*All following quotes are from the post to be found at https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/25195780/posts/23338
*”The low rate of infant mortality is a product of data manipulation.” Please explain to this 70 year-old socialist who has lived his entire life in Capitalist Canada, (the wannabe-USA’s little brother) how a dearth of traffic causes a low rate of infant mortality, and how THAT can be considered data manipulation? Methinks Lawson and Powell, and you, M. C., are the real people trying to play fast and furious to compare applecarts and atomic bombs! which cannot be done. “Why has Cuban socialism, like all other centralized socialist economies, failed? The authors present with great clarity [prestidigitation] the essential point….that socialism, even if run by benevolent despots and populated with workers willing to work for the common good, could still not match capitalism’s performance.” Again, you are comparing oranges with bikini boobs and bottoms where L&P&MC are the beer-drinking boobs as alluded to above. Who said Cuban Socialism has failed, and by what authority? Cuban Socialism has been working–by Cuban standards–for nigh-on 60 years without a citizen uprising, without income inequity, without racism and bigotry, without mass shootings, without pollution, without poisoning most of the potable water available in the nation, without getting into senseless imperialust [spelling intentional] wars, without massively-huge drug problems, without prisons so overcrowded with convicted criminals that judges have to pronounce lighter sentences just to clear their dockets so they can keep up with new arrests, without nation-wide unrest and protests, without BLM and cops run amok, daily rapes (#WeToo) and murders, without 2nd Amendment non-gun-control concealed-carry AK-47 laws and vigilantism do I really need to continue rubbing your noses in the stoopidity [Spelling also intentional] you call capitalist success and performance? What dodo-damned world are you living in? If you wanted to make some kind of point with your readership, you certainly chose the wrong example to prove your point on how much better off a capitalist nation is compared to a socialist nation. I spit on your and your drunkard buddies’ assessment of our world.
And, by the way, just because Hitler called his political system “national socialism” does not give it legitimacy as a socialist nation! It was, and forever will have been, nothing but ugly and racist NAZIISM!
A New Spirituality 
For some reason, I cannot say what but I have my suspicions, I could not make the following HTML edit in the above post. I will try it here to see if it the HTML is now working:
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goddodo-damned [spelling intentional] world…Yes this is how the text should have appeared in my post. My apologies,
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Well said. Misinformed Americans suckle anti-socialist propaganda with catatonic predictability. Cuba is a remarkable country, its people hold a special place in my heart.
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Thank you.
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I will not grant the original post the dignity of a response or even much analysis. It was so stupid, but you picked up a good point from it, that is part of a bigger narrative and propaganda campaign and a culture of selfishness and of fear and hate. Cuba may not be the paradise on earth, but if it’s economy should be compared to something, then it is the other Latin American countries and especially the Caribian states, that are in effect US satellites. Cuba has been under capitalist embargoe for decades, but has not collapsed, contrary to pro-capitalist economic theories.
Because of the embargoe the Cubans have had to come up with innovative solutions to preserve their infrastructure and economy. One can either look at their old cars and be terrified how they still have to use those (wich is not so much the result of socialism, as it is of the external political pressure for them not to make their own choises of how their country is governed) or accept the fact, that those cars were build (many in the USA) to last for much longer period of time, than the consumerist culture in the West would want you to have them run. Why have we replaced our cars built in the 1950’s and 60’s? Because we have been able to replace them by new ones, but where did the great Western middle-classes get the wealth to buy new cars and why did they give up the ones, that obviously could have been repaired for generations to come? It would be both nice and naive to make the claim, that those new cars were simply deserved by the sweat of the brows of the western middle class workers. It would be also true as for the fact, that most people in this big world (luckily) have not and can not afford new cars. Are westerners more productive, or is it just that their economic system produces more weath, by somehow creating more value to the same amount of work? Of course not. There are no lazy nor productive national characteristics. Nations are consisted of individuals both lazy and productive. If there is more value for the work fo westerners, then where does that value come from? Might it come from the fact, that the so called third world countries provide for the western countries all of their raw materials and forced child labour almost for free? Why do they do so? Is that not simply stupid? Well, I guess it is, but it is also a rigged system of the capitalist game, where entire nations are dependend on people who make policy and descisions even though they have no other mandate than that they are super rich. So, even though the average middle-class Westerner would not know it, what they are actually enjoying is a system where they are the parasites of the super predator individuals, who prey on the defenceless individuals of the third world countries. Ignorance is bliss, but does it make it OK?
We did not think, that the most common explanation of the Germans and even Nazi party members after WWII, that they did not know what happened to the next door neighbour Jews, was a good enough explanation. Did we? They should have known. They should have bothered to find out, and even taken some action to prevent it. Certainly they should not have voted into power powerhungry men who told them that they despise the Jews as not equal to the rest of the Germans. The same applies to ideological Capitalism. It is an inherently Fascist ideology and there is blame and responsibility on people who support it, because they think they as individuals benefit from this extortion of some others.
It is not the fault of the people in the West today, that their ancestors built a system of colonialism and capitalism to exploit on the ancestors of other people. It is not their fault that this system of racistic capitalistic exploitation was ongoign when they were born. Equally it is not the fault of the people in the Third world countries today, that their ancestors got scrued and exploited. It is not their fault that the system was in place when they were born. However, it is the fault of us all, everywhere today that we accept it as some divinely set and unchangable. That especially we living in democracies accept, that our leaders do nothing about it, when we hold the power to change it.
Today, as the globalization has become more obvious, more and more people from the poorest areas of the world, where war is constant, pour into the west, the ugly head of nimbyism a form of nazism has risen from the shadows of the ruins of the Third Reich. Western people with right-wing selfish values, even here in Finland, have started to make louder noises about closing the borders from foreigners. Why? Because they have grown accustomed for decades of looking at the poor and dying children in Africa and Asia, but they are unable to feel any empathy towards those people. They keep telling themselves a lie, that they are more deserving than those children born into extreme poverty, by mere accident of birth, wether it is to the right country, that provides them with education and social security, or familyt that provides them with higher standards of living, or the right religion, that saves them from eternal lakes of fire. However, they do not want the poor people to be enterprizing and moving out from the combat zone created by the western powers and capitalist ventures to controll the natural resources and cheap labour of the “developing countries”, that seem not to develope at all.
Back to Cuba. Once a right-wing dude told me, that he starts to believe Socialism is a good thing, when people from Florida begin building dingies to get to to Cuba. I get his point, even though there have been some airplane hijacks to Cuba from the Western countries there is no great traffic to Cuba from Florida, despite at worst times Miami was one of the most violent cities on the face of the planet having more people being shot than at the same time in Belfast and Beirut during some years. The comparrison is unfair, because there are people escaping from Costa Rica and Haiti all the time to Florida and absolutely no similar traffic to the opposite direction. Haiti and Costa Rica are capitalist countries. There has been constantly growing traffic from San Salvador to the US, even though it is the one country the USA supports financially more than any other. What does their economy look like in comparrison to Cuba? What about the poverty and happiness of tjeir people? There are rich people moving to retire in the Caribian states from the West and some of them are retiring to Cuba. What does that mean? If you were a rich capitalist, where would you prefer to retire to? Cuba or Haiti? Rich people will be able to get good medical treatment anywhere. If you were to be born into a poor family, would you prefer to be born in Cuba or Haiti? Maybe the writer of the post you referred to should be asked this question. It might be interresting to find out how honest they would be about their answer and how they would excuse their answer, what ever it was…
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Cuba has been successful according to their standards, but I am no fan of Castro’s version of communism. He was an oppressive tyrant who ruled with little tolerance for dissent. Communism is no more socialist than Nazism. The Scandinavian type of socialism is more suited to a pluralistic society than communism. I chat with my extended family in Sweden quite often. They’re quite happy with the inclusive economic system in their country.
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Everything depends on your perspective. I only spent two weeks in Cuba, but they were a simple people who took great joy from life.
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