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>"The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore." Anymore?! What, it was working sometime during the past half-century of murders, starvation, political im
by ataggart 16y ago
>"The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore."
Anymore?! What, it was working sometime during the past half-century of murders, starvation, political imprisonment, destruction of wealth and civil liberties, poverty, de facto slavery, and general screwing-over of generations of Cubans to the extent they'd be willing to risk their lives floating in a cardboard box to Florida?
- InclinedPlane 16y agoFor "them" (defined as the speaker and his immediate cronies) it worked just fine.
- jbooth 16y agoIt's actually been a lot nicer to live in Cuba during most of that time than much of the rest of Latin America. Pinochet comes to mind.
- hugh3 16y agoWhat was so bad about Pinochet by South American dictator standards? It's hard to think of any metric under which Pinochet's Chile could be considered worse than Castro's Cuba.
- jbooth 16y agoThat's because you've spent your American life hearing about how Castro is the devil (because Cuba was allied with the USSR!) and hearing very little about Pinochet or any of the rest of Reagan's buddies. I mean look at the comment I responded to, it sounded like they were running gas chambers in Cuba. I'm no defender of communism or non-democratic governments but just because someone wasn't allied with us doesn't necessarily make them more of a monster.
- hugh3 16y agoActually I asked for information on how Pinochet was worse than Castro, not just a repetition of the assertion that he was combined with a false assumption about my nationality. I don't claim to be an expert on South American dictators, but as far as I know the worst thing Pinochet did was to kill and imprison thousands of political dissidents, which is coincidentally also the worst thing that Castro did.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- jbooth 16y agoYou've almost got it. Now think: How come for certain people, whenever Castro comes up we hear about how he was/is some exaggerated monster yet those people don't actually seem concerned about Latin Americans or any other monsters in Latin American history?
- hugh3 16y agoGeez, you're still not answering my question about how one was worse than the other, you're just responding with unwarranted patronization and innuendo about "certain people". I'm the one arguing they're both in the same ballpark. You're the one trying to argue Pinochet was worse.
- rbanffy 16y agoI am not entering a contest to determine which one is worse, but, as far as dictators go, Pinochet was a very, very bad one. IIRC, he was responsible for the death of about 3000 dissidents and the imprisonment and torture of 10 times as many.
- hugh3 16y agoThe sad part is that as far as dictators go that puts him somewhere right around the middle. The "very bad" ones kill hundreds of thousands and the "very very bad" ones kill millions.
- ataggart 16y agoIt's not clear to me what calculus one should use when ranking dystopias, nor the point of such rankings. At least Pinochet is dead.
- hugh3 16y agoPinochet also has the mark in his credit that he eventually handed over power to a democratically elected government, and that Chile is now (by South American standards) a stable, democratic and prosperous country. Who knows what Cuba will be like twenty years after its dictatorship eventually ends?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]