Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Cuba: It’s the Morality, Stupid
I was nine when the Bay of Pigs fiasco occurred. We lived in Miami. There were a lot of Cubans in our parish. The Ortega brothers, my friends down the block, were typical. Their father refused to learn much English because (a) he would be going back soon when Castro was gone and (b) it was not macho to look weak by speaking a language that you had not mastered. English was for wives and kids. The boys took judo and were otherwise told to prepare for some undefined moment of conflict that never came.
The Ortega boys had an uncle in training in the Brigade 2506 or whatever that anti-Castro invasion force was called. A lot of kids in Epiphany school knew somebody off in training then. I don’t think it was a very well-kept secret that something was in the works. We were told often in those days that we were “only 90 miles from Cuba” and thus well in range of the Soviet missiles there. Our nuclear attack drills were frequent. We saw all the required movies and training films. The Cuban Missile Crisis was still a year away.
When the invasion started, the news was good. We talked about it in school and included those guys in prayers. The force was supposedly moving inland. Two days later it was over and the invaders were crushed. My clearest memory of that time is of a Cuban third-grader yelling at every kid on the bus that morning that Americans were cowards and whatever other bad names he could think of because we left his father to die on the beach. Then he started crying and his sister and some older girl tried to comfort him. Nobody disagreed with him. It seemed, at the time, that he was right. Nobody spoke at all. Happily for that kid, his father was in the second wave that never left Venezuela or wherever it was they deployed from — but he did not know that his father was safe for a couple of days.
I have never understood defenders of Fidel Castro or his ridiculous sociopath sidekick Che Guevara. I get that feeling clever is a big part of being a leftist and that finding reasons to attack and feel superior to your own culture, country, history, religion etc. is a big part of the gnostic ego trip that is the whole left-wing-progressive-socialist-liberal-whatever experience, but why be so stupid to pretend that a malignant megalomaniac like Fidel Castro is anything other than a monster? Does that prove one’s nuanced geopolitical sophistication? Or just gullibility?
One-fifth of Cubans have fled their country since Castro took control. The only one Castro ever wanted back was Elian Gonzalez, because the kid’s popularity seemed threatening. Cubans are poor, abused, closely-watched, and readily imprisoned … but whatever, health care is free there so that level of political repression is OK, or so I’m told by terribly clever people. (Cuban health care is of such high quality that Fidel went to Europe for treatment when he got cancer.)
Cuba is an economic failure of massive proportions. It no longer has a Soviet sponsor and its current sponsor (Venezuela) has destroyed its own economy (with the help of Cuban expert guidance).
A competent American leader would see an opportunity to finally pressure the regime out of existence instead of giving some final vindication to a monster and propping up his regime a little longer. A lot of innocent people deserve vindication. Even a symbolic capitulation to Castro seems disgraceful, even if all the really enlightened people are applauding it.
Published in General
Perhaps the term “facism” then needs to be re-defined.
No. You’re wrong. Sorry, but you are.
The “government” (depends on which government you’re speaking of in China, i.e. central or local) retains the power to determine wages and hiring practices for those companies which are…state owned. That’s no different from the US.
Not for private companies. Of course, I don’t need to point out that private companies are what is driving China’s economic boom.
Housing? Not really. Chinese housing market is pretty much as free as it is in the US.
Worship? China is the fastest growing spot in the world for Christianity. Its “repression” of Christianity there is similar to what you’ll find in places like Russia, or most other dictatorships who repress any group which isn’t registered and recognized by the state (has nothing to do with communism, but with retaining power).
There’s no wage and price controls in China…anymore than there are in the US.
At its most basic level, can it not be boiled down to a one-party dictatorship combined with private ownership of property on the condition that one enthusiastically submits to The Party?
1. A majority of companies in China are state-owned; not at all relevant to compare the two countries.
2. Chinese house churches are a religious movement of unregistered assemblies of Christians in the People’s Republic of China, which operate independently of the government-run Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) and China Christian Council (CCC) for Protestant groups and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CCPA) and the Chinese Catholic Bishops Council (CCBC) for Catholics. They are also known as the “Underground” Church or the “Unofficial” Church. They are called “house churches” because, as they are not officially registered organizations, they cannot independently own property, and hence they meet in private houses.
Wrong again.
Not quite. There are 282 known state-owned enterprises in the PRC, and …
That’s a really high proportion, but it’s not a majority.
43% of profits? That could be two companies who numerically may appear to be a minority. That’s like saying Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook are merely three companies in the tech industry.
I correct my use of the term *majority* in the sense that it implied numbers of companies, not output or influence.
If there are 282 state-owned enterprises, for those to be the majority would mean that there are fewer than 564 enterprises in total in all of China. That’s clearly not accurate.
1) Obviously the “majority” of companies in China are not state owned. What that link says is that these companies, which represent 35% of the economic activity are companies where the State has a…majority share.
Well, that’s the same thing in France, or Italy or Russia or virtually all European countries (and most Latin American or Asian or African countries).
If that’s the definition of communism…we’re in trouble. Everyone except maybe the Anglo-sphere…is communist.
These companies in China are primarily the natural resource companies, transport, energy and some construction companies. Usually things which in virtually all Third World countries are state owned.
2) The “repression” of Christians you speak of, as I said, is typical of virtually all dictatorial regimes of all economic stripes. The same sort of restrictions are applied in places like Russia, where you have to be a state-approved church to operate. Or in many of the Latin American dictatorships.
It’s something which a) isn’t all “that” serious of a repression, and 2) it’s got nothing to do with communism but everything to do with political control.
I guess not. All your points are that China operates the same way as your average European country where much of the natural-resource and transport industries are state owned…and that it’s got dictatorial tendencies in wanting to control free speech and practice.
But that’s not communism. China abandoned communism long ago.