DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: Christians4LessGvt on May 08, 2015, 07:01:08 PM
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You Will Not Like Cuba
Media Hype Sells Product That Does Not Exist
LUIS H. BALL MAY 6, 2015
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Behind the intense propaganda, Cuba is nothing more than a country in ruins. (Flickr).
During the early days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, several national media outlets in the United States published articles referring to East Germany as "the most advanced of the Eastern European economies," vaunting its bright future after communism as the country, we were told, possessed "advanced industries" in optics and a highly productive workforce. Soon afterwards it became clear that the authors of these articles had foolishly believed the lies spread by Communist East Germany's vaunted propaganda machine.+
The reality was starkly different. East German factories were only good to be used as scrap metal for the modern smelters of West German industrial giants such as Krupp or Thyssen. There was zero advanced technology in East Germany; the country's infrastructure was comparable to that of a poor Third-World nation; the pollution of the cities was terrifying; and most of the countryside had turned into a giant hazardous waste dump.
Twenty five years later, East Germany remains poorer than the western side of the country, which never lived under communism. It will probably take another 25 years before the damage caused by decades of rule by a thuggish, murderous, totalitarian communist clique can be fully reversed.
One wonders how supposedly professional newsmen who were assigned by their publications to cover that part of the world could have been so blind and so wrong. Without doubt, some praised the supposed East German paradise with careful and well-thought-out lines, designed to hide their true political leanings. Others were evidently fooled by ignoring a fact well known to anybody who has lived in a police state: nobody dares to tell the truth.
The well-intentioned and honest reporters actually believed what they were being told by "the man on the street," who was always full of praise for his country, even if he knew better. Years of living with the East German secret police, the infamous Stasi, had inculcated into everyone the fear of telling the truth, particularly to a foreigner. Vaclav Havel, the late hero and former president of the Czech Republic put it best: "The first victim of communism is the truth."
They make great efforts to fool as many people as possible, beginning with gullible journalists.
Reading Time and Newsweek magazines a few weeks ago, I was surprised to see the East German case magnified by a factor of 10. These reporters would have us believe that Cuba is a paradise waiting to be discovered. Their articles are full of quotes from Cubans who praise their country and speak wonders of the changes to come.
Unfortunately, these same articles forget to mention that Cuba's version of the Stasi, the feared G2, has not been dismantled and that, unlike Germany in 1989, the Communist Party regime is still in power. Can one truly believe these stories from people quoted by name by US journalists visiting the island?
The truth is that Cuba today is the poorest country in the Americas, poorer than Haiti. Its per-capita income is less than that of Honduras, the small Central American country that has the world's highest murder rate. Cubans today would be suffering from mass starvation if the country were not receiving upwards of US$7 billion per year from their allies in the Venezuelan government.
Cuba manufactures nothing and produces nothing, except cigars and small quantities of rum. Its once vaunted sugar industry, the world's largest before the communist takeover, has been completely destroyed, to the extent that Cuba has become a net importer of sugar. There is not even enough sugar produced in Cuba for its own meager, and rationed, domestic consumption.
The happy tourist that arrives in this paradise being promoted by all the main media outlets in the United States will find the world's highest concentration of prostitutes, as women are forced to sell their bodies to live a better life and obtain precious hard currency. They will find no toy stores, no supermarkets, no hardware stores and, of course, no jewelry stores.
It is not because Cuba was such a backward country before the revolution that none of this exists. On the contrary, Cuba had more modern supermarkets relative to its population than the United States in 1958, as it had great department stores and world famous jewelers. None of this will be evident to the tourist however.
Remember, this is not Berlin after the fall of the Wall; this is Berlin before!
As Time magazine points out in its promotional guide disguised as a news article, there is no crime in Cuba, as there was no crime in the streets of Moscow under Stalin or in Berlin during Nazi rule. Is it not that great news for the tourist? The regime is so efficient that there is absolutely zero risk to the camera-toting visitor!
Maybe those readers who plan to visit this Caribbean paradise would like to know something that Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times have omitted: their phone conversations will be bugged, and possibly they will be secretly filmed in their hotel rooms. Remember, this is not Berlin after the fall of the Wall; this is Berlin before!
Twenty years ago, Fidel Castro began to promote his imprisoned island to foreign tourists. Canadian and Spanish tourists initially poured in. Eventually, however, word got out that Cuba was not much fun.
Today, they still trickle in, but the boom in tourism that the Castros expected has not materialized. Those who do visit Cuba do so because it is, by far, the cheapest destination in the Caribbean. Those Europeans and Canadians who can pay more ignore Cuba as a destination.
The Castros are counting that with the United States' huge population and enormous tourism industry, they will finally get the revenue they crave. A small fraction of US tourism diverted to Cuba will prove a windfall for their communist cronies and will greatly help them retain their grip on the island. Thus, they make great efforts to fool as many people as possible, beginning with gullible journalists, many of whom fell in love with Marxist utopia while in their Ivy League colleges.
Lastly we should not fail to mention Cuba's vaunted health-care system. That is probably the one positive outcome of the fact that many Americans will indeed visit Cuba in the near future. Once US tourists begin to break their ankles or get food poisoning or appendicitis while on the island, this is one myth "a product of efficient propaganda" that will quickly disappear.
If a traveler reading this article wants a good account of what he can expect to find in Cuba, he can turn to the work of the great Chilean author Jorge Edwards. His book Persona Non Grata, written in 1971 when he was still a avowed Marxist, remains the best account of daily life in Cuba, as in reality nothing has changed since then.
http://panampost.com/luis-henrique-ball/2015/05/06/you-will-not-like-cuba/
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CU4, you do not know shit about Cuba.
You do not speak or read Spanish, you have never been to Cuba, you do not know anyone who has lived in Cuba recently.
I lived tor five years with a woman who came to the US in 2003. She found the US so confusing and difficult a place, she went back to Havana.
There are hundreds of ancient colonial buildings that have been restored, and there are beaches that lure thousands of Canadians and Europeans to Cuba every year.
It is true that the Castros are crappy administrators of the economy, but people are not starving, and were not starving during the period between when the Soviet aid stopped and the Venezuelan oil arrived. You can see this by just looking at pictures of the people.
I have decided not to visit Cuba because it is expensive to see the country due to the lack of decent transportation. It costs more to rent a car and travel in Cuba than in the US. The Dominican Republic has most of the same sorts of scenery and historical areas that Cuba has.
When relations are restored and the embargo is over, I expect that this will improve things in Cuba greatly.
Before the Revolution in Cuba, there was a tiny upper class that ran most of the businesses and perhaps 80% of the population was Third World. Most of what the Miami Cubans tell you is just crap. It is NOT TRUE that there were more supermarkets and all that stuff. There is a very good reason why Fidel was welcomed by most of the population when he took over/
Jorge Edwards was never any sort of real Marxist: the Edwards family was among the wealthiest in Chile, and still is.
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I can't get there quick enough. My grandfather and granduncle is buried there. It's extremely important for me and sis to go thier to at least see thier grave. People forget how many of us here has relatives over there
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There is a lot to see in Cuba. It is not like anywhere else on the planet.
Presently it is pretty expensive, as a flight costs twice as much as to the DR, and prices for tourists are pretty high as well, and then again, I would not want to spend all my time in Havana.
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We'll likely wait till it get easier.
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I can only vouch for the clime.
The weather and beaches of Guantanamo are excellent.
The Cubans I met there were exiles who can never go out, or commuters who had their pay confiscated at the gate. I didn't get much discussion in.
My Father paid a tourists visit to Havana before I was born, said it was good.
Can you run a rollicking town in a Communist country?
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Can you run a rollicking town in a Communist country?
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Ask Sheldon Adelson about that: he has make billions on casinos in Macao, probably the most rollicking town on the entire planet.
Honk Kong does an ample share pof rollicking, as does Shanghai.
In the case of Cuba, I don't think that gambling is anything that Raul wants any part of.
As for other types of rollicking, check out CubaDave.com
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CU4, you do not know shit about Cuba.
Never said I did....but I trust what others say about it.
And I don't trust you because you hate to admit
the Commies have mostly failed.
It's a 3rd World Country....people risk life/limb to flee from.
(http://www.stern.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/assets/images/con_038218.gif)
It's not the US embargo that keeps Cuba poor,
it's the brothers Castro
Written By Bobby Ghosh
Many Americans and Cubans believe that it is the tight noose of the US embargo that keeps the island nation deep in poverty. This narrative suits the regime of Fidel and Raul Castro, because it gives the grim brothers a ready excuse for their inability to give their subjects decent economic opportunities.
But the noose is pretty loose: Most of the world does business with Havana. Although much is made of Cuba?s special relationship with Russia and Venezuela, it trades with most of the countries that would be considered close US allies. With a halfway competent government, Cuba could be a fairly wealthy nation, able to brush off the American embargo as a minor inconvenience.
For a microcosm of the Castros' failure as managers of the Cuban economy, look no further than the tourism industry. The island blessed as it is with gorgeous beaches, warm weather, fantastic music, and terrific rum gets nearly 3 million foreign tourists a year. Nearly a million come from Canada, with the UK, Italy, Spain, and Germany all accounting for large groups.
For a country with 11.25 million people, that?s a lot of tourists. (For comparison: India gets 6.5 million foreign tourists a year for its population of 1.25 billion.)
What?s more, for 20 years most tourist services and imported products in Cuba have been priced in an artificial currency created by the regime to bilk foreigners: the so-called "convertible peso," or CUC, which is pegged 1:1 to the US dollar. Local products use the regular peso, called the CUP, which is 1/25 the value of the tourist version. Though the government announced last year that it would scrap the CUC altogether, that process is moving slowly.
The CUC makes hotels and other tourism services in Cuba absurdly overpriced relative to the real economy. But the businesses that charge in CUC are largely state-owned, so most of the money spent by those 3 million tourists goes to the government's coffers, from where it goes?. who knows where? Certainly, very little reaches ordinary Cubans. And if the dual-currency system is abolished, that won't change unless a lot more businesses end up in private hands.
Thus, lifting the US embargo will certainly increase the number of tourists, but it won?t automatically improve the lot of Cubans. That's not a reason to keep the embargo in place: It hasn?t worked, and should be scrapped. But let's be clear-eyed about what removing the embargo will achieve. While the Castro regime is in place, the answer is: not much.
http://qz.com/401870/frida-kahlos-fashion-hacks-after-50-years-locked-away/
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It remains to be seen what lifting the embargo might do, but it is certainly worth a try.
China is a pretty good example of what Communism has accomplished, actually.
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China is a pretty good example of what Communism has accomplished, actually.
yes exactly....the farther they get from Communism and became pro-business the better off the people have become!
China's Communist Party has increasingly adopted capitalist models for its economy, and its economy has boomed.
Clearly, China has become a more prosperous nation by unleashing private enterprise.
Under Deng Xiaoping's guidance, the Chinese government pretty much abandoned traditional Marxist views. Private ownership was allowed. Today it is obvious how capitalism has permeated Chinese society. People have the right to own private property and conduct businesses privately nowadays.
Chinese Communism will end up on the ash heap of history.
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It remains to be seen what lifting the embargo might do, but it is certainly worth a try.
It should help the Cuban People come into this century in terms of technology and basic goods.
http://www.ibtimes.com/cuba-technology-development-cell-phones-internet-remain-rare-island-stuck-past-1913349
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Chinese Communism will be integrated into the culture and the history, just like ever other movement that has come to China. China absorbs and assimilates every culture and movement that has had a part in its history.
The current leaders of China studied capitalism from a Marxist perspective, adopted what leads to development and threw away what does not, since development and peace is the only way that China can feed itself.
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Do Chinese schoolchildren learn that one of communisms accomplishments is the all time record biggest famine ?
Perhaps success is being able to define "success" and forget failure.
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Uhm china isn't exactly all communist right now if anything it's in a state of capitalist chaos. It has no safety oversight to insure the people do not get harmed. Ex. Baby formula poison
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The Cuban police do not carry guns.
The murder rate in Cuba is below that of all the countries of the Western Hemisphere except Canada and Chile.
China had famines on a regular basis since before Jeezus. If the famine you are talking about was worse, it was only worse in the sense that more people starved, but not worse in the statistics for the percent of the people affected. China has earthquakes and floods on a regular basis that are not due to any political ideology. The Three Gorges Dam will surely prevent flooding once it is complete. No large country has ever developed at such a rapid pace as China. No capilatist country has EVER managed a growth rate of over 7 for 20 years without a bust.
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No capilatist country has EVER managed a growth rate of over 7 for 20 years without a bust.
There has never been a capitalist country with so many consumers and coming from such
a large mass scale disastrous economic starting point of no-where to go but up.
After WWII the Japanese embraced all the new technologies from the West, mainly from the United States.
Be it automobiles, television, or electronics.
The Japanese not only adopted those technologies, but in some cases improved upon them.
It is easy to fill your factories if you don't have to invent or develop new products, you can simply copy them.
We see exactly the same thing happening in China....
China will have a bust, and since China does everything in a big way....lookout when their "bust" happens!
Many say we are already witnessing the end of the Chinese economic miracle.
Dirt cheap labor has built China's economic miracle.
Chinese manufacturing workers sweat all day for a small fraction of the cost of their American or German competitors.
The workers in the "workers paradise" will soon tire of slave labor wages & start demanding more than they already have.
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I have a wife whose parents have lived all their lives in mainland China. The husband worked in a factory, the wife in some neighborhood organization. They have one other daughter, so the 'one child policy' did not seem to apply to them. Since my friend and his wife were married five years ago, they have come to the US to take care of the kids three times. Each time they paid for the ticket. Recently they paid $18,000 to buy their daughter a van. They own their own apartment in Tsing Tao (the city where the beer is brewed) and they retired when they were FIFTY. They saved their money and invested it, I assume very wisely. Who gets to retire at fifty in the US?
So, please, you do not know what the poo you are talking about.
After WWII, the Philippines was a poor country where most of the people were peasants, just like China in 1950. There was no Chairman Mao with disastrous programs like 'the Great Leap Forward' or the 'Cultural Revolution' in the Philippines, just a string of US approved dictators. And what is the Philippines today? A poor country where most of the people are still peasants.
The difference is that the leaders of the PRC understood more about how to use capitalism as a tool for development than the capitalists themselves. If you study the history of the US since Independence, about every seven to ten years there is a bust, a crisis, a recession or a depression. And the US has LOTS more resources than China.
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So, please, you do not know what the poo you are talking about.
Because I read and study a situation and come to a different conclusion than you
doesn't mean it is of lesser value than your opinion because you happen to "know someone from there".
I also know a guy that toured China in 2011 extensively before he started his post-graduate studies
and he said that much of it is a "F-ing Shit Hole" and millions appeared to be living "at least" a century
behind most Western countries....China sits around #90 on the UN Human Development Index!
BTW....Hong Kong who didnt have to live under CommiNuttiness sits at #15 in the world!
Hello Earth To Reality....Hong Kong #15......China around #90.....ANY QUESTIONS?
Freaking #90!.....but XO pretends China and Cuba are oh so great...
when in reality they are freaking shit-holes when taken in full context.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index
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Not really sure developement index is a true measure if a place is a hellhole. Does hawaii have a high rating?
Pretty sure the carribean will have a low index and people leave the regular u.s. To live there.
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China had famines on a regular basis since before Jeezus. If the famine you are talking about was worse, it was only worse in the sense that more people starved,.......
Hahahaha, yes that is exactly how it was worse than any other famine the world has ever known.
Matter of fact , the most amazing part of it is how well the facts were covered over, a greater body count than the war in Europe for WWII and it was a secret for decades.
If there was a worse famine as far as a greater percent of a smaller population, I would still give the prize for worst manager of food to Mao.
Stalin is a strong contender , but the numbers still put Mao in the lead.
What was the rate of economic growth in China from the late Fifties to the middle Seventies?
I really think that China could have been growing this strong two decades earlier , if it had not been busy being very purely communist.
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Not really sure developement index is a true measure if a place is a hellhole.
It is a credible in-depth measure of a country's development.
China has improved from hellhole status but is still a poor country...
Over 300 million Chinese live on less than $2 a day.
Pretty sure the carribean will have a low index and people leave the regular u.s. To live there.
Of course...some can live like a King with a lot less money in some beautiful places
in some part because some of the places you refer to have a large native populations living in poverty.
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But no country has homogenous development with the possible exception of s. Korea and japan. America has people poor enough that a down tree is considered of value.
China has greater manufacturing greater internet than the United States and even if it had star trek level tech but due to the sheer population size it's index will likely not move very much.
Yes the carribean has great poverty but nobody is starving . I've been there and it has alot of free food growing wild there . The climate makes the need for shelter minimul. I joke the. Only reason people work is to pay for the cellphones
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There are some seriously hungry people in the Caribbean. The tourist areas are much more prosperous than the outback. There are lots of bananas, but the rice is imported, and that is the major part of the diet.
China in 1950 had a much greater population than it did at the time of previous famines, that is why more people starved. The point is that people are not starving now, and live is improving for almost everyone.
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Yes , there will never be the largest famine ever in Belieze, because the numbers are not there.
But the point is that Communism was the actual reason for this famine , there was not a food shortage .
The runner up famine in the Soviet Union was happening with no food shortage as well.
Just if you want to bend your opponent , preventing him from eating is effective.
And the point really is that China made no "progress" while Mao was alive , when the government removed just some of its restrictions the progress surge was like the scene when Forrest Gump lost his braces.
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Mao knew how to win a Revolution, he did not know how to manage a country. A country as huge as China probably cannot be micromanaged to the degree that Mao wanted.
The trouble with ideologues is that they always think that ideology is so morally pure that it must be followed rather than actually trying to find a solution that actually WORKS.
The same attitude that caused Mao to fail would cause Republican "Let the Market Rule" advocates to fail. They do not give a shit whether 95% of everything belongs to 1% of the population: they will only claim that that particular 1% is such an assortment of geniuses that they SHOULD own everything, and that to deny them their God-given right to own everything will cause a breakdown and collapse of the economy, because "The Market" knows best.
Ted Cruz is the best example of this ideological point of view, but I doubt that he believes his own bullshit.
He prefers to proclaim "I don't believe that God is through with America yet", as though somehow God is working through him to put the "right people" in that "Shining City on the Hill".
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The trouble with ideologues is that they always think that ideology is so morally pure that it must be followed rather than actually trying to find a solution that actually WORKS.
I like your point there.
The same attitude that caused Mao to fail would cause Republican "Let the Market Rule" advocates to fail. They do not give a shit whether 95% of everything belongs to 1% of the population: they will only claim that that particular 1% is such an assortment of geniuses that they SHOULD own everything, and that to deny them their God-given right to own everything will cause a breakdown and collapse of the economy, because "The Market" knows best.
The government is depending on these people , they can't have many fewer without changing our tax system.
Would you vote for someone who used sheer political pull to lift themselves from the Hoi Poloi to the top of the first percent ?
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The government is NOT depending on these people. Many of them have their money keeping Matt Romney's money company in the Cayman Islands. Romney paid at most 14% of his income in taxes.
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The government is NOT depending on these people. Many of them have their money keeping Matt Romney's money company in the Cayman Islands. Romney paid at most 14% of his income in taxes.
Even though this is true of great fortunes like John Kerry's , most of the income tax is drawn from the upper crust.
If there was no cheating , the government would just take more, but never enough.
I doubt that there is really any government program to kill off its golden goose flock, they probably morn each ones passing. Especially those who have younger wives.
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Taxing people above 14% is not "killing them off". Don;t be absurd.
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Of course not, it is more like milking the heard.
They morn each one that they loose.
Our government would like it fine if it could be much more socialist, and a stronger uppercrust would be the foundation of greater taxation. Great for those on the receiving end but...
It can be overdone!, and the nature of government is greed , so when a famous Frenchman would rather be a Russian perhaps there was too much?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_Depardieu
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/G%C3%A9rard_Depardieu_and_Vladimir_Putin%2C_Sochi%2C_Russia%2C_2013-01-06_1.jpeg)
American citizens are not doing this in any significant number, but this is possible, after all it was escaping bad government that brought half of our ancestors here in the first place.
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It was escaping the endless wars of Europe.
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It was escaping the endless wars of Europe.
Indeed yes.
My ancestors would qualify as "boat people" under the same circumstances in this present day.
There is not as much wilderness to escape to now.