Maybe now it can become a capitalist democratic republic like Mexico, so that Cuba will be able to pay for the wall President Trump will now build around Florida.
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What have the Cubans ever done to deserve that?
Though I do have a Cuban story, told me by an East German engineer. East Germany had sent Cuba the contents of an entire electronics factory. A year later it was not in production, and the engineer was sent to find out why and sort out the problem.
In order to get to Cuba he could not, of course, fly over Western airspace. He had to travel from Dresden to, ultimately, Vladivostok, thence to N Vietnam, and across the Pacific and Panama to reach Cuba, as it were, from behind. It took a long time.
When he got there he found the problem; the E German five year plan did not align to the Cuban five year plan, so although the factory equipment was still there, wrapped up but rusting in places due to sweating in the tropical heat, the factory building was in the next five year plan and would not be built for several years.
He spent a very nice month on the beach waiting for his return flight to be arranged, and went home to amaze his colleagues with his suntan.
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Let’s hope that the by far longest, most repressive and most deadly dictatorship ever seen in twentieth-century Latin America will ease up and eventually end… admire him or not, justify his actions or not, wonderful as social programs might have been… that’s what he actually founded, and that’s what his brother governs. All those executed, tortured, interned in psychiatric institutions or worse, or drowned at sea aren’t worms, they were human beings. 58-odd years are not a week. Nor the fact that it IS a one party state with prohibitions against any party, press, education or association that is not state-run. Or the fact that Cubans suffered severe restrictions on legal emigration; those residing legally outside of Cuba had for a long time to apply for and renew visa-like permits, from their own country of birth! Let’s also hope that the military, economic and political exploitation of Venezuela ends too.
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There is a long list of bloodletting leaders who has supporters that find that they surpass good and evil. It is some kind of group forming feature in the human mind that makes it easier to disregard ordinary moral and support and participate in deeds that transforms murder into inconprehensible statistics. The enemie is so bad that it can be justified and o how glorious an inspiring he is!
I dont like these kind of mental mechanisms and what they make possible in escalating all kinds of conflicts. Not liking them do sadly do absolutely nothing in making them less effective and stating that the massmurderer were evil dont help for those that find him to be their mass murderer.
He might have been less bad then Batista but that dont make him god. DDR with its opression were less evil than then the former regime but that dont make them good. USA leaders have done manny foolish and evil things but do that make opressors good?
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Is Moscow mourning? And does that mean Trump & co have to as well?
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So when Castro declared “I am a Marxist-Leninist and shall be one until the end of my life”, this was only in response to US attempts to oust him? He had no pre-existing leanings towards authoritarian Communism?
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I don’t know about Cuba, but when Ho Chi Minh lived in London he supported the Labour Party, and he wanted to bring democratic socialism to Vietnam*. Trying to kill people does tend to warp their ideology a bit.
I remember Dan Glazebrook pointing out that of course Assad wasn’t very nice; he was fighting a civil war which had started as a deliberate destablisation of his country by Ba’athist Iraqis. Winston Churchill had chemical weapons all prepared to use against a German invasion in WW2, but that was OK because we were the good guys.
*I didn’t of course know him personally but I have had this from several sources.
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But Churchill was a Good Guy™.
Of course, he was also the man who wrote in a memorandum: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes"
I might a skewed viewpoint, but I unfortunately believe that, a century later, most Western leaders basically share that opinion (simply replace ‘poisoned gas’ with ‘carpet bombing’). What was the nationality of that person who said that the death of 500000 persons, children included, was worth it ?
There are the standards that us ‘plebes’ are supposed to follow and believe in, and then there are the much loftier ideals of our betters. We just have too limited an understanding to really get the big picture.
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I think that means the Cold War is finally over. For real this time. North Korea doesn’t count.
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World War 3 is right now.
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Oh, that’s true. When you put it that way, we’re up to world war whatever right now.
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I’m not sure if it’s more accurate to say if the Cold War never happened or if it will never end, just like the War on Drugs or the War on Terror. I mean, I know people used those things to justify a lot of shit but I don’t think anything was ever done to solve anything and only to make things worse seemingly on purpose.
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Did you read what @TailOfTruth said? They didn’t say that Castro was good, just less bad than Batista. I think that’s an accurate statement. I think that if the US hadn’t treated Castro with hostility, we could have pushed them in the Yugoslavia direction rather than into the waiting arms of the Russians. But we spent years trying to over throw Castro, rather than trying to work with him and soften him up.
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Oh the Cold War had better have happened. I’m not scraping my dissertation at this point! 
I think that there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the Cold War posturing was mutual beneficial to the US and Soviets, because it gave both countries an excuse to throw their weight around globally and gave them both a scary enemy that they could use to justify their foreign and domestic policies. But whether or not it was “real” it was REAL in the sense that it had incredibly real implications for any number of people around the world.
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[quote=“anon61221983, post:36, topic:90138”]
But whether or not it was “real” it was REAL in the sense that it had incredibly real implications for any number of people around the world.
[/quote]I cannot disagree with this even a little. Guess it’s all the wars all the time. Wonder what the next multi-generational conflict will be?
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Dang. He only needed to wait a couple more year to see America’s downfall.
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Isn’t it the ongoing war on terror? If the Cold War was my childhood, my kid knows nothing but the war on terror as the key foreign policy position of the US.
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He got to see Der Trumper elected. Sometimes, you watch the movie previews and realize, as much as you thought you wanted to see it, you actually don’t.
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As far as I can tell, he did both.
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Fidel was the “president” of Cuba in the same way that the Kims were/are “presidents” of North Korea and Ceaușescu was “president” of Romania.
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