Cuba’s Big Currency Mistake

A nation of laws, right? The quality of the law is not its only point of potential weakness and legitimacy but also the manner in which it is enforced. Is it an equitable law? Is it equitably enforced? The answer in this case is obvious. It’s not an equitable law and it isn’t and will not be equitably enforced.

https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/editorials/article252763763.html

Gov. DeSantis should have just laid it on the line when a reporter asked about the scores of Cuban-American demonstrators and their supporters who shut down a portion of the Palmetto Expressway in Miami-Dade County.

Instead, he deflected, talking about protesters in Cuba.

Implicit in the question, however, was whether the governor’s vaunted anti-riot law — created in the wake of George Floyd demonstrations — would apply in the case of the demonstrators blocking streets and an expressway in Miami-Dade.

Their cause is righteous, of course — bringing down Cuba’s oppressive and regressive regime.

Florida’s misbegotten anti-riot law leaves even peaceful demonstrators subject to being arrested if a protest is arbitrarily deemed a “riot.” The law explicitly makes blocking a highway a felony offense. Worse, it gives civil legal immunity to people who drive through protesters who are blocking a road — basically, encouraging haters to do just that.

So it’s clear as clear can be. DeSantis and the Batista Cubans believe they own Florida and they are most definitely racists considering the anti-protest laws only apply to blacks and white sympathizers of blacks.

I went to college with these pricks so in case you can’t tell, I hate their guts.

I would suggest that similar lenses should be used to look at any agitation that’s favorably reported by the US and UK MSM. Even if there are legitimate grievances against the government (and there always are), any protesters stupid or evil enough to welcome US intervention in any capacity, given its appalling track record, is a traitor to their respective populace and deserves to be strung up a lamppost as such.

If the Batistas gave a damn about Cubans in Cuba, they could donate money to Cuban or international food relief agencies, which would immediately alleviate suffering of Cubans in economic duress. Instead they are breaking the law and blocking traffic in the USA.

With covid, tourism and foreign exchange are probably down in Cuba. And you have the post Castro and generational transition of power there. Seems like both Biden and Diaz-Canal could have dialed back the Trump era could war by now. Where is Blinken, and is there even a US policy on Cuba at the moment?

Yeah, Cuba has been in a bad place for decades due to the US’s malign influence, but let’s not discount that its elderly, sclerotic leadership also didn’t adjust well to the fall of the Soviet Union. I’m sure a lot of what is happening in Cuba now is US or Miami gusano-instigated, but at the same time that doesn’t mean that the Cuban people don’t have legitimate problems with a bad government, like 99.9% of the planet’s inhabitants. I have something in common with PS, when I was in school getting a B.A. in Spanish after my time in Nicaragua after their revolution I had una profesora gusana Cubana. She would regularly interrupt class to rant and rave about how great Cuba was prior to the revolution, (she stated it was a paradise and everyone including the poor was happy; nobody dared ask her why, then, the revolution against Batista happened?) and fantasize that Castro would be painfully exterminated. Here’s an interesting 2006 article about how foaming at the mouth the Miami crowd are and the glory days when Governor Jeb Bush installed Batista’s grandson as the state’s Attorney General, and they had Miami official holidays (declared by the mayor) to celebrate the likes of Air Cubana terrorist bombers Luis Posada Carriles & Orlando Bosch, who masterminded the killing of 73 (to get the Cuban Olympic fencing team) in a precursor to the 911 WTC attacks. It is amazing the staying power that militant fascism has on some people’s minds . . . Link at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/11/twilight-of-the-assassins/305291/

Well, maybe they’ll get a bit of foreign exchange in the next couple of years from underselling the Pfizer, Moderna etc. crowd. Nothing like an affordable vaccine to a deadly disease to get people doing their level best to get around the blockade.

Hey Mark, I feel that, believe me. They have CDS. What is CDS? Turning the tables on McDonald Trump supporters, and the Batista Cubans are Trump supporters, CDS is Castro Derangement Syndrome.

Many if not all of these Batista Cubans were and are schooled by the Jesuits. Belen is a Jesuit school. My college was aJesuit college and some kind of intelligence pitstop. Oswald came to speak at my college before that fateful day in November 1963 and Patricia Krenwinkel was a student there.

The irony is, Castro himself was schooled by the Jesuits. They created their very own Golem that turned on them. I guess I’m a Golem of sorts too, to them at least. The poor kid charity case that refused to serve their wealthy sons and daughters. That was the purpose of their charity. To make me a glorified servant to their superior privilege. The priests had a particular penchant for the charity cases. We were fair game. Vulnerable. Beholden. They figured a certain percentage were easy targets of their predation for this reason.

I travelled in Cuba during the Obama thaw and I understood the two-currency scheme as a key component of their strategy for using tourism as a principal source of foreign exchange, but it was ritually scorned by many Cubans I spoke to. And, as PS says, the scheme as a whole had turned the social hierarchy of the economy up side down, as a rickshaw diver (yes they have those) could easily earn more than a doctor.

Spreading out the opportunities to earn tourist dollars was pacifying the country though, giving many people opportunities to exercise their ambition and escape to some extent the poverty. Cuba did not seem to me a happy country.

Cuban exiles in Miami talk up the line that the Government in Cuba is corrupt and oppressive. Cubans in Cuba at the time I was there seemed to trust that the Government at the top was not corrupt and intended to do good and find solutions, but they also regarded the government as prone to stupid strategies and were wary of the maze of authoritarian restrictions that could envelop an individual locally. I can well imagine that no one was much surprised when going to one currency failed as a policy.

Cuba has struggled terribly. The overthrow of Batista triggered a baby boom, and those boomers are now in charge, but aging rapidly and there are proportionally a lot of them and not so many young people, as the famine post-Soviet-collapse depressed birth rates that never recovered and many among the young seek to emigrate.

The centralization of resource allocation and decision-making mean that lots of problems are neglected while a few are addressed effectively and some badly. Sanctions are blamed but I think communism (informed by legacies of Spanish colonialism in the political imagination) might have something to do with it, for good and ill. Individual initiative is frustrated in many areas, but surprisingly successful in others. One example when I was there was the distribution of “the package” of pirated American and Spanish television programming via USB drives available from local electronics repair guys. On the other hand, in a country of musicians, buying guitar strings was hard and a ballpoint pen difficult.

Cuba is just another country trapped between its neighbors (us) and it’s own history.

Astrid, you need to ease up on your medications.

Jeremy Corbyn show when one ignore liars lying. They don’t go away, they keep lying until they won and you lose. Eventually people believe the liars and you’re discredited. The Gray Zone and Jimmy Dore were absolutely right to defend themselves against slander as hard as possible.

Hugh: I would note that the absence of a US policy on Cuba is all the more remarkable . . .

What can that statement even signify?

The U.S. has a policy toward Cuba, the principles of which have been enacted by Congress in response to pressure from various right-wing elements in business (and organized crime), the anti-commie ideologues and the Cuban exiles.

There is not much of a Left in U.S. politics in regard to any issue, but certainly none willing to articulate any more sophisticated policy than a token anti-war stance or an anti-apartheid view. The Right has learned to cynically use narratives liberal interventionism — that is the ghost of left views on foreign affairs that died when Franco survived the end of the Second World War and when Castro turned out to be a frequently foolish ego maniac.

Having acknowledged that much, what should we make of someone who claims there is no policy? That PMC expertise among the civil service mysteriously fails to fill this alleged vacuum?

It almost doesn’t matter to point out that a policy has a purpose. The US had a Cold War policy toward Cuba but that war ended even before the USSR did in 1991 thirty years ago. You could say that we had an anti-Castro policy after that, but Fidel left office in 2008, thirteen years ago, and died in 2016, 5 years ago. And Raoul is 90 and off the scene. There was a period of some relaxation under Obama. Under Trump the Cold War stance was reinstituted but importantly this was not a Cuba policy but a largely successful effort to buy Cuban-American votes in Florida. Why Biden continues this is nonsensical. It is not like he is going to buy back those votes. And in any case a ploy to win Cuban-American votes under a previous President is at most a Cuban-American policy, not a Cuba policy. So what we have now is a continuation of Trump’s non-policy. My previous point stands. 6 months into the Biden Administration, with all the resources at its disposal, we should have a real Cuba policy by now.

Here’s what Biden calls a success. Here’s what he and his buddies and McDonald Trump and his supporters want for Cuba. And it’s just the tip of the capitalistic iceberg.

https://khn.org/news/article/hospital-trauma-centers-charge-enormous-fees-to-treat-minor-injuries-and-send-people-home/

Tens of thousands of times a year, hospitals charge enormously expensive trauma alert fees for injuries so minor the patient is never admitted.

In Florida alone, where the number of trauma centers has exploded, hospitals charged such fees more than 13,000 times in 2019 even though the patient went home the same day, according to a KHN analysis of state data provided by Etienne Pracht, an economist at the University of South Florida. Those cases accounted for more than a quarter of all the state’s trauma team activations that year and were more than double the number of similar cases in 2014, according to an all-payer database of hospital claims kept by Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration.

Florida, you know, where the Batista Cubans reside and hold sway.

That professor Mark spoke of saying, or effectively saying, “our peasants were happy” is serendipitous humor. It reminds me of an old documentary I saw shot in the Deep South, Mississippi in particular, in the early 70s. They were questioning the privileged white southerners about civil rights and without fail all of those who were interviewed would say again and again that civil rights was a failure and no reforms were necessary because, and I kid you not these were the exact words, “our negores were happy.”

See any similarities? I do.

Biden and the Dems will lose the the House in 2022 and the Senate will gain GOP seats. Both chambers will be further radicalized. The Dems will lose the Executive in 2024. I, for one, will refuse my vote this time. Biden and the Dems are already failures and Biden’s smug remark yeesterday about socialism seals the deal.

My wife’s friend from Cuba, her mother, did not vote prior to Obama. She voted for Obama because of one single issue. America’s revised stance towards Cuba. She appreciated Obama’s policy. So she voted for him and has voted Dem ever since. She will not be voting in the 2022 and 2024 elections. She is withholding her vote. She is representative of a whole lot of people who voted Dem this past election and the election before for various reasons. Biden has obliterated all of that good will and benefit of the doubt bequeathed him.

US foreign affairs are so toxic and rancid because they are not governed by any foreign policy consideration. We were in Afghanistan for 20 years for no particular reason with no goal or endgame in sight. We support Israel not because it’s an ally, it’s not, but because of a Jewish lobby and whacked out evangelicals in this country. How we act or do not act toward Cuba is governed by Cuban-American fascists in Florida.

As progressives, maybe it would be more useful, certainly saner, to discuss what a realistic American foreign policy should look like.

“it is like we are being led by not very bright 6-year olds”

We are being led by not-so-bright but definitely mentally ill and endlessly greedy overseers. There are few politicians actually running the US and it’s “policy”. The politicians and their appointees are … beholden.

“We were in Afghanistan for 20 years for no particular reason with no goal or endgame in sight. “

This isn’t quite true. The goal was to make a lot of money for a few, and that mission was accomplished. Even their exit strategy was very similar to other economic exit strategies: once the money mill winds down, remove anything of real value, then leave behind the detritus and a complete mess that someone else will have to clean up). This is the playbook, for centuries.

And I’m with PS that Cuba is more successful than many other countries, but the reason behind the “policy/lack of policy” there is the same as it has always been, right out of the same playbook. Our insane overlords cannot stand seeing real estate not being developed for a quick buck, land that hasn’t been despoiled, and a population that isn’t enslaved and constantly tithing to their overlords.

Back when I was in grad school in Florida (the hope and change years) when academics were vying to get on the list to visit Cuba, there was also much talk about how the Havana waterfront was going to be developed (the usual hotel chains) right down to which and what would be where. Those plans have now been sitting around a long time, and the costs paid for those plans probably rankles. The lucky academics meanwhile, were raving about the intact ecosystems and general well being of the land and the health of the people. It was described at that time as paradise, the land that time forgot, but in reality served as an indictment of neoliberalism and insane economic policy.

And on “uber” leaders: having just one is the main problem. No one person can (or should) make all decisions, nor any continuous and finite group. All problems should be solved by whoever has the most experience and success solving that particular problem, at scale. There are alternatives, in other words, but the absolute worst choice is a single leader and his “advisors” making all the decisions. It should be obvious what that evolves into over time.

I can provide two topics for debate from which to choose:

1. When was that time when Americas foreign policy was the least toxic for other nations and its own workers?

2. Would Elon Musk be a good foreign policy advisor to the President?

FDR’s good neighbor policy was probably the only time US forum policy might be described as something other than “extremely toxic”.

Hugh, I wasn’t the one who went on and on with US State Department line on Uighur genocide and the Crimean, and never responded to ample evidence that debunked those lies. You’re the Hasbarist and not a skillful one at that.

It may be an artifact of my computer and/or programming, but it looks like the BlogRoll that Ian Welsh used to have is gone now. If it went the way of the Raven for forced-redesign reasons then . . . oh well.

So here is something from a blogger I have mentioned before, who seems to think on parallel tracks with Ian Welsh sometimes. His name is Ran Prieur and he seems to be a leaner tougher meaner hippy for today’s leaner tougher meaner times of today.

Here is the thing which caught my eye. . . .

” July 16. Yesterday I had a highly upvoted reddit comment. Anwering the question, “What is the biggest lie you’ve been told by society?” I said, “That success comes from being smart or hard-working. It comes from some combination of luck, social intelligence, and tolerance for lying.”

Of course, as one of the replies points out, “success” isn’t even a good thing to aim for. As American culture defines that word, it means wealth and status in an economic domination system. As long as we all need money to live an adequate life, money is a tool of power-over, a way to make other people do things they would not do, if they didn’t need the money.

One of those things is to validate the world-view of the people above you. As another reply points out, tolerance for lying includes “a willingness to lie for the benefit of people who hold power over you at the expense of yourself.”

The popular myth of “lying” is, “I, who am evil, shall say something I know to be false, for my own advantage, ha ha.” The reality is more like, “Oh shit, if I don’t tell these people what they want to hear, I’ll be in so much trouble.” And then, “So I don’t have to keep track of two things at once, I’ll just tell myself the same thing I’m telling them.”

Now, through the miracle of social media, the universe of tell-them-what-they-want-to-hear has expanded to include all of us — as cringing slaves, crafting our profiles to preserve our delicate status, and also as corrupt dictators, who can always find a voice confirming our comfortable beliefs. ”

I hope that last sentence can be proven not-true, at least on the part of some.
Here is the Ran Prieur link.
http://www.ranprieur.com/

The popular myth of “lying” is, “I, who am evil, shall say something I know to be false, for my own advantage, ha ha.” The reality is more like, “Oh shit, if I don’t tell these people what they want to hear, I’ll be in so much trouble.” And then, “So I don’t have to keep track of two things at once, I’ll just tell myself the same thing I’m telling them.”

Lying is something we all do constantly, with a mix of motivations and to satisfy not just the bosses, but also our peers, friends, family.

Learning to lie to and thru social media (and most especially to and thru the omni-present surveillance apps) is a survival skill. The great tool of privacy is the mask.

The important thing is, Willy, they absolutely don’t care that it is a lie. They don’t care if they get called on it. It’s all about scoring points with their base.

I saw today that Mike Pence said he had had enough of Biden, but nothing about Trump, the guy who raised a mob to off him. If there were no consequences to these clowns being clowns, we would be living in a golden age of comedy.

Not commenting about the “great and good” who are anything but. But individuals in this society must operate in a framework of low social trust, lies, and distortions. This means lying or at least shielding the truth carefully. In my experience, liberals PMCers are prejudiced and bigoted in a much more complete way than MAGAites, though I admit this may be because MAGAites don’t trust me enough to speak their full opinions in front of me.

It’s basically Prisoner’s dilemma game where not only do we not have mechanisms to enforce cooperation of the prisoners, they’re constantly told that the other prisoner is THE enemy and must be sold out at all cost. We’re marking ourselves up, trying to make ourselves as attractive as possible, in the hope that we’ll be the house slaves and the ones destined for salt mines or victims in wild beast fights.