Thanks for the post.

about Castro. He and his brother Raul have done terrible things to those who disagree with them. Imprisonment. Torture. Death.

BUT, the lowliest cane field worker has access to free, universal health care, good schools (near 100% literacy), and which is the first country to send skilled trauma doctors and nurses to Latin American countries that have a disaster? (Spoiler Alert: It's not us)

American doctors have some say in where and when they go, don't they? Since they don't work for the government, the government can't tell them to go somewhere, can they?

A medical student told me once about the large application fees required just to "win" the internships where they then work extremely long hours for starvation wages.

If you want to reduce student loan debt, you work in underserved communities.

I've read some stories about Cuban doctors and other medical professionals as well, and their system of sending doctors to foreign countries doesn't seem all that great for the doctors either.

part of the bargain for free education including post-graduate medical training.
Additionally one weekend a month was in a state institution. He found it very fair.

By the way most developing countries spend millions training doctors who are then offered better salaries in OECD countries. It's cheaper to rob us of our doctors than to train doctors.
We give thanks for the Cuban doctors.

"In the belly of the Beast" for another view of the relationship between the Americas and the US Empire.

Yet another example, but available in French only, is Dans l’œil de l’aigle : Washington face au Québec by Jean-Francois Lisee.

Gotcha.

Plus we only "choose to think we'd be too saintly to do" that. Because, hey...shit happens!

Most of us know very well his neice, Mariela Castro, is a leader in Cuba, working for gay and lesbian rights, has been for years.

Gays were sent to UMAPs in the early years of the Revolution. This isn't a secret. Castro himself mentions the policy explicitly in My Life, though he tries to soften it up by calling the camps "farms". Funny that someone so familiar with Mariela Castro wouldn't know about what the Cuban government was doing to gays between 1965 and 1968.

In my experience, people who demand sources rarely do so because they are actually interested in reading the sources. Nine out of ten, they do so hoping their opponent cites some blatantly biased source that is so easily dismissed that one need not even bother to read it.

In any event, here are a few:

Guerra, L. (2010, July 26). Gender policing, homosexuality, and the new patriarchy of the Cuban Revolution 1965-70. Social History, 35(3), 268-289. doi:10.1080/03071022.2010.487378

Cardenal, Ernesto, 1974. In Cuba, New Directions Books, page 68

Lumsden, I. (1996). Machos, maricones, and gays: Cuba and homosexuality. Philadelphia: Temple University Press,U.S.

Young, A. (1981). Gays under the Cuban revolution. Greensboro, NC, United States: Grey Fox Press.

We maintained cordial relations with Communist leaders like Tito and Ceaușescu. I suspect having a Communist nation ninety miles from our shore was a thorn in our leader's sides.

In his one and only meeting with Fidel, he suggested that the revolution should run Cuba like U.S. capitalism runs Puerto Rico.

THAT was a big help.

In my view, there were only three things that MIGHT have made a difference:

1) Admitting we were wrong to overthrow Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954(establishing a blood-soaked police state in place of the democratic government Arbenz led)and agreeing never to do anything like that again;

2) Advising American corporations to accept Cuba's offer to compensate them for their holdings at the appraised property value(rather than backing them up on years of property tax avoidance through deliberate undervaluation by insisting on a much higher rate).

3) Agreeing to leave Cuba the hell alone.

But our leaders couldn't do that. They couldn't let a symbol of anti-colonial victory survive unscathed.

n/t.

The USA was after Cuba since the early 1800s and by the mid 1800s the Southern slave owners wanted it for a slave colony. The US has forced the situation so obviously over and over again in Cuba. It's amazing the Cubans still care for Americans, I feel responsible if Trump damages them again, how could we!

n/t.

from Trump. Otherwise he put Claver-Clarone on his transition team and he's the most right wing of them all.

See his blog Capitol Hill Cubans. And he gets a ton of $ from the government to push his right wing agenda.

I dont give a fuck that he had a (entirely overrated) "universal" health care system, nor do I give a fuck he replaced a RW fucking murderous thug. Two wrong don't make a right. Castro used his educated doctors as a revenue tool, shipping them all over the world for cash, whilst the average citizen (and god help you if you were gay or dark black) often had to deal with oftimes nasty, dirty, undersupplied clinics and hospitals that ran vigorous black market shakedowns on the side. I have been to Cuba twice, and yes, I love the people, the culture,music, food, etc, but I am so sick of privileged westerners romanticising Castro to god-like status based off feel good myths.

Last edited Mon Nov 28, 2016, 12:54 PM - Edit history (1)

let that concept to sit there a long long while and be fully absorbed without skipping over it and blocking it out and making all the allowances. And those of us who are not Cubans, not 1stGenExiles/CIA, are also not Saintlier-than-him-or-thou, can be repulsed by the oppression. Moving the camera angle back from the close-ups on the killings, torture, homophobia, and all the rest is the panoramic picture of the Cuban people kept in stifling oppression while this fellow pretended to be doing it all for them while living the highest of lives with billions stashed away.

I know we can't convert each other, and I'm certainly not a scholar about the history, so no discussion is possible here, but just wanted to say what I think, which the Cubans in Cuba can't do for themselves.

Nothing would ever have got better for most of the Cuban people. They'd have had "elections", but the US would had made sure that only capitalist(and therefore white supremacist and reactionary) parties would have been allowed to run, and that whatever party was allowed to win those "free" elections would have dismantled everything.

Our country's leaders will never allow Cuba to have a progressive, inclusive future if we regain dominance over the place. They would force the place back into the Batista era, forever.

It's time to admit that it's not our place to "overthrow" any other governments, at least in the Americas.

I would rather have seen multi-party elections happen in Cuba, and free speech. But nobody in the United States, a country that has devoted itself to doing nothing in the Americas but saying "NO!" to any vision of a better life, has any moral authority to lecture anybody in the Americas on "freedom and democracy". Coming from American lips, those words can never be anything but code for "submit to our power, forever".

If you want a democratic world(as I do) work to get OUR country's government to stop acting as though it has the right to rearrange the world to serve "American interests&quot interests that are never the betterment of the working poor or the jobless poor, or of people of color, women, and LGBTQ people anywhere). We need to let the world run itself, for once.

Is that really too much to ask?

You're right, outside Hitler, it's never simple.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

in the ocean between Cuba & Florida. Remember that? Russia even had some ship there for 'business meetings' related to the drilling project?. The crash in oil prices, bank sanctions and imo, USA Cuba new policy put a stop to those plans.

China today in their business papers are all excited about republicans canceling progress with Cuba. They want to start trade with Cuba. China sees great opportunity to use Cuba as a major shipping port for goods. And so close to the USA, a country that already imports billions in goods. China does this all the time with other countries. They'll construct at their cost major infrastructure like a port/factories/mines/schools ect., lots of jobs for the locals.

America can't afford to go half assed- fake 'friendly' with our neighbor countries or we'll lose their friendship & opportunity.

"Yes, he was a repressive leader"

Rec

If they had any progressive values at all, they wouldn't want a capitalist restoration. Cuba can't be a good place to live if nothing there is to the left of the US.

They need democracy...but equally they need the US to leave them alone.

Really?

Especially if they're the kind of "elections" they had in Eastern Europe in the Nineties...where ALL parties ran on a right-wing austerity program and the people had no opportunity to reject "shock therapy".

The Miami exiles, especially the old ones don't want anything progressive for Cuba(and the tiny number of "moderates" among the young Miami Cubans will never matter in that discussion). They don't want the free education and healthcare to survive. They don't want the egalitarian values to survive. They still want people thrown out of the houses they moved into in 1959(if they were progressive, they would at least give up on that last one, since you can't want that and have any humane values).

They want a market economy...which means permanent right-wing dominance and permanent white heterosexual supremacy.

I want more human rights for Cuba. We all do. I just don't want capitalism and the restoration of the old days. Capitalism can only mean the place ends up exactly like Poland or Hungary right now(which is the way Poland and Hungary will be forever, because the far right never loses office after gaining it and never declines in popularity once in power).

free and fair elections.

if the US had left Cuba alone.

But the US never would have done that.

Castro's party would have pretty much won any free election anyway. There was no large-scale desire to go back to the Batista era.

(And if you're going to bring up the "Popular Socialist Party"-for the record, they were the pre-Castro communist party in Cuba, their tiny handful of elderly members are still unreconstructed Stalinists, and they once joined a coalition government with Batista).

The best thing we can to have Cuba get less repressive is to leave the place the hell alone.

If we had agreed to do that in 1959, rather than starting our efforts to overthrow the Cuban government from the moment Fidel came to power, you'd have seen a very different society there.

But our leaders couldn't accept the loss of their colony.

Revolution is national policy in a lot of countries with histories of strong man dictators.

And don't try to tell me he had too good an army to be deposed. So did Batista.

The truth is that he stayed in power until his dotage and is being mourned at his death because he did so many great things for ordinary Cubans, meaning the landless workers who make all countries run.

Was he brutally repressive to opposition organizations and virulently homophobic? Yes and yes. However, that is not that whole story.

Think about it before you criticize someone else.

...or maybe that's the fault of the Education system?

capitalism
white heterosexual supremacy

You might have a point. I mean, I don't know beans about Latin American or Cuban history and Confessions of an economic hitman was not any help at all, neither, as best I remember it, was Year 501, but I read that about 502 years ago, so I have forgotten all of it.

Still, that kind of jargon is making me roll my white heterosexual eyes.

is to read up on Latin American history-as written by Latin Americans(also as written by people like Noam Chomsky).

Knowing that history would help you understand that it isn't as simple as Fidel doing these things for no reason.

that I mentioned I have read "Year 501" - by Noam Chomsky

Of course, that was long ago, and far away, although I have a copy of it around here somewhere.

Ah, found it after a fairly brief search, next to Thomas Carlyle's "Past and Present" which I have not read. However, I have about a dozen books on my "to read" pile.

It's a good sign that you've read Chomsky.

Look, I'm not advocating what Fidel did on internal security issues. For one thing, the conditions are totally different now(although Trump may slide us back towards more openly "Ugly American" behavior).

It's just that I reject simplistic conclusions...and the "Castro was just an evil dictator and that's all there is to say about it" argument is simplistic. It ignores everything the US did in the Americas to drive the Cuban Revolution towards the choices it made.

One thing I find interesting is that Fidel, even while maintaining rigid control in Cuba, never insisted that the countries allied with him(Nicaragua in the Eighties, Bolivia and Venezuela in more recent years)make their systems into exact replicas of the Cuban model. He accepted all of those states being far more democratic than his state was.

Fixed it.

And I despise dictatorships!

And all the evil shit he did.

It can't make anything better there for the US to continue trying to overthrow the government.

"elections" are going to be meaningless, since the US won't allow any result there other than a right-wing landslide(like we forced Nicaragua to do to itself in 1990).

Good God Ken!

Most of the time, I've seen it used to mock and silence anti-Trump voices online...usually by the sorts who call people "special snowflakes" and who say shit like "suck it up, buttercup!".

And I didn't say anything in that sentence that deserved to be called bullshit.

I was involved in Amnesty International at one point and took part in urgent actions in support of Cuban dissidents. I opposed Castro's treatment of gays(although, in fairness, he came around on that a lot faster than the US government did in the same era).

It's just that any time human rights issues got tied into the Cold War(let's face it-the ONLY reason the US ever criticized Cuba on human rights was that it was allied, on fairly legitimate defensive grounds, with the Soviet Union-especially after we launched a completely unprovoked and unjustified invasion against them in 1961-and because their economy was socialist. If they had been capitalist and "pro-American", no one in this country would ever have questioned anything they'd have done to suppress dissent, and we all know it) any sincere concern about anyone being oppressed vanished. It all turned into sanctimonious "Darkness At Noon" melodrama-about points-scoring in a pointless "conflict"-and none of it actually freed anybody. Other than Solzhenitsyn-and he then used his freedom to do nothing but denounce democracy, lash out at Jewsm and support Vladimir Putin and his campaign to create a Pan-Slavic Orthodox empire.

Even worse, the "freedom and democracy" that came to Eastern Europe brought nothing but massive inequality, crushing poverty and the rebirth of antisemitic right-wing "Christian" nationalism. Other than in the Czech Republic, nothing progressive or positive happened in the lands of "ex-communism" at all. Property rights never brought freedom in any real sense. Poland and Hungary are now permanently fascist, the all-but-fascist AfD is surging in support in unified Germany, and all that can ever happen anywhere in that region is greater bigotry and more virulent nationalism. All other possibilities there are dead.

That's the only thing that can ever happen in Cuba if we keep insisting on "defeating communism" there. Our leaders will makre sure no good possibilities are allowed there, just as they did in Eastern Europe after 1989.

I don't mourn the pre-1989 regimes, but we certainly turned out to be totally wrong in the belief that NOTHING could ever be worse than "godless communism". We should have regarded Marxist-Leninism as simply another bad system. We of "the West" should never have put "defeating the 'Red Menace'" above anything and everything else in life-and we should never have made it not only a war against Marxist-Leninism but against ANY alternative to capitalism at all.

We could learn from this.

We could renounce the whole practice of forcing austerity on the world in exchange for loans and debt restructuring. We could put pressure on the lending agencies NOT to demand layoffs, wage cuts, benefit cuts, cuts in social spending and tax cuts for corporations in exchange for assistance. We could apologize to everyone in Eastern Europe that we immiserated through "shock therapy" and to Mikhail Gorbachev for humiliating him and discrediting his government in repayment for his agreeing to do everything we ever asked of him. We could agree that we would never do to Cuba what we did to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

But our leaders will never do that.

They don't want to create a just and stable world. They just want to be able to say "We Won! We Won!"

And they don't care how much worse that insistence makes the world, how much instability and war that insistence on "winning" causes, how many future wars it causes, how many jihadis and Putins it creates.

Our leaders all have a chronic case of what "Vince Lombardi Syndrome"-the primary symptom of which is the belief that "winning isn't everything-it's the ONLY thing".

And it will always end up leaving us with "Fourth down and Vietnam".

Seriously?

doing online to women, POC and gays.

I've never seen it used in any progressive context.

nt

And I honestly do not understand what is "right wing" about that phrase!

It's not a refutation of an argument, it's simply a denial that the argument has a right to exist.

And let me be clear...Fidel Castro was never my model for what a leader should be. It's just that given what this country did over and over again to not only Cuba but to virtually every other country in the hemisphere, we as Americans have virtually no right to be sanctimonious about the choices he made and that, to this day, probably at least half the people in Cuba still support.

When OUR country finally admits, officially, that we never had any right to intervene in Latin American countries, to blockade any of their economies, send in the Marines to invade, encourage and incite their own militaries to overthrow democratic governments, train bandit armies to cause mayhem(as we did in Nicaragua when we invented the Contras), when we finally grapple with and take responsibility for almost two centuries of quasi-imperial arrogance and acknowledge we had no right to do ANY of it, THEN, and only then, will Americans be entitled to say we support "freedom and democracy".

We have to admit that indefensible wrong was done in our name. And that what our leaders did caused huge numbers of people, all over the hemisphere, to come to the conclusion that the tactics of Che and Fidel were their only hope.

As John F. Kennedy observed(even as he dealt with the Americas in a way that refused to acknowledge the truth of his own observation) ""Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

If we don't like what Fidel did...we need to make sure that no country is stopped from making transformative change through democratic means.

Not too much to ask, really.

A fucking right-wing coup in Venezuela can only improve things at this point...

You don't seem to have ever noticed it has been Democrats who have been called "commies", "pinkos", "commie lovers", "useful idiots", etc., etc. since the 1950's by US fascists.

Democrats don't really foam at the mouth thinking about leftists. Never have.

None of the Fidel haters want to discuss what the right wing Cubans did to our interests here.

Ugly things Bush vs Gore and so many of them were involved with violence. These were our "friends".

Cuba hasn't instigated violence.

Car Bombings, murders of all kinds, using their radio stations to "out" political enemies, giving out their names, addresses, phone numbers, etc. for listeners who might want to terrorize them, blowing up businesses owned by their political enemies, their homes, cars, etc., etc., etc.

This was what they did to enjoy themselves after they got here from Cuba after the people of Cuba rebelled against their brutal racist society.

They also turned South Florida politics into a sewer for so many years, tainted elections known across the country by sane, sober people who stay conscious long enough to read/hear the news.

Considering what the US has done to Cuba all these decades, it seems downright freakish when these idiots squeal about what a "threat" they believe Cuba is to the U.S. Unbelievable!

Last edited Mon Dec 5, 2016, 06:36 PM - Edit history (1)

Did Castro have some good qualities? Sure... Were they completely overshadowed by his bad qualities? Of course...

Does me saying this mean I want the Batistas back in charge? No

Leftist dictators bad, right-wing dictators good. We have overthrown duly elected governments in favor of right-wing dictators because those governments were too lefty.