the administration of the national bridge club while an authoritarian state doesn’t much care how the bridge club operates as long as it keeps out of politics and concentrates on organising bridge tournaments.

Hidari,

Compare on a population basis. Nowhere near the population of the U.S. is fleeing.

Compare the reasons: no liberties and fearing for their lives vs. don’t like the culture.

Compare the government response: sure, we’ll send you your social security checks to another country vs. We’ll imprison you if we catch you leaving.

I don’t find those comparable at all.

Chris Bertram,

Your comment about refugees is a non-sequiter.

Erik Loomis has an excellent take on Castro (and on Cuba from 1898) at LGM:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/11/castro-its-complicated

@Suzanne: With so many Russian engineers and military people spending a lot of time in Cuba, and with one of the finest players of all time, Jose Capablanca*, being a Cuban national, it was inevitable that chess would become very popular there.

*When I was a young player (chess-player, that is, the only kind of “player” I’ve ever been or am likely to ever be!) I loved to play over Capablanca’s most famous games. With Fischer, Alekhine, maybe one or two others, he has always been regarded as having been one of the most naturally-gifted players of all time.

James Hanley @ 50, your point as you express it here is irrelevant. You aren’t responding to Castro’s claim that the embargo played a big role in crushing Cuba’s economy, you’re responding to my claim to that effect; so what you think about what Castro thinks about communism is, well, beside the point.

As to yours @ 49, you’re making an implicit claim that the reason all people have fled Cuba is political repression rather than economic hardship. I’m guessing you can’t actually show that to be the case; especially when the US refugee-handling regime has for much of the past 5 decades privileged the former claim rather than the latter one.

If you spend some time on the island –as I have, for a photographic project– you soon realize that Castro is widely despised by Cubans , as much as he is feared. There are no romanticized fantasies about the Revolución here, and there haven’t been for decades (if there ever were). Frankly, no one should take Cuba seriously as a political project. Cubans themselves certainly don’t . They basically regard the whole affair as a sinister criminal enterprise , dressed up for greater deception. It takes a while for the truth to come out because the regime has set up an extremely pervasive network of internal spies. Everyone lives in fear of denunciation to the thought police. But the Cubans, I learned, basically view Castro as a common criminal. They tell stories of his goons canvassing the country in the early days of the revolution, confiscating all the gold they could get their hands on, for his personal enrichment. On each of my trips I have nightmares of being stuck on the island , unable to leave for some reason or another. Its easily the scariest place I’ve been to – not because economic conditions (which are terrible btw) but because of the complete lack of personal freedom and the lawless nature of the regime.

“Let anyone who lived under a Communist regime prior to 1991 weigh in, I’ll accept their verdict.”

Similarly, we should only accept the medical advice of those who’ve had surgery. Or the legal advice of convicts. Or the nutritional advice of famine victims. Or the child-rearing opinions of children. Or the etc.

It’s a funny thing. You often see the same people argue that

(1) the trade embargo by the United States imposed a huge economic cost on Cuba, and
(2) trade by the United States with developing countries is exploitative neoliberal neo-colonialism that imposes a huge economic cost on those countries.

They never see the contradiction, let alone try to rationalise it.

I’m happy to have avoided the gay concentration camps in Cuba. Fun times for more than a decade. I’m sure the capitalists made him do it.

As someone married to a person who grew up under (Polish) communism, with a fair amount of acquaintance with similar others, let me say that “unbearable on every level, regardless of what you got out of it” is a major exaggeration. I meet a lot of regret (no doubt flavoured by nostalgia). On a less anecdotal level, some 30 per cent of the Russian population still votes for the communist party.

Economists admonish us to look at what people do more than they say. People fled Cuba. They also fled, as noted above, Haiti, El Salvador, Latvia and Ireland, and are currently fleeing Puerto Rica. But Cubans have also fought for the regime – at Bay of Pigs, in Angola and elsewhere, as they fought for communism in Russia and China (but not in Rumania or the GDR).

Nick is suggesting that life in all the states that are, or have in the past been, self identifying as communist is the same. Interchangeable. Life in Romania under Ceaucescu equals life in Cuba equals, I presume, life in Moscow during the Brezhnev years equals life in Kiev under Stalin. If you have one roommate from one of these places you know everything about all of them. That’s the lazy liberal approach to understanding history in a nutshell.

LFC 11.26.16 at 7:16 pm @ 42 —
I don’t see how we disagree, regardless of my supposed misreading, whose error you decline to specify. The US r.c. could have eliminated Castro and company, and chose not to — possibly (as you indicate) because his existence was a convenience or even a pleasure of the sadistic sort. It’s an interesting deviation from their usual methods, anyway.

Philippe 11.26.16 at 10:06 pm @ 59 —
It’s true that in the United States we still elect people and only then decide that they’re common criminals; I guess in the Cuba you describe they just cut to the chase.

Tabasco 11.26.16 at 11:17 pm @ 63 —
I can’t recall observing an instance of the same person proposing the two different arguments at the same time. Maybe that’s your problem, they’re weaseling away from the contradiction. Although I think cognitive dissonance is overrated.

@Tabasco 63

There’s definitely a contradiction there, but I don’t think it’s as stark as you say. You don’t have to be a neoliberal to believe in the value of trade. I’m not sure there really is such a thing as a “developing country.” The category is useful for many sorts of political economy, but obscures massive differences that exist within the class. I do believe it is possible to have significant trade with the US without being impoverished by neoliberal depredation, but the success or failure of such projects has a lot to do with the nuances of history and the whims of the major economies and it often seems as though success stories like South Korea are exceptions to the rule.

Cuba is relatively unique in the Americas for the lateness of its independence and the contingency of that independence on US intervention. It would be tempting to compare it to Puerto Rico or the Philippines, the other significant territories Spain lost in the war, except that the former is much smaller and still a dependency and the latter has had its history warped by both a bloody US occupation and the horrors of WW2 (and is in the wrong hemisphere in any case). I’ve been trying all day to think of a good comparison and coming up empty.

There really is no “control” for Cuba’s communist experiment because its circumstances were already fairly unique, but my best guess for what a Batistaist counterfactual would look like is some combination of Mexico and Colombia. All three countries have histories of repressive dictatorship and ~complex~ relations with the US. I expect you’d see capitalist Cuba doing the same sort of back and forth between corrupt democracy and criminal dictatorship we’ve seen in much of Latin America with the same extreme left/right and peasant/urban polarization (though perhaps more extreme, as it was the existing extremity of this situation that caused the revolution in the first place).

I’m picturing drug gangs, death squads, guerrillas, and an incestuous political elite that can just barely hold the country together (actually that might not be all that different from reality). That would indeed have left the island vulnerable to local kleptocrats and neocolonialist looters, but it would also have made Cuba a truly integrated part of the regional economy with much improved access to vital resources and consumer goods (like modern cars and computers) and more income with which to buy them, which would be an obvious net gain assuming the resources were distributed equitably (which, of course, is a big assumption).

Now, the other question is what would a Communist Cuba be like without the embargo and I simply cannot answer that because there are so few historical comparisons (China and Vietnam are a world away), but my best guess is that, these days, it wouldn’t look particularly communist.

Tabasco have you ever heard of the saying ‘the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited’? You are arguing with a ludicrous straw man (or perhaps two ludicrous straw men).

How about a little comparison.

George W. Bush chose to start a war that has killed several hundred thousand people, not to mention made a power space filled by Daesh, who helped kill thousands more.

Like with the Iraq War and its aftereffects, it’s hard to get a precise number of people killed under the Castro regime, but it’s likely in the tens of thousands (between those executed and those who died in jail). There’s the question of whether one should count those who died at sea fleeing Cuba and the soldiers who died in Angola.

Hence, we have a very recent American president whose own death ledger is rather impressive, and so I find it hard to accept arguments about the inherent beneficence of liberal democracy or the moral uprightness of America (or, indeed, any other nation that helped perpetrate the Iraq War, such as the UK).

“As to Romanian roommates who knew that life under Communism was unbearable on any level, unlike life under the Iron Guard?”

Steven Johnson, could it be that the roommates did not mention the Iron Guard because that was not an issue? Perhaps it was something they did not experience in their own lives. In any case, saying that the only alternative to the Iron Guard was Ceaucescu is, among other things, reductionist.

Cuba had major problems on the eve of the revolution. That revolution, alas, did not change any of these, and instead created new ones. Cubans deserve better than that. They also deserve better to be treated as ciphers, as useful bodies for a revolutionary stances.

Apologies for the second comment, but this from the Independent helps:

– Estimates of executions under Castro’s 50-year rule run into the thousands, with monitors warning of unfair trials, arbitrary imprisonment and extrajudicial executions.
Castro responded by insisting that “revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction”. As the one-party system came into force, independent newspapers were closed and homosexuals, priests and others viewed as a threat were herded into labour camps for “re-education”. Censorship and repression spread, with fans of American rock ‘n’ roll among those targeted.

Freedom of expression, religion, association, assembly, movement and the press were denied. HRW cited secret police, surveillance, short-term detentions, house arrests, travel restrictions, criminal prosecutions and politically motivated sackings as methods of “enforcing political conformity”, as well as restrictions embedded in legal and constitutional structures. All media is heavily censored and the spreading of “unauthorised news” a criminal offence, with internet access heavily limited by cost and restrictions.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/fidel-castro-dies-dead-cuba-dictator-communism-human-rights-abuses-executions-freedoms-censorship-a7440636.html

Did someone say Totalitarianism? The term is explicitly defined by the State Department’s Jeanne Kirkpatrick’ ‘Doctrine.’ You see, authoritarians do not disturb ‘habitual patterns of family and personal relations.’ So what is totalitarianism? Abortion and gay rights.

Some dictators are more equal than others. http://littleatoms.com/news-world/romanticisation-fidel-castros-cuba-must-die-him

Yeah, James Bloodworth still claims Cuban guerillas were fighting with the Syrian Arab Republic. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/16/cuba-is-intervening-in-syria-to-help-russia-it-s-not-the-first-time-havana-s-assisted-moscow.html

You try and defend Castro by saying ‘but he fought Apartheid in Angola’… and then it hits you. That’s why those woke, decent and liberal thinkfluencers hate him. Black Africans are to be pitied, not free!

I’m happy to have avoided the gay concentration camps in Cuba. Fun times for more than a decade. I’m sure the capitalists made him do it.

I guess Cuba is homophobic for legalizing homosexuality in 1979 when Britain did it a nicer, whiter way in…1983. But seriously, it’s true, when Cuba didn’t let gay people into it’s conscript army they had to labour in alternative service…. when did you let gay people serve in your country’s military again? I am of course liberal and gracious enough to assume I am talking to a firm opponent of peacetime conscription!

@86 The Saudis do. And from 700 AD to 1600, or so, Islamic states in various forms were rightly perceived as expansionist and totalitarian. The rise of communism occurred by historical accident (?) at the same time as Islamic states entered a period of historic weakness, a period that continued until WWII post-colonialism.

There are plenty in Europe and America who regard Islamic totalitarianism to be once again in the ascendancy.

Anyway, the critical issue would appear to be private property as far as Cuba is concerned.

Note for new readers: generally speaking (not always but usually):

‘Authoritarian regimes’ are those aligned with the United States.

‘Totalitarian states’ are those not aligned with the United States.

One of the key aims of ‘foreign policy experts’ at Washington based ‘thinktanks’ or at American elite Universities is to think of new reasons as to why totalitarian states are really bad, and authoritarian states are not so bad, really (this has been especially tricky since 1993, when the most assiduous supported of anti-democratic regimes on the planet has been the United States).

Incidentally: consider this. The only reason we are even having this discussion is because Castro stood up to the Americans. There are numerous American backed dictators (Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, Idriss Déby of Chad, Karimov of Uzbekistan: there are many others) whose deaths will not provoke Twitterstorms because their deaths will not be marked in the Western media at all. Indeed most proponents of ‘human rights’ in the ‘West’ have never even heard of them, even though they are partly responsible for their tyranny.

If Castro was an American backed fascist, we simply would not even be having this discussion and the oh-so-moral soi-disant ‘iconooclasts’ on this thread who demonstrate their rebellious natures by expressing views that are identical to those of the semi-elected oligarch Donald Trump, would not be posting details that they just googled of said fascist’s human rights record.

Because it’s taken for granted in the Western media that American backed dictators are ‘normal’ or even ‘necessary’. It’s only those not under American control that get the publicity.

Castro’s crimes, which did happen even though American liberals say they did, are an easy target because the West are not responsible for them, and so are ideal for striking a pseudo moral pose about. After all since we are not responsible for them, we don’t have to do anything about them, so it’s an ideal way to make oneself feel morally superior, without having to, y’know, do anything.

“@85 Decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK was in 1967.”

A common misapprehension. It was legalized in England and Wales in 1967. It wasn’t legalized in Scotland and Northern Ireland until 1982 thanks to the ECHR ruling Dudgeon v. United Kingdom. It’s pretty telling how even gay-rights friendly Europhiles don’t know that.

But that’s the Kirkpatrick doctrine at work isn’t it? White homophobia is just homophobia. Add homophobia to full employment and they start comparing MUAP to the Holocaust. But the brave, victorious and ‘Decent’ Allies took the actual gay men imprisoned in the not-quite-so-metaphorical Konzentrationslager and immediately returned them to German prisons to serve out their sentences for the ‘unspeakable crime’ that wasn’t legalized in Germany until 1968. Never mind that ‘actual’ Holocaust, bourgie whiteboys! It might not make you feel quite so good about yourselves.

Randy MacDonald @79 “Steven Johnson, could it be that the roommates did not mention the Iron Guard because that was not an issue? Perhaps it was something they did not experience in their own lives.”

No. The point is you and the roommate actually think your personal experience is the only evidence worth thinking about. Other people’s experiences are entirely irrelevant, reduced to zero.

You might consider the very odd expedient of trying to evaluate how “unbearable” something is by comparative examination of a variety of more objective indicators than your roommate’s assertions. Drug addiction and alcoholism, suicide, domestic violence and crime rates are useful, but differentials in average life span and infant mortality are also relevant. The average age at which youth attain independence, the average number of people per household, average vacation time, average level of education, and yes, emigration rates, are common economic.

As to measures of the repressiveness of a state? Rates of imprisonment, rates of police supervision, rates of surveillance (which by the way does include credit reports,) rates of military spending and uses of military violence are all essential. A government that represses millions of people outside its borders is a viciously oppressive government.

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/state_and_revolution/cuba.htm

@kidneystones, you may wish to recall that the Levellers were the original modern democrats. Ergo, you might not want to rail against leveling in your anti-communism class tirades.

@ novakant, my wife is an emigrant from South Africa, and as a result of family ties I go there from time to time, and I have the opportunity to listen to first-hand testimony regarding the nature of repressive regimes. The repressive regime in question is, surprisingly, not the Apartheid-era regime, but the current one, and those offering the testimony are upper-middle-class and wealthy whites.

The nature of the repression is the diminishment of their standard of living – the roads they drive on are not as well maintained, the electricity that powers their homes not as consistently reliable, the crime rate is so much higher, and so on.

Occasionally I interject a comment to the effect that, while clearly the government has failed in their duty to expand the electrical supply so as to make reliable electricity available to all, they have in fact extended electricity to many, many people who never had it before; or I’ll note that while the road they’re complaining about could use a bit of resurfacing, they must be aware that many people who never had paved roads before have them now; or that the crime rate is the certain result of a society made up of a handful of relatively wealthy whites and blacks floating in a sea of desperately poor blacks; but such comments invariably fall on deaf ears.

My wife returned from a solo trip recently and reports that the reaction among her family and long-time white family acquaintances to the protests by black students against impossibly high university tuition was to complain that the protests prevented their own children – who were attending on scholarships despite the obvious relative wealth of their families – from completing their semester exams.

So yes, there is much wrong with the current, corrupt ANC regime, but when it comes to comparing it with their preferred alternatives, I’ll take the anecdotal testimony of my acquaintances with a grain of salt. They don’t in fact seem to be very objective about it.

“But Cubans have also fought for the regime – at Bay of Pigs, in Angola and elsewhere, as they fought for communism in Russia and China (but not in Rumania or the GDR).”

You know who else got people to fight for his regime. Hit… no I’ll let Ken Livingstone finish my sentence for me.

Seriously. Lots of people have gotten people to fight for their governments. It really doesn’t follow that the government in question was a good government.

Incidentally, whether or not Taylor used the quote cited in the post he was far from blind about the horrors of Stalinism. And, somewhat ironically, he favoured more trade with the USSR on the Cobdenite grounds that trade lessens the tension between rival powers. I suspect that if I could dial him up on a ouija board and get him to contribute to this discussion he would say something to the effect that the blockade had been counterproductive and the opening up was a good thing, he would probably point out that there was a certain amount of hypocrisy in the US opposition to the Cuban regime given its support for dictators in other parts of the region, but that he would be fairly emphatic that Cuba was a dictatorship and that a democracy would be vastly preferable.

Steven Johnson, firstly I am not the person who raised the idea of Romanians wanting something better, and secondly my name is spelled “McDonald.” Accuracy is, I think, something to be strived for.

In any case, what evidence did you have that the Romanians in the anecdote shared wanted the Iron Guard in power? Do we any have reason to believe that Romanians, in the 1980s or whenever, were only capable of totalitarianism whether of the left or the right? Why not suspect that the Rpmanians in question might have wanted something like the social democracy enjoyed by non-Communist Europe, say?

Automatically presuming the worst is a mistake. How can you judge a situation accurately if that is all you expect?

You (all of you) should read Samuel Farber.
Wish you could read Spanish (perhaps some of you do)…, because there are books that you should read and don´t even know because of the language: “Las clases olvidadas en la Revolución cubana” [The Forgotten Classes in the Cuban Revolution], written by my late friend Marcos Winocur, an argentinian historian (exiled in Mexico), disciple of Fernand Braudel; or “Historia mínima de Cuba” [Very Brief History of Cuba], by the cuban historian Rafael Rojas (another exiled in Mexico).

I totally get the US context of the matter, what makes me despair is the thought that all the amazing literature written by people with first-hand experience of repressive regimes of all kinds seems to have been written in vain, if their testimony and insight is shrugged off so easily by pointing to ‘objective indicators’ or saying that capitalism can be cruel too.

But non-repressive regimes simply was never an option open to cubans. It’s not so much “written in vain” as “of no real relevance”.

‘Accuracy is, I think, something to be strived for.’

I think accuracy is something to be striven for, but maybe that’s just me.

Anononymous 11.27.16 at 11:09 pm @ 108:
‘As to why the US responded so violently and aggressively to a communist Cuba…’

As I pointed out previously, the US (government, ruling class, etc.) was relatively tolerant of Cuba. Consider the methods used upon Vietnam or Iraq.

Castro is the Pinochet of the other side. Why the two don’t get treated similarly (by both sides) is essentially tribalism..

If you thought about the differences in detail for a few seconds you might realise how inane that is. (A couple to start you off: Pinochet oversaw a system of state-sanctioned torture which murdered thousands—Castro didn’t; Pinochet overturned a democracy, Castro a dictatorship; Pinochet privatised everything in sight, Castro improved health and education standards in a way that was acclaimed across the world, etc…)

Twice the GDP per capita I mean

You don’t tend to find that many people who will represent totalitarianism as a good thing, fascists sometimes did as part of an explicitly anti-democratic ideology. The communists prefered to claim to be democratic while holding elections that were an utter sham intended to conceal the totalitarian dictatorship.

Imperialism has a better record on human rights and political freedom. Jamaica has been a democratic regime since universal suffrage in 1944 before independence in 1962 and has remained one since. A poll in 2011 showed about 60% of Jamaicans favoured reverting to being a British Territory. Like with Newfoundland in 1935 a history of economic mismanagement makes reverting seem attractive. Not that Britain is remotely interested.

@118

“‘Imperialism’ has never been mentioned.”

Cuba was detached from the Spanish Empire some time before Castro was born.

@113

Another difference you don’t mention is that Pinochet stepped down, and elections resumed.

Yes, I think it’s a stupid game as well.

Sorry, but claiming that the two are at all comparable in terms of ‘individual moral ledger’ (as opposed to geopolitics) seems to require a kind of Anne-Applebaum-ish / alt-Centre triteness all of its own, and I can’t see how it’s remotely possible to back up with details (rather than, say, patronising insinuations about the rest of humanity’s group psychology.) Which is not to say Castro didn’t commit some serious crimes in his time of course.

“Bystanders react differently to the kid who stands up to the bully, unappealing though that kid might be in many other respects, to the kid who plays the role of the bully’s sidekick and accomplice.”

That’s the genius of marketing in Castro’s case (see also Trump in different areas, [sad sigh]). If you market yourself as the kid standing up to the bully in the communist/capitalist world wide drama, you can get people to tribally buy into your vicious oppression of your own people. Again Pinochet is instructive. Why upthread “Pinochet overturned a democracy, Castro a dictatorship” without acknowledging the precisely reflexive “Pinochet turned over to democracy, Castro kept his dictatorship until death”? The answer isn’t anything about the overall merits of democracy. The answer is that on the Communist/Capitalist divide, people chose sides and will excuse people they think identify on their side while condemning those on the other side. It also hurts to admit when you’re wrong (in my youth, I was wrongly dismissive of Pinochet’s evils for exactly the same reason) so you tend not to revisit the question if you can avoid it.

The reason I tend to harp on the tribal stuff insight is because pretending that you’re above it leads to serious errors in judgment like “Bush II wouldn’t push so hard unless there was proof regarding WMD” (an error I made) or “Hillary Clinton is a great Presidential Candidate”(an error lots of my friends made) when someone who isn’t so deeply invested in excusing the faults of their own tribe can see much better.

“You (all of you) should read Samuel Farber.”
No, I’ll stick to obscure leftists ‘zines instead. (Thanks Proyect. Didn’t know Trots defended Cuba)
http://www.workers.org/2007/world/lavender-red-92/

“Basically a totalitarian state wants to control the administration of the national bridge club while an authoritarian state doesn’t much care how the bridge club operates as long as it keeps out of politics and concentrates on organising bridge tournaments.”
I’d like to thank Kidneystones and Brett Dunbar for attempting to define Totalitarianism rather than just repeat the State Department’s word at the State Department’s hit list. But have you ever noticed that right wing regimes treat abortion as a threat to the social order and leftists countries usually do not?

“Here’s a good rule: if you would flip out over a Republican doing X, then X is (to you) morally untenable. If you wouldn’t say in a hypothetical future”
Democrats “support” Guantanamo -the only torture camp left on the island of Cuba. Leftists are rejecting objective lies about Cuba that literally support Imperialism.

“‘Imperialism’ has never been mentioned.”
Well said. Even I am in need of this correction….

“Imperialism has a better record on human rights and political freedom.”
Gough Whitlam murdered the Balibo Five so no-one would notice the liberal Decents could smoothly hand over East Timor from the Nazi colonial regime of NATO Portugal to the Indonesian one that murdered democracy – and hundreds and thousand of Communist – on LBJ’s orders. Kinda like how

“UMAP was the initial Cuban labor till you die camp–I’m not sure working political prisoners to death with special emphasis on homosexuals is so much better than throwing them out of helicopters. That program was replaced with sending political undesirables to be killed in Angola again dead is dead.”
Lies aren’t working? LIE HARDER! Yah, no, homosexuality wasn’t even illegal in Cuba (1965-1979) as long as an life sentence. The ‘Military Units to Assist Production’ was an alternative service. Finland has the same program – people who refuse to give three years to the army get a criminal conviction and spend it prison camps. (inb4 DIFFERENT BECAUSE PUTIN! Sweet perfect USA would NEVER invade a Latin American blah blah blah). And I’m sure the people of Mozambique are very grateful for these fantasies of yours.

“A country that was on par with Italy is now poorer than the DR.”
So did Argentina. Then something happened. I wonder what it was – must have been those filthy Communists. No one more than Latin America shows that GDP per capita at 1900 is not destiny – and America has made sure of that.

“Say Ferdinand Marcos for example, though in actual fact Reagan didn’t prop up his regime when it came down to it”
I found this in ten seconds. http://listverse.com/2014/08/18/10-fiendish-stories-about-asias-forgotten-dictator/

“Sorry, but claiming that the two are at all comparable in terms of ‘individual moral ledger’ (as opposed to geopolitics) seems to require a kind of Anne-Applebaum-ish / alt-Centre triteness all of its own”
Well then get ready for the alt-left – Cuba’s policy on homosexuality can be compared favorably to liberal West. MI5 let Ian Paisley’s cronies rape children in Kincora Boy’s home while running his terrorist colonial regime that killed 3,000 people so Irish Catholics people couldn’t vote. Oh, and ‘Saved Ulster from Sodomy’ until 1982. The Cuban people should be so grateful for a chance of such perfect liberal British DECENY. (In case your wondering, the farcical child abuse inquiry has explicitly refused to investigate Kincora)

“Doctors and engineers moonlight as waiters.”
It’s weird how a country with a shortage of doctors has one the highest number of doctors per capita in the world. I suppose that’s why Cuba sent all those doctors. Malcolm X, Colin Kaepernick, why do black Americans know more about Cuba than edumacated White liberals? Ah but they know to compare UMAP to Dachau – oh the things they ‘know’.

“Pinochet privatised everything in sight, Castro improved health and education standards in a way that was acclaimed across the world”
Indeed. People from Colin Kaepernick and Justin Trudeau look at Cuba and are all the more struck by the fact that Cuba is a country with stunning outcomes on health, poverty and education DESPITE being a formal one-party state. People who recoil at the withering effects of dictatorship look to Cuba and see a country that attracts millions of tourists from its neighboring hegemonic enemy for its vibrant culture – even Trots begin to wonder. This thread has been has inundated by Liberal trolls who know little about Latin America, less about gay rights and care nothing about the cruelty of war – and Castro has done more to shut Guantanmo, built of American seized colonial land – than their self-righteous self-regard ever will. Cuba imported homophobia, chess and ballet from Soviet Communism. Cuba has retained the graces of Russian culture – America only retains its colonialism.

And Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front is responsible for how many deaths by now, with, like apartheid, US support? But they don’t count because that’s just business. The Somali dead from the US supported invasion count too. As for the famine count, that is one race the capitalists have always won. The presumption of course is that famines in capitalist countries are always acts of God, while famines in socialist countries, even new ones still scarred by war, are always acts of malice. Double standards are useful in political debates, aren’t they?

The mad dogs of anti-Communism will not listen, but, still…the bottom line is that a government that serves to provide equal material and moral benefits to the majority of people and exercises its sovereign rights of violence in the interest of the majority, which includes humanity at large has a better claim to be democratic than one which merely passes the same standards as the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authoritarian_regimes_supported_by_the_United_States

As Wikipedia dryly notes about ‘Authoritarian regimes supported in the past’ (and ‘currently supported’): ‘This list is incomplete’.

Of the large states in the Caribbean the ones with the consistent history of democratic government and good human rights are Puerto Rico and Jamaica. Puerto Rico is still a U.S. territory while Jamaica was a British Territory until 1962. Cuba Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the have had several brutal dictatorships.

This thread depressingly parallels the structure of arguments about the Syrian Civil War. It’s a rule of the game that if you support a faction you mustn’t acknowledge its bad acts. Immediately try to switch the discussion to an opposing faction’s equivalent-or-worse wrongdoing. Or if Their Faction has yet to do wrong on the scale of Your Faction you’re supposed to imagine Their Faction’s atrocities in a counterfactual world where they have more strength.

What’s the most recent conflict that doesn’t inspire people to put on their team jerseys and deploy motivated reasoning? The Gothic War?

There is no exchange rate between acts that permits tallying them all for a goodness score in a standard unit of account. You can’t net out high economic inequality with high press freedom, or low-with-low. It’s like trying to reverse the bitterness of beer by adding honey. The flavors just keep accumulating. Nothing you can add will make beer taste like plain water again.

Stunning outcomes on poverty? Source?

I don’t see Americans fleeing their country, despite repeated threats to do so after each election.

This page crashed on election night: http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/

Canadian services who deal with immigrants have indeed seen an uptick in US applicants. I don’t think it’ll end up to be substantial, personally, but there are indeed people who recognize other countries that might be nicer to live in. (NB: Canada may not be one of those countries, depending on your circumstances.)

engels@140: Thank you, you but you’ve been doing this a lot longer than I have. Do warn me if I’m about to get banned.

It’s a shame this multi-faceted debate about the great intersection of imperialism, totalitarian social formation and third world developmental economics – that could be the only fair appraisal of Castro’s life and work – will never be able to have the complex debate it deserves in a comments section, but as I sense the occasion has passed these will be my last words:

Hasta siempre, comandante.

Once again: Just so; and Hear, hear!

But the observation will pass unnoticed just as it did the first time

Perhaps because it appears to be (a) very obvious (b) undisputed hy anyone present…

Interesting piece: Cuba’s Culture of Dussent

Neocolonialism tended to have all of the disadvantages of colonialism without any of the positive aspects.

Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic got pro-american dictators with the usual horrific human rights abuses and mass murder of political opponents. The government was independent under US hegemony but also tyrannical. The US government couldn’t simply dismiss the government for incompetence or corruption, it would require some extra-legal action.

While more traditionally colonial government the colonial power can dismiss a c0rrupt tyrannous or incompetent government by legal means. Puerto Rico and Jamaica have both remained democratic with good levels of personal and political freedom.

If you explicitly run a place you cannot disclaim responsibility for the political rights of the inhabitants, the way you can if there is a somewhat independent tyrant. America cannot remove a Cuban dictator at will, as Castro demonstrated. A neocolonial hegemon can disclaim most of the responsibility as it has less control than a colonial power.

@ engels, thanks very much for that link!