The truth on the other hand, is the unshakable reality that has driven every sanction, every sabotage attempt, and every assassination plot since 1959: Cuba is a threat only to an idea. It is a threat to the imperial doctrine that a small, poor nation in America’s ‘backyard’ must not be allowed to choose socialism, to provide free healthcare and education, and homes to live without the permission of Washington.
For this sin of self-determination, the crime of building a society where capital is not god, Cuba has been punished with the most enduring economic siege in modern history. This is not an ‘embargo’, which I consider to be a sterile, political term. It is a total blockade, designed to constrict and cripple. It is enforced by a plethora of laws with names like the Helms-Burton Act, which terrorises foreign companies from trading with the Island and allows the US to seize ships in international waters. Its goal, as US politician Robert Torricelli once admitted, was to…
‘Wreak havoc’.
What the US is doing right now? It goes further back…
Ebough damage has been done in these last decades. This is dangerously becoming a full blown USA genocide of the Cuban people. It’s unacceptable.
If I were a super perfect president of the United States, I would ask Cuba if they want to join the Union, with all rights and benefits that goes with being a State. This offer also would be extended to territories like Puerto Rico.
IMO, Cuba and other island States have a special potential - as places to try out UBI, universal healthcare, free education at all levels, and other reforms, that can’t be easily implemented in isolation* on the mainland.
*Specifically, I want to try different variations of implementation, to find the best ‘recipe’ for an improved democratic socialism. Islands are good for A/B/C testing, I wager.
Why the fuck would they want to do that?
Even an Americans self fulfillment fantasy of being the bestest us president that ever was involves the annexation of Cuba. You guys got a problem.
I said “offer to join the union”. If rejected, then America should simply end embargoes and all of that crap. In any case, I suspect you have an issue, because you don’t want Cuba to have opportunities of any kind. People are being hurt on Cuba, because they have been denied prosperity by selfish dickheads who can’t think of a better future.
Your comments here are soaked in US chauvinism.
Cuba is already sovereign. It does not need to be “invited” into the empire that has spent over 60 years trying to strangle it. Treating another nation as a potential US “state” or “test lab” is naked colonial thinking.
Also calling the islands places for “A/B testing” social policy is grotesque. You’re talking about real people, not sandbox populations. Cuba already guarantees universal healthcare, free education at all levels, housing rights, and food subsidies despite being under one of the longest economic sieges in modern history. The US can’t even provide those basics to its own working class.
The blockade isn’t some abstract policy disagreement. It blocks fuel, medicine, banking access, shipping insurance, medical equipment, and even disaster relief. It’s collective punishment imposed by the United States. Every year almost the entire world votes at the UN to end it. Washington ignores them.
To add to this Puerto Rico is not some inspiring example of US “opportunity.” Puerto Rico is a US colony with no voting representation in Congress, crushed by debt, austerity, and privatization imposed by Washington. If that’s your model, it’s an indictment of your beliefs.
And finally Cuba does not need Amerikkkans to teach it socialism. Cuba built a functioning public health system, biotech sector, disaster response model, and mass literacy campaign while under siege something the US ruling class hasn’t even properly accomplished for its own despite ruling most of the world with a bloodied iron fist.
If you actually cared about Cubans, you’d drop the annexation fantasies. Your grotesque idea of “testing grounds.” and ridiculous imperial “offers.”
I have a feeling that your hypernationalism isn’t to help people, but rather to lash out at the United States. You don’t look any different from the Republicans in my nation.
You’re completely lost. If I were to guess, you’re getting some kind of benefit from psychologically transferring qualities that you see in America to yourself, and then taking criticism of America as a personal threat. Since we’re analyzing each other.
Where have I ever been hyper nationalist or even nationalist at all? You just don’t want to contend with the fact that you’re pro imperialism and colonialism and an outright chauvinist as long as it has good pr.
Oh, so just like how trump offered Canada and Greenland to join the union. Get you some of that self awareness mate
My thought process is very different from the Orange Man, thank you very much. While I obviously would have to ask experts in this hypothetical scenario about what resources former territories and Cuba would need, my focus is three things:
1: Allow these lands to become prosperous for their people’s benefit. This is regardless of whether they become part of the Union as States, or as independent countries. People should live a decent life. Either way, mutual trade is a keystone.
2: Try out different structures of authority for resources and services in each different socialist State. Boring but important stuff, like how many departments are needed to distribute resources, checks and balances, anti-corruption measures, ect. Assuming a presidency of two terms, it is only 8 precious years to figure out a good way forward. Thus, A/B/C testing.
3: If a good model of practical social democracy is developed, try to spread it, and standardize the socialism for the testing States.
I would ask Cuba if they want to join the Union
And you’d receive a universal and resounding “no”. Cuba is its own independent country, with its culture and its ideals, much better than the USA. If you were a “super perfect” US president you’d be better off remodeling the USA to be more akin to Cuba lmao
Where do you think remodeling gets started? Having the US being jealous of Cuba’s prosperity would do much to help convince the states to become better.
That should be done with internal propaganda, Cuba will never join the US.
Jesus fuck, read the room. NO COUNTRY WANTS THAT.
How does your position help Cuba?
By not making it an imperialist conquest by a dying empire. It helps by not dragging Cuba down. It helps by letting Cuba dictate it’s own fate, and not by a bunch of feudalist technocrats. It helps by not having to have Cubans eat the psychic damage caused by become complicit with an evil regime that’s ok with committing genocide if it makes a rich asshole slightly richer. It helps by not having it be ruled by a narcissistic psychopathic pudding brained man-baby, who believes he is the smartest person in the world, but is so incompetent at everything, he could fuck up a cheese sandwich.
Jesus fuck… why would anyone want to join that shithole.
“Your position?” Dude. My position is that suggesting annexation of Cuba is incredibly tone deaf and generally offensive. My position isn’t meant to directly help or harm Cuba, it’s meant to protect objectivity, which of course helps all good faith actors.
I had no problem with Cuba. Nice place to visit in winter. No Americans.
British and Soviets had their famines in India, Ireland and Ukraine. Americans need their own Holodomor
Soviets didn’t have a “famine in Ukraine”, they had a famine in the Soviet Union caused by the need for extremely rapid industrialization started in 1929. If it hadn’t been for the rapid industrialization (which hinged on moving field laborers to factories in cities and was funded with the only product they could export: grain), the soviets would have lost WW2 and tens of millions more of people would have died.
The famine disproportionately affected Ukraine (and other agriculturally strong places in southern Russia and Kazakhstan), but the industrialization also disproportionately benefitted Ukrainians by liberating them from Nazism and saving tens of millions of their lives from Nazi extermination.
If you want some good insight on the soviet famine of the early thirties, I suggest you read Robert B. Allen’s “Farm to Factory”, it makes a very good economic analysis of it.
yeah they had a famine in the soviet union, but the ukranians starved to death in millions
Yes, due to the particularities of agriculture in Ukraine, not due to ethnic or imperialist reasons, so it’s not comparable to India or Ireland
yeah there was no way to deliver food there, especially not from foreign countries that offered aid. also not possible to let people leave
The “holodomor” is Nazi Banderite propaganda. There was a famine in an area that was prone to famine for centuries prior. It was not targeted at Ukraine, it also affected Kazakhstan and western Russia. It was also the last time they had a famine.
They had one more after WW2 but this one is never mentioned in western media because “nazis deliberately causing starvation by destroying half of USSR agriculture and murdering millions of Ukrainians, Belarussians and Russians” is going against western narrations.
Yeah I probably should have specified last natural famine. Even then kulaks worsened it beyond what it should have been through burning crops and slaughtering livestock.
There was also a famine in the 30s in Kazakhstan, not just Ukraine. A similar number of people died.
“People in socialist countries starve because we starve them”
Why the quotes?
I’m saying the US basically says this.
For those who say it’s a hoax, look up videos of any Cuban on YouTube and turn on the subtitles.
I hope and pray that the Cuban people stand together and persevere. May this be the final nail in the empire of evil.
I guess this is the best approach.
And because all of this shit they have been throwing on the Cuba, they can claim socialism doesn’t work.
And yet Cuba has higher life expectancy than the US lmfao
I would say resisting 66 years of unceasing hybrid warfare from the biggest superpower in the world right next door is pretty good sign of resilient and working system.
That’s definitely a bonus for them
Cuba is terrible; its own allies have turned their backs on it and dug its own grave.
Cuba is absolutely gorgeous, and it’s a shame that the conservatives have been lying about what we are doing, at their directives for the last 50 years.
I think, based on conversations I have with people in real life and read online, that the people in the US haven’t challenged the 60 years of propaganda about Cuba, and believe it a totalitarian nightmare dictatorship.
I have a close friend who went to Cuba for ecological research (did you know they still have intact reefs) a few years ago, and when they would tell people they were going to Cuba, the most common reaction was a fearful “that’s scary” and a confused, almost accusatory “why”.
I don’t think they realize that everyone else can just go to Cuba, it’s only the blue US passport and a bunch of old white guys, and probably now more Cuban Americans, with their fear of communism and land reform stopping them from enjoying a very nice bottle of state owned rum and an experience of how other people live.
I’m glad other countries have been stepping up to help the people there, the Cuban people deserve happy and comfortable lives, and we clearly don’t have the appetite to stop starving them of that right now. Until we shake that propagandized view, I don’t imagine that will change either.
Obama I think floated an end to the shitbaggery during his second term. Like anything he proposed, it was stonewalled.
I think he actually lifted the travel embargo and aimed to normalize relations but the bazillionaires and still angry exbazillionaire diaspora faces started melting so 2016 was the end of that.
Add that to the endless list of war crimes that shithole empire did/does to rest of the world.
What what whaaaa??? I thought the US was a force for supreme goodness up until the millisecond that Trump became president.
This was most definitely the turning point. And just who were George Dubya, and Clinton, and Reagan, and Nixon, and goddamn Kissinger, and Robert McNamara, and the Dulles Brothers, and all the slave owners who founded the country?
A shining city upon a hill, manifest destiny, exceptionalism. Well-meaning promoters and protectors of democracy forever and always. Just what would the rest of the world do without you?
/s in case anyone actually needs it.
It is essentially genocide.
I don’t agree on this, but I do think it’s shaping up rapidly to become one. We will see in a couple of months, but any tropical cyclone or natural phenomena has a huge destructive potential in Cuba right now.
I don’t know about that. Genocides don’t usually take 80 years, as the population grows. I don’t think that fits the description.
Ok shitlib
This kind of ad hominem is not going to convince undecided people of your view
Not a Lib, loser.
What you say you are doesn’t matter. It’s what you believe and do that decides what you are. And you are running defense for the US genocide using the same tired talking points that are used to deny every genocide.
What we say or do or are doesn’t matter. Your need for strawmen does.
Im not the one conflating decades of “embargo” (still fucking horrendous btw) largely dictated by the economic choices of shipping companies whether to serve cuba or the U.S. (hint: companies that make money will choose the profitable option) with the recent extreme escalations by the Trump admin which are attempting to tighten it into a full blockade (which I shouldn’t need to tell you since they’ve been really fucking overtly vocal about their actions and intentions)
Removed by mod
The Cuban embargo made good political sense to pressure the Soviets when they were trying to use Cuba as a nuclear base to bomb us from, and any country would have done the same, in the face of the same threat.
If you werent a lib you’d know that the US and NATO were the escalating/aggressing party, shitlib.
I do know that, and I also know that the whole thing was over and all bombs removed from both Turkey and Cuba by 1963. The embargo continued to keep Russia from re-arming Cuba, and it worked. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it should have been lifted. Continuing it has been cruel, and dumb, and both Republican and Democrat presidents are guilty.
The Cuban embargo made good political sense to pressure the Soviets when they were trying to use Cuba as a nuclear base to bomb us from, and any country would have done the same, in the face of the same threat.
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yeah the evil Soviets just wanting to bomb us for no good reason. Hey, when did the U.S. try to put nukes in Italy and turkey again? Oh, huh
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Dawg there’s a memo from the office of the secretary for inter american affairs from 1960 detailing the specific plan for the embargo to cause hunger, desperation and consequent counter revolution. Translation: “we’re going to starve Cuba until they do what we command”
The cuban missile crisis wasn’t until two years later. They intensified the embargo FEBRUARY 1962 and the missile crisis didn’t begin until the END of that year. But yeah sure uh the missiles after the fact totally justify an overtly stated goal of starving civilians for political change (hey what’s the definition of terrorism again btw)
going off about MAGA nonsense as if Joe Biden did anything to end the embargo
Oh my god, liberal. Liberal! Liiiiiiibeeeeerrrrraaaaaaallllll! As if your “actually putting missiles in cuba would have justified starving them” statement wasn’t enough confirmation on its own. Christ
Heh-heh, America isn’t the only place with ridiculous propaganda.
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