<<Oh come on. Everyone knows people need salt.>>
In certain minimal qualities, probably yes. I'm sure the Cuban diet provides all the salt they need, otherwise you'd see the results showing up as some form of clinical malnutrition. As seasoning for food, that's another question. Salt's basically bad for you and a major factor in coronary artery disease. The government may well have decided that enough is enough.
<<The technology to produce salt from seawater when there are thousands of idle hands is simply due to the fact that the government is incompetent. No sophisticated equipment is required.>>
Incompetent or that they found better uses for the limited amount of construction materials they have than to waste them on salt evaporating ponds. I'm sure that at some point the matter was given due consideration. If the people really want their salt, nothing prevents them from forming collectives, asking the government for materials and designs for salt evaporation ponds and doing it themselves, but somewhere the state priorities for salt have been set. Somehow it ranks somewhere below food, housing, education and health-care. TS.
<< The same thing goes for growing rice and beans, instead of importing them from the US.>>
That's an even easier priorities calculation. The planners figure out the volume of rice and beans needed, the cost of growing and distributing them internally and the cost of bringing them in from the outside and distributing them internally. The costs would include "opportunity costs," i.e., what if instead of growing rice and beans we grew another crop for export on the same land we need for rice and beans? Say a crop like sugar, which can be exported and in effect traded for petroleum? All things considered, it might cost a lot more than you think to grow their own rice and beans.
<<Cuba is very poorly run in many ways. Cubans are better off than Hondurans and Salvadoreans and maybe even some Puerto Ricans, but there is no excuse for Cuba not feeding itself. >>
I'm sure there are inefficiencies there as everywhere. Lots of room for improvement. If the inefficiencies in the Cuban market were as great as the inefficiencies in the capital market in the USA, the whole fucking island would probably be under 300 feet of water by now. Probably better not to even mention the inefficiencies in the US health-care delivery, educational and housing systems in that context.
<<The embargo is a joke, and serves only to support a small number of people here in Miami that ship packages and provide phone service.>>
It's no joke here. There is only one major Canadian mining company that dares to do business in Cuba because of the Helms-Burton Act. If it weren't for the Chinese, there'd be no exploitation of their offshore oil reserves; Canadian firms won't touch them, and the economies of doing it from closer to home are lost. It always strikes me as hilarious when critics of the Cuban system claim that the embargo is totally ineffective, claim that they are against the embargo, and yet year after year, the US government maintains the embargo. Oh, I forgot - - it's all for the benefit of a tiny group of gusanos in Florida, who have the means to direct US foreign policy. They've got their own AIPAC. Right.
<<It serves Raul and Co. as a pretext for their incompetence.>>
Well, whatever incompetence there is - - and I'm sure there has to be some, just like everywhere else - - you gotta admit, it's a great excuse.
