Cuba's Fidel Castro dies.

[Vladimir Putin]

Unlike those surly neo-cons who want to see the Communists rubbed into the dirt without being given a moment's sympathy, Obama took the right path by offering a gradual improvement in relations, to take a stage by stage approach to normalizing Cuban-American relations without it appearing that Cuba will collapse on its knees and Americans sweep in to sweep up the remains. One doubts that Trump, if he becomes President will be as clever or diplomatic, one just has to wait and see.

I predict Trump will throw everything Obama accomplished with Cuba out the window, we'll end up breaking diplomatic relations with them and going back to square one in U.S.-Cuba relations. Trump will make demands Cuba will not be willing to fulfill.

[hippifried]

Stavros,
It was a specific question about the people who stayed. You know. As in did not leave. Didn't abandon their homes or businesses. I know there may be some racial tensions, but please, don't try to make it sound like here or ANY place in Europe. It's irrelevant.

Between the first 25 and the last 25 years of the 20th, there's 50 years of. "HUH?".16 or so under Fidel. So, "poorer" by what standard, &how much? It only makes sense that a small developing country would struggle under an economic blockade. So how much of that "poorer" can really be put on Castro? By the '50s, the only industries were sugar, tourism, gambling, & cigars. Inherited the healthcare system? Really? I'm going to need some serious sourcing on that. But how about education? Gonna give Batista&the Mafia credit for that too?

So the question still remains. Drinking rum and Coca Cola working for the Yankee dollar or the last 50?

Vladimir Putin,
President Trump will have power to fuck up US foreign policy, but can he really surround himself with that much stupid? I don't worry about him as much as Ryan destroying social security and Medicare. Maybe Atlas will shrug him all the way off the planet.

[broncofan]

Isn't this just like saying the Ayatollahs in Iran have done a great job for their people because some think they're better than Pahlavi? Is the only relevant metric of his legacy whether he was better than the man he supplanted? Shouldn't history judge him based on the options he had? Namely, not to install himself as dictator for life, murder thousands of dissidents and send tens of thousands fleeing as refugees. That's a sticking point for me. And none of this segmenting the world into good guys and bad guys, communists and capitalists, western imperialists and the indigenous changes how those actions should be interpreted. I read Sean Penn's Castro hagiography and at one point I honestly thought he was gonna say you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

[broncofan]

As we're still discussing this I read, on the prestigious wikipedia no less, that the Castro regime during the 60's had a revolutionary social hygiene policy where "fraudulent sodomitic writers" and "effeminate dancers" were locked up. What is it with cruel dictators and their wonderful euphemisms. I think he should have left them alone and gone after the homos. Yeah, I'm going out on a limb here and say stuff like this is not helpful to his legacy.

[Stavros]

Stavros,
It was a specific question about the people who stayed. You know. As in did not leave. Didn't abandon their homes or businesses. I know there may be some racial tensions, but please, don't try to make it sound like here or ANY place in Europe. It's irrelevant.

Between the first 25 and the last 25 years of the 20th, there's 50 years of. "HUH?".16 or so under Fidel. So, "poorer" by what standard, &how much? It only makes sense that a small developing country would struggle under an economic blockade. So how much of that "poorer" can really be put on Castro? By the '50s, the only industries were sugar, tourism, gambling, & cigars. Inherited the healthcare system? Really? I'm going to need some serious sourcing on that. But how about education? Gonna give Batista&the Mafia credit for that too?

So the question still remains. Drinking rum and Coca Cola working for the Yankee dollar or the last 50?

Vladimir Putin,
President Trump will have power to fuck up US foreign policy, but can he really surround himself with that much stupid? I don't worry about him as much as Ryan destroying social security and Medicare. Maybe Atlas will shrug him all the way off the planet.

Hippifried, we can agree that the obvious difficulty for Cuba was trying to function when most of the world would not trade with it. Nevertheless, the blockade and the aims of the revolution did not necessarily mean that Cuba had to become a one-party dictatorship, it was an explicit choice that Castro made to reject democracy in favour of 'unity' -unit as defined by him and his party. He ridiculed the west where states might have 100 parties, and said Cuba did not follow Gorbachev's models of reform because " we would have divided ourselves into ten fractions and would have begun a great struggle for power...we would have self-destructed...' -yet this statement reveals the lack of unity in Cuba that Castro himself was aware of, and is also why in 1968 he defended the USSR's intervention in Czechoslovakia to prevent "capitalism and counter-revolution".
http://www.isreview.org/issues/54/castro.shtml

It is simply not the case that Cuba could not have functioned in a democracy, because it had done so before Batista seized power in the military coup in 1933 before returning Cuba to democratic elections which he won in 1940 with the support of the Communist Party, and in the period 1940-44 enacted social and labour reforms -not surprising given that the syndicalist movement had been powerful across Latin America since the last quarter of the 19th century. Batista moved to the US and was disappointed to rank third in the Presidential elections of 1952 and seems to have decided he was the best man for the job and with US support seized power before the elections were held. But here is a curious comparison, not just the personalized form of rule based on a small elite group in the military and the economy, but because the health care system already existed, a key indicator of health such as infant mortality under Batista deteriotated under Castro, with the exception being the claim that Cuba under Castro has had some of the highest abortion rates in the world with the claim that this is often a decision made by the state rather than by the mother.
Castro may indeed have expanded opportunities in health care, and created many more physicians than was the case before, but many work abroad, are paid low wages which require them to take on extra work, and the Cuban health care system is divided into three layers -for fee-paying foreigners (very good), party and state officials (excellent), and the rest (not so good). Thus, the infant mortality rate under Batista ranked Cuba 13th in the world whereas these days it is around 40. As for wages, wage rates in Cuba were higher before the Cuban revolution, in part because of the earlier good relations Batista had developed with the Unions with Communist Party support, but stagnated under Castro so in terms of income, most Cubans have been worse off under Castro.
-sources
-Bruce Bueno de Mesquita The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behaviour is Almost Always Good Politics (2011, Chapter 5 'Getting and Spending' pp101-126

Some other issues. Castro's Cuba got off to a bad start with Franco's Spain, but after a spat with the Spanish Ambassador in 1960, Cuba revamped its relations with Spain so that the critique of Falangist politics that had been standard in Cuba, and the fact that Cuba, per capita sent more fighters to Spain in the civil war than any other country was forgotten as from 1960 until Franco's death the Cuban press offered no criticism of Spain.

The last is the letter that a young Castro wrote to FDR to congratulate him on winning the election in 1940 and asking him to send him $10, as recounted by Archie Brown in The Rise and Fall of Communism (The Bodley Head, 2009,p295) "because I have not seen a ten dollars bill American and I would like to have one of them". He got a thank you letter in reply from the State Department, but no $10 bill.

Meyer Lansky is rumoured to have lost $100m from his casinos and brothels when Castro seized power, that may be where the problems mounted up in Batista's last years, but it is beyond doubt that in Cuba, one dictatorship handed over to another, and that history tells us Dictatorships in the long term cause more problems than they solve.

[flabbybody]

I predict Trump will throw everything Obama accomplished with Cuba out the window, we'll end up breaking diplomatic relations with them and going back to square one in U.S.-Cuba relations. Trump will make demands Cuba will not be willing to fulfill.

Let's start with requiring Cuban government hand over Joanne Chesimard, the person convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper in 1977. She's enjoyed political asylum from Castro clan for decades. I would hope Trump insists that she be returned to serve the rest of her life sentence, something Obama apparently doesn't give a fuck about

[broncofan]

Let's start with requiring Cuban government hand over Joanne Chesimard, the person convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper in 1977. She's enjoyed political asylum from Castro clan for decades.

This is the sort of thing that a binary view of the world leads to. Joanne Chesimard committed a cold blooded murder of a wholly innocent person and because she was a prisoner of the enemy and member of a revolutionary movement, she is seen by Castro as having killed a symbolic oppressor (in reality an innocent man performing a noble public function). Castro could have sent her back to the country that had jurisdiction over her crimes even without having formal diplomatic relations with the U.S.

The fact that he would harbor a murderer as an act of defiance against the putative oppressor could not more amply demonstrate what a corrupted individual Castro was.

[blackchubby38]

Stavros,
It was a specific question about the people who stayed. You know. As in did not leave. Didn't abandon their homes or businesses. I know there may be some racial tensions, but please, don't try to make it sound like here or ANY place in Europe. It's irrelevant.

Between the first 25 and the last 25 years of the 20th, there's 50 years of. "HUH?".16 or so under Fidel. So, "poorer" by what standard, &how much? It only makes sense that a small developing country would struggle under an economic blockade. So how much of that "poorer" can really be put on Castro? By the '50s, the only industries were sugar, tourism, gambling, & cigars. Inherited the healthcare system? Really? I'm going to need some serious sourcing on that. But how about education? Gonna give Batista&the Mafia credit for that too?

So the question still remains. Drinking rum and Coca Cola working for the Yankee dollar or the last 50?

Vladimir Putin,
President Trump will have power to fuck up US foreign policy, but can he really surround himself with that much stupid? I don't worry about him as much as Ryan destroying social security and Medicare. Maybe Atlas will shrug him all the way off the planet.

I will say that for the people that stayed, the last 50 years have been worse than the ones that preceded it. Not saying that under Batista or the mafia Cuba was the land of milk and honey mind you. But your quality of life takes a huge hit when you have to live under an authoritarian regime. No matter if that regime is Communist, a military dictatorship, or one that is based on Islamic fundamentalism.

Now the question becomes is the country in question's "choice" of government in the best interests of the United States and the rest of the Western world. During the height of the Cold War, I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who thought it was a good idea to have normal relations with Cuba. But after the fall of Communism and as the United States started normalizing relations with countries from around the world (one of them being Vietnam mind you), the time had come to do the same with Cuba. But for whatever reason, it never happened.

Only time will tell if the steps that President Obama took in normalizing relations with Cuba will be reversed by President Trump. If those steps did play a part in Trump winning Florida, then I guess will be back to business as usual. I will then once again ask the Cuban-Americans who didn't like what Obama did, "What would you like the United States to do to put an end to the Castros' reign"?

[Stavros]

I will say that for the people that stayed, the last 50 years have been worse than the ones that preceded it. Not saying that under Batista or the mafia Cuba was the land of milk and honey mind you. But your quality of life takes a huge hit when you have to live under an authoritarian regime. No matter if that regime is Communist, a military dictatorship, or one that is based on Islamic fundamentalism.
Now the question becomes is the country in question's "choice" of government in the best interests of the United States and the rest of the Western world. During the height of the Cold War, I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone who thought it was a good idea to have normal relations with Cuba. But after the fall of Communism and as the United States started normalizing relations with countries from around the world (one of them being Vietnam mind you), the time had come to do the same with Cuba. But for whatever reason, it never happened.
Only time will tell if the steps that President Obama took in normalizing relations with Cuba will be reversed by President Trump. If those steps did play a part in Trump winning Florida, then I guess will be back to business as usual. I will then once again ask the Cuban-Americans who didn't like what Obama did, "What would you like the United States to do to put an end to the Castros' reign"?

As I suggested in my earlier post, Cuba was always going to suffer from the sanctions imposed upon it, even though some managed to get round them (eg, South Africa, Iraq). There are some curious parallels here, for one of the worst cases of a revolutionary state being utterly impoverished as a result of its rupture with colonial rule is also in the Caribbean -namely, Haiti. The extent to which Napoleon extracted revenge on Haiti crippled it for most of the 19th century and may have played a role in the creation of a venal class of soldiers and politicians who had no faith in their own country believing Toussaint was part of the problem not the solution. Haiti became one of the poorest and most corrupt states in the world, not just the Caribbean.
Moreover, if you also throw into the mix the New Jewel Movement (=Joint Endeavour for Welfare Education and Liberation, f.1973) and their so-called revolution in 1979 you have in the Caribbean a toxic mixture of criminality (these days dope), Religion, and revolutionary politics. And I must say one of the most interesting but frustrating people I once knew who had been close to Maurice Bishop not only could not see what they did wrong, but had the most bitter and aggressive attitudes toward the US that I have ever encountered outside the Middle East. When I suggested that the Caribbean islands be seen as splinters or fragments or satellites of an enormous US economy sucking them in, and it was futile to resist the allure of the US economy, this person was utterly indignant, and instead of seeing an opportunity to trade freely with the USA to make the money that would develop what is after all a small island, they ranted on about independence and capitalism and so on.

So there seems to be a wealth of bad feelings in US-Caribbean relations which affects the Independence lobby as well as the Miami Club of vicious anti-communists, and there doesn't seem to be much of a bridge between the two. And yet, if President Clinton could arrange for Yitzhak Shamir to shake hands on a peace deal on the White House lawn with Yasser Arafat, and if the former Quarter-Master of the Provisional IRA some years after the Good Friday Agreement of 1997 was keen to welcomed the Queen to Stormont Castle with a smile and a handshake, you must ask what it is about Cuba that sends both sides into such a frenzy, not least because the Cold War is over and communism is as dead as George Washington and probably more irrelevant than that other Revolutionary Leader.

The tragedy would be that Obama blazed a trail toward the rapprochement with Cuba, and Trump finds a way to claim any credit for the normalization of relations, whatever that means -or walks away as he claims he will with the Iran Deal. But either way, it is not the business of the US to decide how Cubans organise their politics, that alone is the proverbial 'red rag to a bull'.