4 ms·

Well, the US has a pretty checkered history regarding Cuba if you're going to talk about altruism. I'd say we've done more to inadvertantly prop up that regime

by jbooth 13y ago

Well, the US has a pretty checkered history regarding Cuba if you're going to talk about altruism. I'd say we've done more to inadvertantly prop up that regime than to undermine it. There are 3 nominally communist countries left in the world, from a high of dozens -- Cuba's one of them, and probably the closest to actually being communist (China and North Korea being technocratic-capitalist and pharaonic, respectively).

morgante 13y ago
Agreed. I definitely don't think we've always had the best policies on Cuba, and also am not entirely convinced Cuba is itself the best target of this sort of effort. But regardless I think the tactics themselves are commendable. Speech, not guns.
- BgSpnnrs 13y ago
  I think a more commendable tactic would be to not stick their oar into sovereign state's business with a mind to ruin their systems of government. I suppose not killing people is commendable, but it is pretty low bar for moral behaviour.
  - bayesianhorse 13y ago
    If you believe in democracy, you can't believe in any "moral right" or legitimacy of a non-democratic government. Castro, Assad, Putin, neither of them has a moral right to run their countries, as only a freely elected government in a human-rights respecting state can have legitimacy. That doesn't mean these leaders don't have "a claim" to power, or that you necessarily have to actively start deposing them. Yet the only reason a democratic government does not depose an antidemocratic government is if it can't do so. And the latter is true for almost all situations. It stops to be true when there is a specific oportunity to improve the situation.
    - gclaramunt 13y ago
      But you need to be careful to discern what's """real""" and what's propaganda. From the outside, I can also paint a bleak picture of US election process (vote fraud, electoral college, gerrymandering) and if I select the correct news, the US have a presidency bordering on dictatorship that's bent on taking basic rights from the population, and a repressive police force. Besides, the qualification of "human-rights respecting state" might be too much if you consider recent (and not so recent) history.
      - bayesianhorse 13y ago
        No democracy ever has been perfect. But You need to apply some serious distortion if you want to say the US is less democratic than Russia. At the very least you have to ignore that there is no opposition in Russia, virtually no dissenting media, virtually no investigative journalism and absolutely legendary corruption. You also need to focus very specifically on "repressive police force", which is easier to do in the US, where the press will hunt down these incidences like sharks will hunt blood in the water. Transparency actually hurts the democratic image of the US, whereas Russia won't ever have these kinds of public scandals...
        gclaramunt 13y ago
        I never claimed that, for sure IMHO a good indication of a healthy democracy is presidency turnaround. But if you want to give the rights for state to intervene in the matters of another, you have to thread VERY carefully: "bring democracy to Irak" didn't work very well and the actual intentions were transparently different. tl, dr: separating a state's geopolitical interests from "helping democracy in other places" is very hard
        bayesianhorse 13y ago
        The Iraq War wasn't about installing democracy. After 9/11 the US was in a shocked, irrational state of mind. I would hope other nations would behave differently given the same situation and power, but I have my doubts about that also. There was a shortage of enemies to punish, so Saddam Hussein was the next best villain. After all, he did not only have weapons of mass destruction previously, but also used them. I actually live in a country where regime change worked emphatically well (Germany). I can't recall any such "regime change" project though were the major intent was to install democracy. In Iraq it was the WMD pretense and a diffuse sense of retaliation. In Libya it was to stop an army from shelling civilian living quarters. Mostly the intention is "just stop killing people, dammit!" And it actually works. You can never say for sure, but for example if Syria is any indication, it worked in Libya. While there are tons of problems in Syria, continued shelling and bombing of civilians isn't one of them any more.
davidw 13y ago
Vietnam is too, in name, but is similar to China, from what I understand. Laos is communist is well, IIRC.
- dublinben 13y ago
  Vietnam and Laos are socialist countries, not communist by any means.
jacobolus 13y ago
To be fair to the Cuban regime, during the period from the 1960s through at least the 1980s, Cuba did better (in terms of health, education, political stability, lack of large-scale violence, (relatively) responsive government, etc.) than most other countries in Latin America or the Caribbean, arguably largely because the US wasn’t able to replace the government with a right-wing dictatorship like the ones that dominated most of the rest of the region. Obviously Castro is no saint, and had no qualms about repressing political dissidents (and I think those on the left in the US and Europe who hold up Cuba or Venezuela as some kind of bastions of freedom are delusional), but on the whole, Cuba actually did reasonably well for itself, especially considering the economic difficulties caused by the U.S. embargo.
- gadders 13y ago
  For that whole period it was heavily subsidised by the USSR.
  - jacobolus 13y ago
    What else were they supposed to do when their next-door superpower blocked all trade, and brought substantial resources to bear on trying to undermine/destroy them? Invasion plots, assassination plots, every kind of wacky propaganda plot you can imagine (fake radio stations, leaflets dropped from planes), financial support for dissident groups, etc. etc. My point was just that regular Cubans actually did alright, much better than US propaganda would have you believe, and better than most of the other states in the region, including those which were heavily subsidized by the US. They could have easily ended up with a fascist police state or a civil war. American policymakers obviously had legitimate reasons to fear anything that seemed like it might further Soviet interests, given the overall climate of the Cold War, and so as someone born in the mid 1980s I find it hard to judge their intentions and actions, after the fact. However, I tend to think that things would have turned out much better overall for everyone involved if we had kept up diplomatic and economic relations with the Castro regime right from the start, instead of basically forcing them into Soviet arms.
  - jbooth 13y ago
    ..and the right-wing juntas up and down latin america were subsidized by the US. Cuba still did better. You could say, "But that's not a fair comparison, the USSR subsidized things that actually helped people in Cuba while the US only funded commando death squads and fruit exporters, of course Cuba had a higher standard of living".. at which point I'd ask you to review what you just wrote.
noahl 13y ago
I realize this may have been an offhand remark in your post, but your description of North Korea as pharaonic is very interesting and something I hadn't thought about before. Do you have any sources comparing North Korea with the government of ancient Egypt, or is that just a comment on the country being built around one person?
- jbooth 13y ago
  Just the whole cult of personality, near-godhood thing.

by jbooth 13y ago

morgante 13y ago

Agreed. I definitely don't think we've always had the best policies on Cuba, and also am not entirely convinced Cuba is itself the best target of this sort of effort. But regardless I think the tactics themselves are commendable. Speech, not guns.

BgSpnnrs 13y ago
I think a more commendable tactic would be to not stick their oar into sovereign state's business with a mind to ruin their systems of government. I suppose not killing people is commendable, but it is pretty low bar for moral behaviour.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  If you believe in democracy, you can't believe in any "moral right" or legitimacy of a non-democratic government. Castro, Assad, Putin, neither of them has a moral right to run their countries, as only a freely elected government in a human-rights respecting state can have legitimacy. That doesn't mean these leaders don't have "a claim" to power, or that you necessarily have to actively start deposing them. Yet the only reason a democratic government does not depose an antidemocratic government is if it can't do so. And the latter is true for almost all situations. It stops to be true when there is a specific oportunity to improve the situation.
  - gclaramunt 13y ago
    But you need to be careful to discern what's """real""" and what's propaganda. From the outside, I can also paint a bleak picture of US election process (vote fraud, electoral college, gerrymandering) and if I select the correct news, the US have a presidency bordering on dictatorship that's bent on taking basic rights from the population, and a repressive police force. Besides, the qualification of "human-rights respecting state" might be too much if you consider recent (and not so recent) history.
    - bayesianhorse 13y ago
      No democracy ever has been perfect. But You need to apply some serious distortion if you want to say the US is less democratic than Russia. At the very least you have to ignore that there is no opposition in Russia, virtually no dissenting media, virtually no investigative journalism and absolutely legendary corruption. You also need to focus very specifically on "repressive police force", which is easier to do in the US, where the press will hunt down these incidences like sharks will hunt blood in the water. Transparency actually hurts the democratic image of the US, whereas Russia won't ever have these kinds of public scandals...
      - gclaramunt 13y ago
        I never claimed that, for sure IMHO a good indication of a healthy democracy is presidency turnaround. But if you want to give the rights for state to intervene in the matters of another, you have to thread VERY carefully: "bring democracy to Irak" didn't work very well and the actual intentions were transparently different. tl, dr: separating a state's geopolitical interests from "helping democracy in other places" is very hard
        bayesianhorse 13y ago
        The Iraq War wasn't about installing democracy. After 9/11 the US was in a shocked, irrational state of mind. I would hope other nations would behave differently given the same situation and power, but I have my doubts about that also. There was a shortage of enemies to punish, so Saddam Hussein was the next best villain. After all, he did not only have weapons of mass destruction previously, but also used them. I actually live in a country where regime change worked emphatically well (Germany). I can't recall any such "regime change" project though were the major intent was to install democracy. In Iraq it was the WMD pretense and a diffuse sense of retaliation. In Libya it was to stop an army from shelling civilian living quarters. Mostly the intention is "just stop killing people, dammit!" And it actually works. You can never say for sure, but for example if Syria is any indication, it worked in Libya. While there are tons of problems in Syria, continued shelling and bombing of civilians isn't one of them any more.

davidw 13y ago

Vietnam is too, in name, but is similar to China, from what I understand. Laos is communist is well, IIRC.

dublinben 13y ago
Vietnam and Laos are socialist countries, not communist by any means.

jacobolus 13y ago

To be fair to the Cuban regime, during the period from the 1960s through at least the 1980s, Cuba did better (in terms of health, education, political stability, lack of large-scale violence, (relatively) responsive government, etc.) than most other countries in Latin America or the Caribbean, arguably largely because the US wasn’t able to replace the government with a right-wing dictatorship like the ones that dominated most of the rest of the region. Obviously Castro is no saint, and had no qualms about repressing political dissidents (and I think those on the left in the US and Europe who hold up Cuba or Venezuela as some kind of bastions of freedom are delusional), but on the whole, Cuba actually did reasonably well for itself, especially considering the economic difficulties caused by the U.S. embargo.

gadders 13y ago
For that whole period it was heavily subsidised by the USSR.
- jacobolus 13y ago
  What else were they supposed to do when their next-door superpower blocked all trade, and brought substantial resources to bear on trying to undermine/destroy them? Invasion plots, assassination plots, every kind of wacky propaganda plot you can imagine (fake radio stations, leaflets dropped from planes), financial support for dissident groups, etc. etc. My point was just that regular Cubans actually did alright, much better than US propaganda would have you believe, and better than most of the other states in the region, including those which were heavily subsidized by the US. They could have easily ended up with a fascist police state or a civil war. American policymakers obviously had legitimate reasons to fear anything that seemed like it might further Soviet interests, given the overall climate of the Cold War, and so as someone born in the mid 1980s I find it hard to judge their intentions and actions, after the fact. However, I tend to think that things would have turned out much better overall for everyone involved if we had kept up diplomatic and economic relations with the Castro regime right from the start, instead of basically forcing them into Soviet arms.
- jbooth 13y ago
  ..and the right-wing juntas up and down latin america were subsidized by the US. Cuba still did better. You could say, "But that's not a fair comparison, the USSR subsidized things that actually helped people in Cuba while the US only funded commando death squads and fruit exporters, of course Cuba had a higher standard of living".. at which point I'd ask you to review what you just wrote.

noahl 13y ago

I realize this may have been an offhand remark in your post, but your description of North Korea as pharaonic is very interesting and something I hadn't thought about before. Do you have any sources comparing North Korea with the government of ancient Egypt, or is that just a comment on the country being built around one person?

jbooth 13y ago
Just the whole cult of personality, near-godhood thing.