They need to trade with people for money and food. If their closest neighbor let them trade, I guarantee Cuba would be saying the opposite to stay on the good side of them. But since they can't, and Russia was iced out of the world economy pretty much, of course they'd extend a hand to Cuba, which is similarly iced out. And of course they'd accept for the good of their people. Who knows if they actually care how that war goes, they're just a tiny island nation that wants to be able to eat and survive. We can't blame them for making decisions under this kind of duress.
Even your own article shows how bad faith that argument is, but it's from the US so it makes sense. The US media loves their propaganda. It points out that US laws makes it impossible for a ship to dock at the US for 180 days after docking at Cuba. They regularly fine and sanction foreign countries and foreign companies when dealing with Cubans. A ton of banks have stopped dealing with Cuba because of this. They also prevent US used goods from being traded to Cuba when it is a part of a bigger thing, so if any part of a foreign made product has something from the US, it can't be traded over. This ends up including tons of medical equipment, farming equipment, scientific equipment, etc. There's a bunch of other laws, too. Family members can't even wire over remittances any more without paying tons of money.
Of course they can't force other companies but they make it nearly impossible for companies to trade with the US and Cuba if they want to make a profit. Especially considering the power of the dollar in the US market. That's what makes it a blockade. Saying a bunch of these facts while giving a "false" is extremely bad faith. It's like saying Trump didn't cause January 6th because he didn't tell people directly to riot. It's a very surface reading.
The Cuban government of course isn't perfect, but that doesn't detract from the power the US has on them. Plus, when the Republicans went to protest on January 6th it was against their own government, but that doesn't mean they had a point. Most of the protests were from power failures, long food and medicine lines, and Covid lock downs, which is partly the government's fault and partly the US's for making them a poor country and restricting their ability to get medicine and make food through the sanctions I mentioned above. And partly just Covid's fault, every country dealt with that. But the President went out and talked with them, and the country ended up making some economic reforms recently. That's more than I've seen the US ever do in response to protests lol. If we really want to know if the Cuban government is so terrible, you should support the US lifting the embargo so the government can ruin itself. It obviously hasn't destroyed the government over the last 60 years anyway.
By the same logic the entire planet should’ve already sanctioned and embargoed Israel and the US for doing the exact same thing as Russia but I don’t see that happening.
Cuba is saying these things because Russia is one of the few countries still willing to trade with them. They’ve been hit by crippling sanctions for decades for doing nothing wrong and they’re trying to find ways to survive. End the embargo and you’ll see that change quite quickly.
Maynarkh said that Cuba has been under US sanctions, and also that US sanctions started the Japan-US conflict during WWII. Gravitas has misinterpreted it, intentionally or not, for it to mean that US sanctions on Cuba started the Japan-US war.
The person said Cuba being under US sanctions is what caused the Pacific side of WWII. What they were TRYING to say is that Cuba has been under sanctions, and that OTHER, unrelated sanctions were the cause of the Pacific side of WWII; but they used indefinite pronouns and therefor had a confusing sentence.
The joke is about the unintended interpretation of the sentence.
Mmm… sort of, but that telling of the situation also skips over a ton of context.
US sanctions against Imperial Japan were the proximate casus belli for the IJN attack Pearl Harbor and causing the US to actually join the war, but the sanctions were absolutely precipitated by other things Japan was doing in the years leading up to Pearl Harbor. The trade sanctions were enacted in more or less direct response to Imperial Japanese military adventurism and rather flagrant violations of the Washington Naval Treaty (though it is definitely fair to say that the force limitations imposed by the treaty were somewhat onerous and biased towards established powers, if considered in a geopolitical vacuum).
Not one downvoter has explained how you can have privately and corporate-owned luxury resorts in a non-capitalist country. Can't imagine why.
Oooh I love this false dichotomy because if every government that allows for any form of corporate owned private property to exist is capitalist then we can ascribe basically all evil to capitalism. Heck even the USSR was capitalist by your logic. Capitalists did the holodomor.
That is in no way the same. Have you even read Capital or the Communist Manifesto?
Getting pissed off at me that private ownership and profit are not things that belong in communism is silly. Based on that argument, the U.S. isn't a socialist country, it's a communist one.
I'm a different person. I'm not pissed, I'm just making casual conversation.
Communism and capitalism as they were described in the literature both died in 93 and 08 respectively.
Just like the current capitalist system in the US cannot function without massive subsidies and bailouts, I'd imagine the current communist systems require private enterprises to keep parts of their system functioning.
Every mode of production contains elements of its former, according to Marx, exactly because we have to understand human development and our current paradigm through historical materialism.
To say that a communist nation cannot contain capitalist components as its non fundamental mode of production is as stupid as saying Britain is not capitalist because they have a king.
That is not in any way the same. Either there are hierarchies of power and the people at the top get rich and corporations make profits or it’s a communist country. You can’t have it both ways no matter how much you want to take the concept of communality from communism.
You need to be able to distinguish between a country's primary mode of production versus the scope of its total. A "perfect" capitalist or communist one will likely never exist, at least not any time soon. You cannot ignore the aspects of the basis on which development happens.
And yet there were plenty of other communist countries in the 20th century that did not have any corporations making profits. Why is Cuba special in this regard?
Well I sure as hell know that corporations and profit don't belong with whatever definition of communism you seem to be suggestion.
The very idea that allowing corporate profits are still communist as long as it's not the primary mode of production is nonsense. If every single thing in Cuba was privatized apart from its tobacco industry, its largest export, would you say it was still a communist country?
I'm also curious how you'll defend Cuba's three largest exports being addictive, carcinogenic substances. And yes, to pre-empt the whataboutism, I know the U.S. exports a whole lot of toxic shit, but we're not talking about the U.S.
I never said anything about Cuba specifically. I made a general remark that an analysis of whether a country is socialist or not has to concern itself with what is the primary mode of production. I also wanted to bring in historical materialism because you seemed to talk about Marx without (seemingly) understanding this very important part of his contributions.
To be clear, my position was, and still is, that I find your analysis faulty, regardless of what I think would be the right conclusion on Cuba being communist.
Pretty easily, actually. Socialist states don't exist in a vacuum, they need money for trade and resources like every one else. This reality is why all actual socialist ideologies are globalist in ambition btw. It doesn't do your socialized industry any good if you have to buy your materials from a slave mine.
Ideology alone won't buy Cuba medicine, or industrial tools. The fact is that the hemisphere they're in is dominated by America and capitalism is something you either work around or starve under.
It'd be nice if Cuba could have afforded to build the resorts as worker co-ops or whatever but it's an economic miracle that they exist as a nation at all with the eternal enmity of America trying to choke them to death for seventy years.
Only a delusional purist won't acknowledge that it takes money and resources to build things, and all the foreign investors want a, you know, investment. Socialism is almost always considered a goal to transition to, and not an absolute requirement to be enacted day one.
Unless you want to live on an anarcho-primitavist farm somewhere anyways, and, honestly, they're the ones most likely to survive this coming collapse so I guess they'll either get the last laugh or die to the raiders like everyone else.
And yet private industry which enriched corporations was not a feature of communist countries in the 20th century. They didn't need to enrich individuals and create profit for private businesses.
Those aren't nationalized resort hotels. Nationalized resort hotels could make lots of money from tourists too.
I tend to agree, but there's a pretty large difference in the resources available to China, Russia, and even Vietnam and North Korea and those available to the island nation of Cuba.
I don't like it, but I also don't like dictatorships, so they're going to do what they're going to do. It's not there isn't plenty of socialist theory that revolves around the idea of transitionary states and regulated liberalization.
