Met a Cuban IT technician today in Brazil, he came with his coworker to install my WiFi modem and stuff.

My dad knows I’m a filthy commie and said “hey he’s from Cuba!” and I promptly said (to remain neutral as to not cause anything) “I’d love to go to Cuba, cause here in Brazil people either say it’s hell on earth or heaven on earth, so I’d like to see it for myself”. The Cuban guy, which was very likeable said “there’s a politician here in Brazil who says the truth: every May 1st we were coerced into partaking in the May Day Parade or else we’d be screwed over in the future, there are many people in poverty, it’s a dictatorship, the military high ups get mansions and the populace lives in squalor, the government makes incentives for the people to use dollars because the bureaucrats can use those to travel abroad etc”.

Honestly, I do believe he’s telling the truth, because he lived and grew there in a town close to Havana, I forgot the name. His dream was to move to the US, and as someone who worked there I told him " if you’re not a qualified worker you’re gonna have a bad time, there’s lots of poverty, yadda yadda".

What to think of this? Every single metric I’ve seen of Cuba shows it’s better than its Caribbean neighbours, in basically every way besides what those far right institutes say.

What I’ve gathered from the conversation is that every poor country is similar, from Burkina Faso to Burundi to Laos and Cuba. It’s not really a fault of “socialism” but rather a fault of the global North-South dynamic and how it pushes global south countries to be like this as to provide cheap labour and commodities.

Any thoughts on this comrades? I’m sorry if I’m wrong on anything, my theory is not the best and neither is my practice. Thank you for your time.

  • 小莱卡
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    24 天前

    Cuba lives in a perpetual state of exception due to the embargo and the proximity to the US, so i can understand why the military gets so many concessions, otherwise they would instantly do a coup.

    The May Day parade coercion is laughable, national day parades are pretty much mandatory in many countries throughout the world. In mexico, for example, 20th of november (mexican revolution) is a mandatory parade for schools even private ones. Have u ever seen a mexican complain about the school boards bourgeoisie using kids to boast about their institutions?

    The sad reality of the Cuban revolution is that it took over a backwards country, it has very few natural resources to build a strong national primary industry, and it is located in the wrong hemisphere and right next to the imperial hegemon. The proximity to the US caused the previous ruling class to migrate instead of staying and providing their technical expertise to develop Cuba, could also argue for a lack of concessions or a NEP by the unexperienced revolutionaries to prevent this migration, which lead to a very arduos task of developing a backwards country with next to no educated people. Considering the context, i think Cuba has done much better than expected, just look at Haiti next door for example.

  • amemorablename
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    24 天前

    I mean, isn’t this just a more personal version of the “person from socialist state who, for unexplained reasons, is no longer there doesn’t like it and is repeating official imperialist talking points that badmouth it” trope. I’d be far more interested in hearing his lived experience and what class he comes from and so on than hearing him repeat the words of a brazilian politician.

  • rainpizza
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    24 天前

    Ok, lets list what this “Cuban” guy said:

    • every May 1st we were coerced into partaking in the May Day Parade or else we’d be screwed over in the future

    • there are many people in poverty

    • it’s a dictatorship, the military high ups get mansions and the populace lives in squalor

    • the government makes incentives for the people to use dollars because the bureaucrats can use those to travel abroad etc”.

    For the first one, I don’t have information.

    For the third one, this is Miami gusano shit which uses Goebbels style propaganda which accuses the other side of what his side is guilty of.

    About the second one and fourth one, he doesn’t mention anywhere about the embargo so this could be a good opportunity for you to learn more about the damages from the embargo:

    https://cubaminrex.cu/sites/default/files/2024-09/InformeB2024.pdf

  • I love how every idiot’s critique of an AES country is always: corruption, unequal/unfair conditions, and dictatorship. Okay, fair enough, so what’s your solution to these problem? Looks like you said… checks notes… uh… “move to the US”? Opinion discarded!

    Capitalism exacerbates all of those things, even if it were true that they existed in a place like Cuba. I would much rather have a Cuban system, or even a Lula PT, with some corruption and better social benefits than just straight neoliberal, capitalist oligarchy that is pure corruption and unequal dictatorship with nothing in terms of benefits.

    It’s impossible that a small, isolated island like Cuba wouldn’t have poverty after all its been through historically and with the current embargo anyway so that’s a given. But, as you said, take a look at capitalist, US-colonized Puerto Rico and it’s doing worse than Cuba in some respects. So much for that.

  • sevenapples
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    24 天前

    I don’t have answers for the specific issues he brought up but as always it helps to be critical and look for the deeper issue. For example, I’ve heard a second hand account (as in, someone told me what a Cuban told them) that it’s a poor country with the example that meat is not easy to get there. One has to ask, is that a failure of the Cuban government or an effect of the embargo?

    For the May Day parade thing we need more information. How are you going to get screwed over if you don’t go? Maybe it’s just a societal expectation and people will frown/comment if you don’t go, but I doubt you’re getting fired over it or a parade you missed some years ago will bite you in the ass.

    For the “mansions for the higher-ups, squalor for the populace” argument, it helps to ask about the scale of it. Socialism Betrayed mentions that in the USSR the higher ups lived in special, more luxurious apartments and had access to a super market with rarer imports (it mentions bananas or some other fruit, probably because no country traded them because of the US). This is a better standard of living that the average citizen, but it’s much closer to them than what we see in western countries.

    Hopefully someone has more specifics, but you get the point.

    • ghost_of_faso3
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      24 天前

      Maybe it’s just a societal expectation and people will frown/comment if you don’t go, but I doubt you’re getting fired over it or a parade you missed some years ago will bite you in the ass.

      Some cultures in the west not going to the church on a sunday would lead to negative social outcomes, in Cuba they replaced church on a Sunday with paying homage to workers all over the world on May Day, seems fine to me.

      For the “mansions for the higher-ups, squalor for the populace”

      Kinda weird one, I dont think Cuba even has homeless people, this is castro’s home;

      I suspect this is just the typical narrative an ex-cuban will internalize about corruption at a higher level while not recognizing that the country they live ins wealth gap is surely larger than cuba’s by a large amount.

  • sinovictorchan
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    24 天前

    I can relate to you since I am a child from an abusive ableist Hong Kong Canadian family. For my story, My grandparents originated from mainland China during the repressive Chinese warlord period, and they fled from China to Hong Kong in 1950 when the Communists began to unify mainland China. At that time, Hong Kong is a British colony. My parents were born in Hong Kong and fled to Canada as refugees before the British empire hand Hong Kong back to China.

    The rationale that my parents provided for their departure from mainland China is not about Communism itself, but rather the Chinese tradition (which refers to the brutal warlord practices that the Communist eradicated) and the overpopulation problem. My parents had justified brutal authoritarian rule in mainland China with their claim that the authority need to stop conflicts for limited resource for survival. My family claimed that they only fled Hong Kong to Canada when the British colony shows a video where a group of people in plain clothes ram an armored vehicle on a group of protesters.

    Interestingly, my father and grandparents now supported the current mainland Chinese government from the ability to transform China into a superpower despite their hatred towards the Communist ideology similar to the Russian Populists towards the Soviet Union. This is in contrast to the liberal alias of tankiejerker who claimed to support slogan leftists, but oppose any successful leftist movements and blindly believe everything that Pax Americana oligarch said at face value. However, my family are still unwillling to return to mainland China.

    Despite their claim of victim of Communism, my family practice a policy of victim blaming from their belief that repression from government are self-inflicted and avoidable at anytime. My father even boosted that armed gangsters are “righteous” people who only attack “bad kids”. He said that you should always serve armed gangsters because armed gangsters ruled Canada and even the police obey the armed gangsters in fear.

    My mother did face abuse from my grandparents, but she always blame the Chinese Communist government for the toxic warlord tradition from her inability to distinguish between the warlord government that my grandparents lived in and the Communist government that my grandparents fled from. Although my mother had never lived under Communist rule, she claimed she can speak about the current mainland Chinese government because she thinks that the toxic warlord practices of my grandparents are somehow the true example of the current Chinese government. The British Christians presented themselves as an alternative to the “Chinese tradition” of my grandparents to gain the trust of my mother, so my mother always think that Western culture are benevolent and that any abusive practice in the Chinese Christian churches are somehow the remnant of “Chinese tradition”. Under the influence of Western Christians, my mother follow the policies of blind obedience to authority, wilfull ignorance, and patriarchy that led to her deception and decades of abuse by my ableist abusive father.

  • DomingoRojo
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    21 天前

    I tumbled upon this thread just now. I am not cuban, but I lived at Cuba from 1987 to 1993 and then made a quuick comeback in 2000 to visit family that remained there. This gives me some insigt but also some perspective, I think (or I hope :P). What that guy said to you sounds to me like the tipical complain “gusanos” use to have, even when I was there : a bunch of stupid little things that are presented as a generality.

    • about coertion. Yes, that was the “running” opinion. However where I was living (which was 400m from “plaza de la revolución” the place where the parade was) were some of my neightbours which never ever went to that and never have any repercusion. What was very “coercitive” was the bad feeling with your neighbours and coworkers if you didn’t do it, but that is social coertion and IMO is a good thing. This can be extended to represion, too: where I was living there were some people complaining against Revolution even loudly (yeah, most of the same people not going to the parade), even screeming, some times and never were any “represion”.
    • about dictatorship: cuban system is not a liberal-democracy. That does not means is a dictature. They have an indirect pyramidal system that starts in your neigbourhood : you elect people from a list of candidates - that are not forced to be part of the comunist party, although I never saw anyone who wasn’t. Then the city council elects the region council which elects the parliament which elects the executive which elects the president of the executive, Yes, that means there is no “direct” vote to president (we use to make jokes about “we elect, people who elects people, who elects people and like that until Fidel” ;) ) but I think that (along with the obligation of “rendir cuentas”: making a general assembly each 6 moths where everybody can go and talk) is a lot more democratic (it would be more if charges would be revocable, but well, nothing is perfect.
    • about privileges of ruler class: well, yes. Sadly this happens but not at the levels people may think. There are no “mansions” at Cuba other than what remains from before the revolutiotn (most of them became schools or cultural centers) and yes, there are better neighbourhoods than others. But for example I was doing highschool with the kid of one of the generals judged and condemned to death in the corruption cases of 89-90 (the Ochoa affaire), and I went to his home several times. His “corruption” was having a house (not an appartment) that was exactly the same as other houses in the neighbourhood (inhabited by “regular people”) and which would be a middle class (even low middle class) house from any country in europe. Still, this tendency has increased, I think, last 20-25 years.

    Now, is good to remember that many of the problems (if not all) are causes because of the blocus of the usa and the constant attack Cuba is in. It is the northamerican imperialism which holds cuba into a situation without exit. If you think this does not matters: it does. In a way, Cuba (and Venezuela now) are still today not able to break with the imperial domination. If you think the blocus and all sanctions etc do not do bad, see this small example: the imperialism says the cubans do not have liberty of expression because they cannot have internet. etc. You know why they cannot have internet? Because they can’t plug to the internet backbone (which passes at the side of Cuba and go to Europe). Instead, they are forced to do agreements with third countries (Venezuela, at the time I knew this) to get some sort of connection… which in 2015 was of about a T1 for the whole island. I have more internet at my workplace than Cuba has for its 11 million people :P

    Anyway, I hope this clarifies things… is not that Cuba is perfect. There are a lot of problems and it is indeed a very poor country with very poor country problems… but it is still a country that tries to resist as they can the heavy boot of northamerican imperialism.