Cuba and US to normalize relations

[warpus]

@luiz You're just trying to point to one group's hypocrisy. "They say A, but they also say B". But that doesn't compute - it's a huge group of people, they don't share the exact same beliefs. Hypocrisy isn't possible.

Having said that, I understand that it can be useful.. just not in that way.

 

[luiz]

But Cuba is a fetish for a large section of the left and a non-trivial section of the right, while being otherwise irrelevant. It's a valid point.

 

[warpus]

But Cuba is a fetish for a large section of the left and a non-trivial section of the right, while being otherwise irrelevant. It's a valid point.

You're presenting it as a hypocrisy, when hypocrisy only makes sense when applied to an individual, or a group mission statement, or something similar.

But anyway, I feel like we're diverting the discussion off track. That is in part my doing. I am going to go do some work.

 

[ReindeerThistle]

But Cuba is a fetish for a large section of the left and a non-trivial section of the right, while being otherwise irrelevant. It's a valid point.

Cuba is your fetish, luiz.

Cuba is NOT irrelevant to the thousands of trained doctors it.produces, or the millions of lives those doctor save.

It's not MY fetish, either, since WE have many like-minded friends in Cuba, and sadly, the gusano mafia you endear yourself to has so very few. Even in Washington.

 

[Traitorfish]

Cuba is kinda blasé as a lefty fetish, at this point, at least in the English-speaking world. Third-generation austerity Stalinism just isn't as glamorous as La Revolución.

In fact, I'm not actually sure who is the current lefty fetish. Palestine, to an extent, but that's spoiled by the fact that the dominant parties are corrupt and incompetent on the one hand, theocratic bigots on the other. Ireland's been off the table since 1998. Venezuela looked like it was going to be the new fetish for a while, but without Chavez there's just too little to talk about. Bolivia just isn't radical enough, still basically a shopkeeper's regime.

A bit short on convincing options, really. Maybe that's a sign of progress.

 

[ReindeerThistle]

I would encourage people to watch and dl the Latin American news sources -- save for Univision, which is just GE's Spanish-language mouthpiece -- but there is a lot of "lefty" things to get excited about: Venezuela's Socialist Offensive; the ALBA initiatives (we moderated a 33-nation conference on Chicago in 2012) and CELAC, which are rejecting US influence in Latin America; Uruguay; Bolivia's MAS movement ejecting international monopoly capital; Argentina's fight against the "vulture" funds.

The Cuba example spurs a lot of interest in The States, especially around The Five and The Embargo, and the admission and graduation of hundreds of US medical students from ELAM.

Cuba has also been through the Special Period, and made great strides in "green" farming.

Did you know about heberprot-P?

Yeah, nothing happening here!

 

[luiz]

Cuba is your fetish, luiz.

Cuba is NOT irrelevant to the thousands of trained doctors it.produces, or the millions of lives those doctor save.

It's not MY fetish, either, since WE have many like-minded friends in Cuba, and sadly, the gusano mafia you endear yourself to has so very few. Even in Washington.

For me? Nah, I don't care about it either way. I certainly don't view Cuba as a poor victim of Yankee aggression, but I don't view it as a particular evil deserving of an embargo either. It is an evil regime of course, but not any more evil than several other regimes which are not only totally integrated to the global trade system but are actually some of its pillars, like China or Saudi Arabia. So the embargo makes no sense to me, and since lifting it will improve the conditions of ordinary Cubans, then lifted it must be.

As for you... you seem to think that that pathetic island-prison, whose economy is smaller than any self-respecting US city, which produces in one year what the US produce in one day, whose claim to fame is an automobile fleet older than most baby-boomers, is somehow putting the US "on the defensive" and forced Obama to act. I don't think you're too rational about it.

 

[Traitorfish]

I would encourage people to watch and dl the Latin American news sources -- save for Univision, which is just GE's Spanish-language mouthpiece -- but there is a lot of "lefty" things to get excited about: Venezuela's Socialist Offensive; the ALBA initiatives (we moderated a 33-nation conference on Chicago in 2012) and CELAC, which are rejecting US influence in Latin America; Uruguay; Bolivia's MAS movement ejecting international monopoly capital; Argentina's fight against the "vulture" funds.

The Cuba example spurs a lot of interest in The States, especially around The Five and The Embargo, and the admission and graduation of hundreds of US medical students from ELAM.

Cuba has also been through the Special Period, and made great strides in "green" farming.

Did you know about heberprot-P?

Yeah, nothing happening here!

None of that is radical, though. It's social democratic stuff. Most of it would have appeared downright conservative fifty years ago. I mean, in 1948, a moderate British Labour government nationalised road-haulage; what in the "Socialist Offensive" compares to that?

There's nothing to inspire the young radical, nothing to stoke the flames of revolutionary passion. It's just more politicians doing politics, and while they're politics might be more agreeable (or at least less disagreeable) to radical sensibility, there's simply no romance. Western leftists might support in abstract, but they won't care about it in quite the same way they used to care about Cuba or China or Vietnam.

 

[ReindeerThistle]

Well, I disagree. What I am describing does stoke revolutionary passion. Not just in what I see day-to-day, but what my international friends are saying about it, too.

For those interested in making change, these are encouraging actions.

Let the a-holes try and start a guerrilla war in the US or EU. Dead =/= passionate.

 

[Traitorfish]

Well, perhaps Europeans are harder to please than Americans. We usually are.

 

[Farm Boy]

Hey if radicals keep expressing an interest in soil conservation and agricultural chemical usage maybe they'll eventually actually learn something about it and become boring like everybody else. Kinda self defeating for the vibe though.

 

[ReindeerThistle]

 

[Commodore]

Yeah, not sure what there is to complain about here. It's sound public policy that should have been done ages ago. It opens up greater consumer goods and tourism opportunities for Americans. It should provide additional money for poor Cubans. And it's a wedge issue that further divides congressional republicans.

What's not to like?

Exactly. This may be the single best move Obama has made in his entire presidency thus far.

 

[Farm Boy]

Pretty much, RT no? At least as it pertains to this. Bear in mind that photo looks like a lot of different people to me. It's odd to see the population flight from rural Mid America(natural rainfall baby!) co-existing with increased advocacy for tiny scale muscle intensive farming techniques. Haven't met more than one person actually interested in doing that themselves though. Apparently shoveling shat for not much money is still something somebody somewhere else needs to be doing to "fix derp world!"

 

[Traitorfish]

I'm not really clear what this is saying, or to whom.

Like, I think that flag-waving for Third World regimes was always a waste of time. I'm just saying that other people are catching on.

 

[ReindeerThistle]

Pretty much, RT no? At least as it pertains to this. Bear in mind that photo looks like a lot of different people to me. It's odd to see the population flight from rural Mid America(natural rainfall baby!) co-existing with increased advocacy for tiny scale muscle intensive farming techniques. Haven't met more than one person actually interested in doing that themselves though. Apparently shoveling shat for not much money is still something somebody somewhere else needs to be doing to "fix derp world!"

Cuba's solutions are not necessarily our solutions. You said as much yourself that there are ways to reduce gasoline use in farming, via gmos, et al. However, in Cuba, the farmers decided how that would happen, not the lawyers.

In Cuba, the doctors decide what is best for the patient, not the accountants.

In America, we could solve many problems if the experts were actually put in charge, n'est pas?

 

[Farm Boy]

In America, we could solve many problems if the experts were actually put in charge, n'est pas?

Often. But putting farmers in charge of farming gets a bad beat in pop culture fairly frequently these days. I'm still waiting for the year the environmental studies phd around here decides to talk to me again. And the tiff seemed largely centered around me pointing out row crop cultivation is a form of tillage. It was weird.

 

[warpus]

Canadian travel agencies are predicting a 20-30% increase in cost for Cuban resorts.

Americans, how long is this going to take? How long before Americans start vacationing in Cuba? Any idea? How long does it take for a law to pass and to make its way through all the various things it has to go through and so on?

 

[luiz]

Cuba's solutions are not necessarily our solutions. You said as much yourself that there are ways to reduce gasoline use in farming, via gmos, et al. However, in Cuba, the farmers decided how that would happen, not the lawyers.

In Cuba, the doctors decide what is best for the patient, not the accountants.

In America, we could solve many problems if the experts were actually put in charge, n'est pas?

Indeed, communist countries have a long history of heeding expert advice and being totally objective and apolitical when it comes to science.

A very informative case regarding agriculture, since we're talking of farmers, is that great Soviet scientific triumph called Lysenkoism.

From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's approval, many geneticists were executed (including Isaak Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943.[9] Hermann Joseph Muller (and his teachings about genetics) was criticized as a bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist, and promoting fascism so he left the USSR, to return to the USA via Republican Spain.

In 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience";[10] all geneticists were fired from their jobs (some were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued. Nikita Khrushchev, who claimed to be an expert in agricultural science, also valued Lysenko as a great scientist, and the taboo on genetics continued (but all geneticists were released or rehabilitated posthumously). The ban was only waived in the mid-1960s.

Thus, Lysenkoism caused serious, long-term harm to Soviet knowledge of biology. It represented a serious failure of the early Soviet leadership to find real solutions to agricultural problems, throwing their support behind a charlatan at the expense of many human lives.

I don't see why Western farmers (and geneticists!) shouldn't feel excited over the unavoidable communist revolution.

 

[CELTICEMPIRE]

Obama did something I agree with.