Last Communist city? Pffffffft!!
Posted on 05/13/2014 3:55:45 PM PDT by Hojczyk
I had to lie to get into the country. Customs and immigration officials at Havana’s tiny, dreary José Martí International Airport would have evicted me had they known I was a journalist.
Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished.
Housing is free, too, but so what? Americans can get houses in abandoned parts of Detroit for only $500—which makes them practically free—but no one wants to live in a crumbling house in a gone-to-the-weeds neighborhood. I saw adequate housing in the Cuban countryside, but almost everyone in Havana lives in a Detroit-style wreck, with caved-in roofs, peeling paint, and doors hanging on their hinges at odd angles.
Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they’ll bring in $600 a month—30 times what everyone else gets. “All animals are equal,” George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism, “but some animals are more equal than others.” Only in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class and even the poor outside Cuba.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
In Stalinist Russia conditions were much the same.
But they didn’t have old American cars to work on.
Just look at Detroit. That is what the future has in store for you!
The powers to be want to turn the US into a third world wasteland, solely for exploiting the intrinsic wealth of the land, like colonial times of old.
We've come full circle; now the colonial oligarchs have come home to roost, and their ambitions include the US, Mexico, and Canada.
Our federal government has less legitimacy than Venezuela or Zimbabwe for that matter.
That's what happens when you sell your soul and sell your country out to the highest bidder. In the end, all of those worthless dollars will not save you from a certain, horrible death.
Not that much better In Putin’s dump
The heretic must be destroyed. Cuba is a workers paradise with free stuff for everyone.
bm
good point
“Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, would be appalled by the misery endured by Cuba’s ordinary citizens and shocked by the relatively luxurious lifestyles of those who keep the poor down by force”
Bull. Marx and Engels would have been pretty satisfied with the consequences of marxism as long as they were among the elites whose rules didnt apply to them.
He overstates the physical decay of the city — it’s not that bad, and that photo is highly selective — but not the condition of its citizens. And the elites do live in luxury, and send their families to hospitals in Europe when they get sick. On top of which it’s highly racist — heavily black population and almost none in the government. Oh, and that not-allowed-to-leave thing.
Another thought — he’s absolutely right that Cuba had a thriving middle class and thriving economy in the 50’s. But the populace absolutely wanted to get rid of Batista, because corruption had invaded everyday life and because civil freedoms had been suspended, and Castro had huge popular support, because he told them what they wanted to hear — that there would be freedom of the press, honest elections and transparency of government. A million people turned out to cheer him the night he marched in Havana after the war, in a genuine outpouring of support and excitement. But alas, there was just one catch: he was lying the whole time. The secret communist government began meeting within the first week, and the murders of the honest rebels began around the same time.
Not necessarily doubting you but I'd like to see the evidence for this. Where are you getting this?
A million people turned out to cheer him the night he marched in Havana after the war...
A million people according to who? Communist sources or trustworthy sources?
But haven’t Michael Moore and Sen. Tom Harkin both sung Cuba’s praises? Didn’t Moore say the Cuban health care is superior to ours and Harkin claimed Cuba’s life expectancy is greater than in the US. Useful idiots.
Quickly coming to America, courtesy of Obama and his liberal nut friends! Guaranteed if Hillary is elected President!
Hard to point to one source as I’ve done years of research on this and spent much time in Cuba, had many conversations with Cubans young and old there and in Miami (where they don’t have to lower their voices and turn the music up louder when they are talking to you.) The tragedy isn’t that he bulldozed an unwilling populace, the tragedy is that they gave their lives for him willingly. Endless footage of people cheering and weeping with joy and embracing the revolutionaries as they came down out of the hills (where they kept themselves safe while others risked their lives). Tad Szulc’s biography is a good source. Even better is Georgie Geyer’s Guerilla Prince because she was a conservative and saw the betrayal with a clear eye, and spent time with Fidel himself without being fooled for a second the way so many other journalists were. The million people or at any rate an enormous crowd is something you can see on archival film — it’s staggering — I’ve stood in the square that the crowd filled, and it could hold an entire city. And not only that — a few white doves flew from seemingly nowhere and landing on Fidel’s shoulders while he was addressing the crowd. One of them stayed there for an hour. A magnificent piece of theater. It took almost a year before people started to catch onto the truth.
The powers that be....
No wonder the Cuban people make the perilous and dangerous journey across the Florida straits to try and live like a human being....
Totten is an excellent self-employed, independent, journalist/photographer. He has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan and, recently, from Thailand. He has a blog under his name where you can read past reports and donate for support.
Last Communist city? Pffffffft!!
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