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I've visited Cuba on a Canadian passport. Aside from the beautiful beaches the thing that struck me most was the desperate poverty of people living in shacks ou

• johnward 12y ago
  Other Caribbean countries are like that without embargoes though. The first time I went to the dominican I saw all kinds of shacks made out of whatever they could fine/steal. The second time they built a new highway that avoided this and basically you ran through fields. I was disappointed because I wanted to show my family the real DR.
  • toyg 12y ago
    Caribbean countries are typical areas that lost their economic identity and are now basically overpopulated. The reasons people moved (or rather were dragged) there, are no more; and they would probably do fine if only they could go back to pre-1500 population levels (or thereabout) and just live off tourism. But they can't, so they will keep struggling to find new economic identities. The Cuban revolution could ignore this for 30 years, because of their ties with the USSR and emphasis on redistribution of existing resources; and then the old problems came back once the USSR crumbled. Now they are trying to build an economic identity around healthcare and education, and without the embargo (which stops technology from entering the country) they might actually succeed in ways that will hopefully inspire other islands.
    • seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Cuba is also much bigger than the typical Caribbean country. They could have an actual diversified economy eventually.
• quonn 12y ago
  This might have been your impression, coming straight from Canada. I visited Cuba a decade ago, having traveled in Latin America for > 1 year. I can't say that Cuba seemed to be worse off than many of these other countries.
  • mladenkovacevic 12y ago
    This is true as well. I've seen worse conditions in both Costa Rica (a relatively successful country) and El Salvador.
    • trhway 12y ago
      exactly. The Latin America is filled with countries there people are poor and powerless and oppressed by their government and non-government organizations (criminal and drug cartels, guerrillas, left and right paramilitaries, etc...) As Cuba was an ally of USSR such policies were reasonable back then. The USSR had disappeared 23 years ago though...
    • pmelendez 12y ago
      >" I've seen worse conditions in both Costa Rica ... " It depends on your definition of worse. In Cuba there was a general shortage of several basic items (toilet paper, eggs, meat... etc.) were most people (the only exception is the political class) have to face rationing and long lines. As far as I know that is inexistent in Costa Rica.
      • dragonwriter 12y ago
        Inadequate overall wealth to supply basic needs leads to lines and rationing in socialist systems, and just pricing goods out of the reach of non-elites in basically capitalist systems, so the symptoms look a bit difference but the substance is much the same.
        • pmelendez 12y ago
          Except when it is not. In Venezuela we are facing similar problems and even when people have the money you can't buy what you need, not even if you are on a elite. It has more to do with the incompetence in economic areas rather than a capacity of making wealth.
• themartorana 12y ago
  It's the same in India and other countries I've visited. Trade alone won't help. I realize India and Cuba are apples and oranges, but my point is that significant trade doesn't necessarily trickle down to the poorest. That said, I do hope it does help some people in Cuba who have fallen victim to unnecessary stresses caused by the embargo.
  • Florin_Andrei 12y ago
    > my point is that significant trade doesn't necessarily trickle down to the poorest Nothing trickles down to the poorest, spontaneously, almost anywhere in the world.
    • mudil 12y ago
      That's absolutely not true. People live better across the world today than they lived 50 or even 20 years ago. I read statistics somewhere that people in some obscure African country today (can't recall the name) have a living standards of Finland of 20 years ago. Think about this: the major health issue nowadays across the world is obesity, not hunger.
      • Florin_Andrei 12y ago
        You're talking about the longest-term possible scale, which is called progress. We were talking about everything below that scale.
      • afterburner 12y ago
        The key word was "spontaneously". You have to make sure the money gets there.
        • BugBrother 12y ago
          I'm hellbanned (too easily trollable) so you probably won't see this, but I recommend an article by Krugman which changed my world view: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1997/03/in_praise_of_cheap_labor.html http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...
• mladenkovacevic 12y ago
  There have been good things happening in Cuba before this announcement such as issuing private business licenses and allowing people to sell their homes (instead of the old bartering system).
• mathattack 12y ago
  When you start from such a low base, there is enormous room for growth. The question is what can they export? Cigars? Medical personnel?
  • dmckeon 12y ago
    Baseball players.
  • EC1 12y ago
    Beautiful women.
  • glup 12y ago
    One of the lasting myths emerging from American rhetoric is that Cuba is starting from a low base. In fact the per capita GDP (as well as quality of life) is approximately on par with Panama and far exceeds the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, and Nicaragua. Tourism will remain the major source of foreign currency, but I think this change will lead to further development in pharmaceuticals and telecom.
    • willholloway 12y ago
      Cubans enjoy greater economic and medical security under socialism than their counterparts in capitalist neighboring countries, even without subsidies from Russia and even with a strict embargo with the US. The country is surprisingly politically free for a tiny nation facing an existential threat from a hostile super power that has invaded, attempted to assassinate it's leader, and funded militants dead set on violent revolution for decades. American leadership immediately resorted to torture and illegal domestic surveillance when faced with the loss of two skyscrapers and 3,000 lives from an enemy that is more like an annoying gnat than an existential threat. Cuba is a success story for socialism, and that is why US policy has sought to punish it, and to make it fail. The US did not want a successful socialist nation in it's sphere of influence, it gives the other nations subject to the Monroe doctrine ideas.
      • refurb 12y ago
• soperj 12y ago
  I felt the same way visiting San Francisco, the abject poverty of the people downtown outside $400 a night hotels is just incredible.
  • sehr 12y ago
    Not to mention the billions of dollars literally surrounding them.
  • calbear81 12y ago
    It's because we don't criminalize homelessness as aggressively as other major cities and the homeless population is concentrated near downtown where the SROs and social services are located. Keep in mind that it's generally not simply poverty but mental illness or a history of abuse/violence that separates the homeless here vs. the working poor in the favelas and slums of the third world.
    • k-mcgrady 12y ago
      >> "It's because we don't criminalize homelessness as aggressively as other major cities" I don't think that matters - the op's point still stands. Do you think criminalising homelessness solves the problem? It just (poorly) hides it. There may be a different between the 'working' poor and the mentally ill that you point out but I'd be willing to bet the mentally ill aren't left to live on the street and fend for themselves in Cuba.
      • calbear81 12y ago
        I was pointing out a difference between the reasons for poverty (mental illness, etc.) between the homeless and people who live in poverty in third world countries (political/socio-economic oppression, etc.). I don't believe in criminalizing homelessness as it's a public health issue but I would contest the opinion that it poorly hides it. Look at any thread about New Yorkers complaining about SF and count how many times they talk about how the streets of New York have so many less homeless people. Of course, they probably don't understand the reasons very well (Rudolph Giulianis war on the homeless, etc.) but it certainly seems effective at hiding it when you either lock up homeless, force them to go underground and out of sight, or buy them a bus ticket to sunny California.
• xyahoo 12y ago
  On the other hand: - average life expectancy in Cuba is almost the same as the USA (and higher than Mexico, Belize, Bahamas, Brazil, etc.). - literacy rate in Cuba is higher than that in the USA - Physicians per 10,000 people: Cuba has 67, USA has 24 In the Ebola crisis, Cuba has been leading from the front.
  • pdeuchler 12y ago
    Comparing statistics from small, homogeneous populations to statistics from larger, heterogeneous populations is fraught with peril. Doubly so for metrics on education and health. (I like to call this the Scandinavian Fallacy) As engineers we would never compare uptime statistics from a small, niche startup serving a couple thousand people to uptime statistics from, say, Google. Why do we immediately ignore these principles outside of engineering? Edit: wording
    • tomp 12y ago
      I'd expect the uptime of Google to be better than the uptime of a niche startup.
    • Hello71 12y ago
      small, niche startups usually have poor uptime on their services. we commend them if they have a year up (hell, if they still exist after a year), but criticize Google for being down once every few years. therefore, if you want to bring in the analogy of startups and Google, it should be even more impressive that small countries (viz. people in small countries, viz. Cuba) live longer than Google (viz. people in large countries, viz. United States).
      • EpicEng 12y ago
        No, because the specific topics at hand are not comparable (service uptime and, say, physicians per capita). The analogy was meant only to illustrate the fact that you cannot (should not) directly compare statistics from such different entities without attempting to control for the variables.
    • 12y ago
• wizzzzzy 12y ago
  I visited Cuba a month or so ago and one thing that struck me was the way a general lack of wealth didn't manifest it's self in a way in you'd associate with impoverished people in developed countries. The quality of the health and education systems are tangible and one of the biggest points of contention from the people I spoke to seemed to be the lack of internet.
  • pmelendez 12y ago
    >"The quality of the health and education systems are tangible " I will be very careful with that statement. Cuba government is very good at propaganda and making people to think that. In Venezuela we have a first hand experience about that since there is a lot of "collaboration" between both countries (basically oil in exchange of medical and education services). The result is a lot of cases about medical malpractices. Also education is very opinionated with a strong emphasis in political indoctrination.
• xster 12y ago
  I'm also not sure whether the flooding of subsidized US agricultural products will benefit the poorest in Cuba. Take Haiti for instance that went from self sufficiency to a net importer of rice when local producers can't compete with US subsidies.
  • IB885588 12y ago
    How was that for people who buy food, though? You have to look at the whole system, not just at one group that might lose out.
  • pistle 12y ago
    That's theoretically a good thing. If it costs less to eat rice from the US, then that capital can be put to use in other ways. The problem can be an existing large imbalance in income producing resources. If rice agriculture is the only thing available, then wealth imbalance can/will increase and power dynamics start looking like oil or natural resource rich countries. If, on the other hand, people are able to eek out improved standards of living, in general, with savings on food costs, they can increase health and education spending and get into a virtuous cycle of increased living standards. There's a bigger context necessary.
• jcmoscon 12y ago
  It's because socialism works!!!
• peckrob 12y ago
  > Aside from the beautiful beaches the thing that struck me most was the desperate poverty of people living in shacks outside the 5 star resorts. This is, unfortunately, not a problem unique to Cuba. I had this very same reaction when my wife and I vacationed in Jamaica. To get to this lush, tropical all-inclusive resort, you spend two hours riding in a minibus across bumpy barely-paved roads through some of the most abject poverty I've witnessed anywhere. It was very difficult to reconcile the insulated world of endless food and finely manicured lawns inside the resort with the world you witness just outside its gates.
• anthony_barker 12y ago
  Same thing in any of the big Caribbean islands: Jamaica, DR / Haiti. Trade with the US for DR has not helped much - US dumps Agro products (Powdered milk, meat) and bans Sugar. http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c2470.html#2014 http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c2470.html#2014