Those of you making defenses of Cuba here are flatly deluded if you make these claims seriously. Cuba was only able to sustain itself with enormous Soviet backi

Those of you making defenses of Cuba here are flatly deluded if you make these claims seriously. Cuba was only able to sustain itself with enormous Soviet backing and this regardless of the economic embargo by the U.S. Once the USSR collapsed, the Cuban government made hurried attempts at introducing partial capital-friendly reforms in certain sectors (especially tourism) which still never really brought major benefit to its people because the rest of the stagnant, suffocating socialist bureaucracy remained in place for most of daily life. I am absolutely no fan of the U.S embargo and think it was a an idiotic disaster in terms of both PR and practical terms, a useful blame point for decades of corrupt, criminally repressive Cuban government propaganda, that allowed that state to conveniently deviate attention away from its own very real failures in trying to stick to ideology in the country. None of this is to even mention the very real dictatorship of one single political party running that country for so long under conditions that simply cannot be compared to those of most democratized countries. To say otherwise of this is a blatant game of whataboutism which normally gets derided on this site but apparently, by what I see in replies to my original comment above, is supported when it comes to Cuba. It's absurd to see so many HNrs, living under largely privileged market friendly conditions and fully enjoying the benefits of the market in their own personal and professional lives, defending the grotesque little experiment in social and economic repression that is Cuba simply because theyre either ideologically fixated on throwing (partially deserved) shit at the US or emotionally sentimental about a country that few of them would want to actually live in as the locals do, for decades on end.