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’.
America: ill do it again
The fact that there has not been a unified Latin American defence coalition against the US formed is crazy to me. Us in the USA want (and more desperately need) liberation from our leadership.
The fact that there has not been a unified Latin American defence coalition against the US formed is crazy to me.
There has been one. It’s just composed of imperial powers and their corporate proxies.
The defense coalition existed to intercede against slave revolts, anti-colonial nationalism, and Communist uprisings. It has been very successful.
Us in the USA want (and more desperately need) liberation from our leadership.
Join the club
Isn’t that why usa/cia do so much to keep them disablized?
B-b-b-bingo
Wanting and having the will to do what needs doing are different things.
That is true. A significant number of people are though in Minnesota. I am working to spread the GS to other states but I am very far away from Minnesota.
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.
*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.
Dr. Mengele joins the DSA.
I would ask Cuba if they want to join the Union, with all rights and benefits that goes with being a State.
And if they say no you’ll definitely leave them alone after that right?
Also, who do you think Cuba broke free from.
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.
“Latino island dwellers are the perfect guina pigs for me to test my half baked ideas to avoid inconveniencing white people when they fail spectacularly”
Cuba is already democratic socialist. And it’s working very well in spite of how much effort the richest country in the world puts into killing it.
Cuba is already democratic socialist. And it’s working very well in spite of how much effort the richest country in the world puts into killing it.
it’s impressive that they’ve lasted this long
My admiration for the grit, gumption and resilience is boundless.
Nobody sane would want to be part of the US banana republic.
Oh honey. No. That is not how this works.
Why the fuck would they want to do that?
Jesus fuck, read the room. NO COUNTRY WANTS THAT.
How does your position help Cuba?
“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.
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.
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.
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.
How about just ending the embargo?
you people are deluded.
No different than some missionary biblethumper peddling his poison thinking he has something great to offer.
your union can get fucked.
Build a wall around it, stay behind it and leave the world alone.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.
Literally the only thing that has prevented Cuban prosperity is US interference.
This is bait right? I’ve just been caught by a master fisherman right? No way is this for real.
I think your heart is in the right place but your brain needs a few minutes to catch up and slap some sense into it.
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.
Apparently it’s not just your president that’s pudding brained.
The only people that think your country is great are the ones there who have never been anywhere else.
Hypernationalism is when you don’t want to be colony sucked dry by the Wall Street oligarchs 🙄
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.
I don’t like America, at least not the one that I live in. What I want is a better America, based on socialist ideology and direct democracy.
🤨
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.
The problem is that they actually believe their own ~~bullshit ~~ internal propaganda that they are the best at everything.
British and Soviets had their famines in India, Ireland and Ukraine. Americans need their own Holodomor
Fuck off with your holodomor BS
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
so?
Want to blame the evil RuZZians for it like those Banderite nazis do bcs they got their ass kicked? LOLwho else was leading the soviet union? who exported the food out of ukraine? much like in the irish famine?
You have zero knowledge how the SU even worked.
Where do you think Chruchov came from? The clown who gave Russian Crimea to that temporary anomaly.
IDC what you and your nazi friends imagine happened, it’s BS.
Grasping at straws to justify their Russophobia and blatant fascism.
For everyone to see, even today.
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
Food aid did arrive, though insufficient, but as I explained previously, the industrialization hinged on grain exports (the USSR being at the time a preindustrial society meant there was literally nothing else they could export) to import machinery and expertise to kickstart the industrialization. A delay in industrial development due to stopping the grain exports would have directly implied a Nazi victory.
There is absolutely no historical evidence of any intent of hunger against Ukrainians (unlike for example Israeli politicians explicitly discussing starving Palestinians to exterminate them), and the famine also killed millions of ethnic Russians and Central Asians. This is the consensus among contemporary historians.
The Bolsheviks correctly predicted that a delay in industrialization would lead to them being crushed by western imperialist invasion. There’s ample evidence for this even in the Western-edited Wikipedia article on Soviet industrialization:
From a foreign policy point of view, the country was in hostile conditions. According to the leadership of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), there was a high probability of a new war with capitalist states. It is significant that even at the 10th congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1921, Lev Kamenev, the author of the report “About the Soviet Republic Surrounded”, stated that preparations for the Second World War, which had begun in Europe
That was as far as 1921 but they couldn’t industrialize at the time due to the civil war, hence Lenin’s “New Economic Policy” which lasted roughly until 1929. Stalin famously predicted the start of WW2 down to the literal year in which it would happen. From a speech by Stalin in 1929:
We are 50–100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.
This is the reason why the agrarian collectivization was carried out in such a hurried fashion and a famine ensued. There was ample debate about this in the party, but ultimately, the international pressure and threat of invasion was too great, and fortunately the Bolsheviks reacted quickly enough to be able to industrialize.
Between 1929 and 1939 (the eve of WW2), the Soviet Union grew its output by 15% yearly, a miracle unseen in history ever before. Thanks to this industrialization, the Soviets could manufacture the tanks, planes, artillery and rifles necessary to defeat the Nazis, whose explicit purpose was to genocide the entirety of Slavic peoples between Berlin and the Urals. Had it not been for the heroic effort of the Soviet industrialization, sadly a lot of which was brunted by Ukrainians, the Nazis might have won WW2 and genocided the entirety of Ukraine. Glory to the Ukrainian Soviet heroes of WW2 who contributed massively to the defeat of Nazism with their own work and blood.
so they decided the potential industrial progress was worth however many deaths in the ukranian region
not someone i would like to associate with
also, it is a useless thought exercise, but would they have been crushed by the nazis? in the end, it was the winter that they didn’t prepare adequately for, plus the usa sent a bunch of equipment over, maybe they’d have sent more, if neededSo they decided the potential industrial progress
Not potential, measurable and factual, sustained 15% growth in industrial output yearly, with it being the only defense possible against the upcoming imperialist invasion.
was worth however many deaths in the Ukranian region
How many Ukrainians would have been exterminated without the Soviet Union having the capability to manufacture 30.000 T-34 tanks against the Nazi war machine? Answer: all of them.
also, it is a useless thought exercise, but would they have been crushed by the nazis?
Yes, there is absolutely no doubt about this and it’s consensus among economists. A feudal country cannot defeat an industrialized nation bordering its lands if the latter invades it. It was not “winter” winning the war, that’s Napoleon, it was the battle of Stalingrad that resulted in a turning point in the war. The Soviets were THIS close to losing the war, and even in victory, 27 million Soviet citizens died as a consequence of the war.
plus the usa sent a bunch of equipment over, maybe they’d have sent more, if needed
Your speculation is nonsense. The USA did in fact send more equipment to England than to the USSR, and it is the latter that defeated the Nazis (80% of dead Nazi soldiers were killed in the Eastern Front). There is absolutely no doubt possible that the USSR would have been crushed with Blitzkrieg as were Poland and France had it not been for their industrialization efforts in the previous decade, this is the historical consensus. Stop trying to bend reality in a topic in which you’re clearly not well educated.
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.
I had no problem with Cuba. Nice place to visit in winter. No Americans.
“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.
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 dunno, maybe helping to almost end the world in 1962 plays a small part in it.
shit americans say
Maybe study the whole story before writing. From Wikipedia:
In 1961, the U.S. started deploying 15 Jupiter IRBM (intermediate-range ballistic missiles) nuclear missiles near Izmir, Turkey, which directly threatened cities in the western sections of the Soviet Union. These missiles were regarded by President John F. Kennedy as being of questionable strategic value; a nuclear submarine was capable of providing the same cover with both stealth and superior firepower. In the late 1950’s missile technology was well developed in the field of medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs), as opposed to ICBMs (intercontinental-ballistic missiles) which could not be kept in a state of readiness at all times.
MRBMs represented only a small portion of the total American nuclear arsenal, but still much larger than the U.S.S.R.'s. Soviet strategists realized that some nuclear equality could be efficiently reached by placing missiles in Cuba. Soviet MRBMs on Cuban soil, with a range of 2,000 km (1,200 statute miles), could threaten Washington, DC and around half of the U.S. SAC bases (of nuclear-armed bombers), with a flight time of under twenty minutes. In addition, the U.S.'s radar warning systems oriented toward USSR would have provided little warning of a launch from Cuba.
Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had publicly expressed his anger at the Turkish deployment, and regarded the missiles as a personal affront. The deployment of missiles in Cuba - the first time Soviet missiles were moved outside the USSR - is commonly seen as Khrushchev’s direct response to the Turkish missiles.
I am aware of the whole story. It still doesn’t change the fact that they were complicit in almost ending the world. I will say that it doesn’t excuse America’s current behavior.
Less complicit than the USA, and Cuba didn’t play a role in any of the other ways the USA has PERHAPS SUCCESSFULLY ended the world.
What a fascist bootlicking take. Blaming Cuba for the US deploying nuclear weapons on an apocalyptic scale AND STILL FUCKING DEPLOYING THEM DOING TO THIS DAY.
You must really have your head shoved waaay up the eagle’s rotten asshole to come up with something that backwards.
Oh Lord, he broke out fedopedia…
Maybe if the US hadn’t tried to invade Cuba the year before they wouldn’t have requested Soviet assistance. Also maybe the US shouldn’t have placed nukes in Turkey if it didn’t want the soviets to do something similar.
So you support Chinese reclamation of Taiwan
If only Cuba had been the sole player in that saga. Instead of a pawn between the USSR and USA.
True, true, true…
Except for Castro publicly going on about how Russia should have never backed down.
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.
I’ve been to Cuba. Communism rots people’s drive. The US hasn’t helped but their dictatorship and failed political regime is the root of Cuba’s misery
“Autarky doesn’t work” is something that all economists - from the Marxist to the Austrian - agree on. Every country must exchange the commodities and resources it can produce for the ones it can’t. The large countries blessed with large populations and an abundance of resources (USA, Russia, et al) can get away with a bit better. But a small, resource-poor island with a centuries-long history of colonial exploitation? To imply that Cuba’s economic woes stem from anything other than being mostly cut off from international trade strains credulity.
Do people think that criticizing Cuba makes you not a socialist? Is that the kind of life you want for yourself? (Eating from the garbage)
You are blaming the victim of US imperialism.
That makes you similar to Noam Chomsky
What?
Cuba’s president can march with his people in the streets without needing security detail. Our politicians can’t.
Find a YouTube video Subtitles of any cuban In their daily lives
“One of”. This is US history we’re talking about - the bar is in orbit.
