Tuesday, February 19, 2008
To my dear compatriots..
It’s too late to place a bet on the timing of the retirement of one aging dictator.. But you can still get odds on another this elected representative..
On the day that 81-year-old Cuban leader Fidel Castro announced he would no longer be the country`s President, Paddy Power said it was offering odds of 4/5 on the Democratic Unionist leader to stand down this year, the year of his 82nd birthday.
It’s “an opportunity to make progress towards a peaceful transition to a pluralist democracy..” More on what next [for Cuba] here.
Pete Baker @ 11:23 AM
‘And I think the majority of Cubans recognise that, and support the Revolution despite its flaws and sacrifices.’
So a democratic vote should be a cakewalk for the Castro dynasty.
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 08:52 PMGaribaldy,
You are changing the parameters of the debate. You were lauding the Cuban health care system as “universally recognised as excellent .... by institutions and governments across the world”.As I have shown that is not by any means universally the case.
If you wish to turn to the whole regime, then one is entitled to ask why people keep trying to leave Cuba if it is indeed such a paradise? I agree that pre Castro Cuba seems to have been a pretty unpleasant corrupt dictatorship. I would argue that Cuba now is a pretty unpleasant corrupt dictatorship. Maybe the majority of Cubans should be allowed free and fair elections or are you concerned that they might give the wrong verdict?
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 08:53 PMI think that the elections would be far from free and fair. For the simple reason that US threats, promises and money on an unprecedented scale would be used to ensure a suitable outcome. So I can understand the retience to change the system and protect the social changes that have been wrought.
I’m not sure I am changing the parameters of the debate on health. Despite its weaknesses, I will again repeat that Cuba is recognised worldwide as having an excellent health service. Both by measureable standards, and in the context it has developed.
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 08:57 PMLook, chaps, this is a really traumatic moment in my life. I’ve still got Fidel’s speeches (severely edited), in a small pamphlet, somewhere in my attic. I’ve just watched Gorgeous George on C4 News, shredding everyone in sight.
I even wanted (want?) to get to Cuba before the Madison Avenue crew, Disneyland, Las Vegas move in.
I remember the overthrow of the Batista régime (who had achieved 20,000+ dead, but—remember—the Batistas had the US State Department seal of approval, so they were all right).
Then there were all those pathetic attempts to “invade” (Aw, c’mon! It’s 75 miles from Key West! Remember 6 June 1944! Y’ken do better than that!)
And who lost out? Well, United Fruit for a start (anyone got Chiquita stickers on their bananas? Delmonte in the cupboard? Oh, in case you forgot, Allen Dulles of the CIA was president of the company). And let’s hear it for the mafia types who ran the casinos.
So, a few minutes flight from Miami there’s a place where there’s 100% literacy, free healthcare, where life expectancy in considerably better than that assured by the AMA?
Better believe it.
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 09:04 PMGaribaldy,
“I will again repeat that Cuba is recognised worldwide as having an excellent health service. Both by measureable standards, and in the context it has developed.By measurable standards apart from really quite relevant ones such as infant mortality rate, death rate: stuff like that.
Garibaldy
“I think that the elections would be far from free and fair.”Well let us be honest they are not free and fair at the moment.
Garibaldy
“So I can understand the retience to change the system and protect the social changes that have been wrought.”Yes funny how dictators are always so reticent to allow elections that they might loose.
Garobaldy
“For the simple reason that US threats, promises and money on an unprecedented scale would be used to ensure a suitable outcome.”Yes that is a concern. The poor foolish people of Cuba might feel that they preferred to be bribed by American money and a better life (which in fairness I agree they might not get) and so not support the revolution. Annoying the way the proletariat sometimes do not vote for their socialist guardians. Best to keep them away from things like democracy, they might be selfish. Best for the great communist egalitarian leaders to sort out their lives for them.
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 09:10 PM“Free and fair” elections? The kind that happened in, oh—for example, Florida and Ohio about the turn of the millennium?
[Wanna take me on? Feelin’ lucky, punk?—Remember, from a parallel thread, I’m “touchy”.]
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 09:16 PMActually Malcolm I do not regard Cuba as the sum of all evil. I am also not a neo-con. I think Cuba achieved a great deal but in all honesty their health care system is nothing like as good as its supporters would claim. Its public health record is, however, indeed excellent.
I fear you are correct and that an end to communism will lead to an excess rebalancing in the other direction. Yet people have the right to decide for themselves how to be governed and I do suspect that they would end up with an unregulated market economy. It would be nice if the communists would elegantly vacate the field or morph into social democrats.
And yes there are problems with democracy in the US and elsewhere. The only real solution as you know full well is for you and me to rule the world. Ha Ha ha I cackle as I stroke my white cat in my lair on Devenish island.
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 09:25 PMTurgon @ 10:25 PM: You’ve really put the wind up me now, with your you and me to rule the world. You know how I hate to get up in the morning. And I am ailurophobic.
Seriously, nobody can or does maintain that Cuba has what Ballymena might regard as a fully-functioning democracy. What I would maintain is they are doing as well as most.
I would not want to argue with the Cuban demographics. Nor with the UNICEF figures.
Beyond that, you can set your own markers or targets. I only know that my family and I have had to wrestle (even with full health insurance) with the US medical bureaucracy. Than which there can be nothing more hellish. Which is why, the moment free movement is established between Cuba and the US, I would predict the AMA and Big Pharma to be anxiously watching health tourism, in the same way that US citizens returning from Canada (and mailed packages from Canada) get peculiar attention. Please comment thereon.
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 09:57 PMMalcolm,
The US health care system manages that rare feat of being both mind numbingly expensive and yet the country has a pretty mediocre score on many of the figures which assess success. I agree in that I sincerely hope that Cuba does not end up with a US health care system.In all honesty the future for health care is an inordinately large problem. One blog, one whole blog site would not cover it. No country can keep pace with the costs nor with expectations. I have no solutions at all.
Although clearly with me in power things would be better.
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 10:04 PMFurgon sez:
Their infant mortality rate is actually pretty mediocre
What is mediocre depends on your own standards, I guess, but it’s lower than United States and roughly equal to the UK. (2006, Infant mortality rate under 1 year, UNICEF)
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 10:14 PMI’ve been to Cuba a few times since 2000. The everyday people are nice, hard working and friendly. As you rise through the enforcement ranks they become quite nasty. To the Cubans that is. The Cubans that I know here, who would like to return (not all roses in Florida for many Cubans, most of them are honest pay taxes etc, so they are getting screwed like the regular citizens and the illegals are moving in) aren’t packing their bags. They say Raul talks a good game, but he can be the monster his brother is at times. No Cuban I spoke with today was optimistic.
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 10:17 PMBTW, the health care system is third world at best. Any Cuban I’ve spoken with about quality of life spits when you tell them what Castro has been telling the world. It is a totally controlled society, where most of the people have less than nothing. My second trip I brought as much candy bars as I could, for these are like gold to the average adult, let alone a child.
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 10:22 PMBfB
Not my experience of being there.
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 10:36 PMWell, I tend to wander off into reality when I visit.
Posted by on Feb 19, 2008 @ 11:35 PMMalcolm Redfellow: I only know that my family and I have had to wrestle (even with full health insurance) with the US medical bureaucracy.
You poor thing. Why not move to Cuba, where life is apparently wonderful? Getting *in* isn’t the problem - getting *out* might be, unless you keep your current citizenship.
Posted by on Feb 20, 2008 @ 08:14 AMI am very impressed by DK’s startling insight into prostitution in Cuba. I am even more impressed when he admits to gathering all this knowledge without ever having visited the country.
I have often been propositioned with a “Fancy a short time, ducky?” but I’ve never before imagined the seductive attractions of, “Fancy no time at all then, darling?”
Posted by on Feb 20, 2008 @ 10:26 AMGreat quotes from George Galloway today in the daily record regarding Cuba;
“Cuba’s children live longer than in Washington D.C”
“Illiteracy is non-existant”
“Cuba harvests gold medals in the Olympics leaving countries like Britain in it’s wake”
Mandela chose to visit havana first on his release from prison to say thank-you.
“Of course the bordello owners and casino kings who left the island in 1959 have maintained a hostile steady drum-beat, they want their dirty business back”
“It’s true they do not have elections like say in Florida, where the younger brother ensures the older brother wins”
This exposes a hypocrisy in the west in our supposed free and fair elections. Does anyone honestly believe that if Cuba had held elections over the last 50 years that the US would not have interfered? Considering the history of US interference If you do, then you are a galah!
Galloway also contends that long ago Cuba decided that anyone who wished to emigrate to the US could do so. The US refuses them visa’s. The boat people represent a tiny fraction of the population.
Posted by on Feb 20, 2008 @ 12:02 PMhttp://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/brian_wilson/2008/02/fidels_last_laugh.html
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/stephen_kinzer/2008/02/made_in_america.html
A couple of reasoned and sensible contributions to the debate (unlike most of those we like to make)
Posted by on Feb 20, 2008 @ 12:24 PMGreat links Garibaldy!
Posted by on Feb 20, 2008 @ 06:33 PMYou knuckleheads revel in old Fidel sticking his finger in the eye of the USA. I understand that he is an evil, murdering bastard. Get your Che-mart t-shirts here and celebrate these two murdering, socialist bastards. When Castro goes directly to Hell, not passing go, he’ll burn for eternity with this other communist pig “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become …”
Posted by on Feb 20, 2008 @ 07:12 PMYeah Pete Baker quoted that already. Oh, and if Cuba is so repressive, how come everyone there tells you, a foreigner, how unhappy they are without getting pounced on and dragged off to gaol, fed to the pigs etc.
Posted by on Feb 20, 2008 @ 07:38 PMRory - just repeating what a friend who actually visited told me. Sure their healthcare may be good, but doctors go on the game to make ends meet. Could be an additional income stream for the NHS!
I mentioned this in an earlier thread and was torn to shreds for it by Mick Hall - but then I went onto our friend google and fairly quickly found a report that backed up my friends observation. Do it yourself.
Posted by on Feb 21, 2008 @ 09:59 AMBetter late than never, Gorgeous George Galloway’s thoughts on Fidel, well worth a read;
“MY 20-YEAR FRIENDSHIP WITH FIDEL - THE MOST CHARISMATIC MAN I’VE MET BY GEORGE GALLOWAY
IT was my good fortune to have been a friend of Fidel Castro
·
for more than 20 years.
I knew him in dark days and fine - when he enjoyed the military and economic protection of his alliance with the Eastern Bloc.
I was there when the lights went out with the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s and during the flowering of the new Latin American and greener socialism which has reached new heights in the alliance with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
Fidel has straddled the last half-century as a colossus.
Every media outfit in the world treated yesterday’s announcement as the main story of the day.
Yet Cuba is a tiny island in the Caribbean which, before Castro, was an impoverished offshore haven for the US mafia where blacks faced apartheid, where poor people died young and illiterate - childrenperished like flies in their infancy.
Today, Cuba is one of the coolest places on the planet.
It is a tourist destination for millions who come back wearing their T-shirts of Che Guevara and imbued with the spirit of the island.
Cuba’s children live longer than those born in Washington DC thanks to a health system - vividly showcased in Michael Moore’s film Sicko - comparable with Scandinavia’s and a good deal better than our own.
Illiteracy is non-existent - the only Third World country of which that can be said - thanks to a free education system with unprecedented numbers of graduates and PhDs.
Cuba harvests gold medals in the Olympic Games, leaving countries like our own trailing in its wake.
And ordinary workers thrill to the ballet, opera and a music scene which positively throbs.
None of this could have happened without the revolution which, in turn, would never have succeeded without Fidel.
He is the most charismatic man I have ever met, an inspirational orator, an oracle of politics in the second half of the 20th century and a listener too.
Once, when I was with him, he dug out a map of the UK and asked me to point out where the long-haired distinctive Highland cows were to be found. When I couldn’t tell him the annual tonnage of British steel, he looked at me as if to say: “What kind of MP are you?”
He was above all else an internationalist leader, as were his comrades. Che Guevara fought in Africa and was murdered in Bolivia.
Cuba played such a decisive role in the downfall of South African apartheid that, upon his release from prison, Nelson Mandela chose to visit Havana before anywhere else.
Holding Fidel’s hand aloft, Mandela declared: “See how far we slaves have come!”
Ofcourse, the bordello owners and casino kings who left the island in 1959 have maintained a steady drum beat of hostility to Castro ever since. They want their dirty businesses back.
And they have provided a base in Miami - just 90 miles from Cuba - for 50 years of subversion, invasion, blockade, failed assassination plots, terrorism and relentless propaganda.
One of the latest lies is the absurd claim that Fidel is a multi-millionaire. In fact, he literally does not possess a single dollar.
Indeed, when this claim - from Forbes Magazine - emerged, he pledged on live television, with me sitting next to him, that if anyone could show a single dollar in his hands, he would immediately tear off his insignia and retire in disgrace.
Equally false is the propaganda which claims that Cubans taking to the boats for Florida represent anything other than a small fraction of the country’s population.
If an airplane landed tonight in Easterhouse offering green cards for entry into the US, I daresay it would fill up rather rapidly.
Cuba decided long ago that anyone who wished to emigrate to the US could do so. It is the US which refused them visas, no doubt because they’ve got enough poor black people in America already.
It’s true that Cuba doesn’t have elections like, say, those in Florida, where the younger brother ensures the elder brother wins.
The losers are the very sections of the population who in Cuba have benefited the most from Fidel Castro.
·
When I was last with Fidel a week or so before his serious illness, I asked what he thought about the new breed of Latin American left-wing leaders such as Chavez who have ousted the juntas.
He told me: “If I had died 10 years ago, I would have died sadly. Now that the red flag has been passed on to a new generation, I can go full of hope and trust in the future.”
Then he added with a chuckle: “The only way to get elected to office in Latin America nowadays is to profess friendship with Fidel Castro
·
and total opposition to George W Bush.”
Farewell, Fidel. You’re a legend. We’ll be really lucky if we look upon your like again.Posted by on Feb 22, 2008 @ 09:40 AMIsn’t it hilarious the hatred that comes across from those who seem really upset that there are people who do not want to live under US hegemony.
Why is this so threatening to y’all? We can list all of the things that is wrong with Cuba, much of it due to US interference. Perhaps we could make similar lists of our own shitty society. Nah! keep reading your hello magazines, Oh kerry Katona has grown balls, oh J-lo has a new baby called frog-midden. I wonder what the new autumn fashion colours will be, I need that new latest life changing mobile phone, blah, blah, blah! Fuckin borin!
Posted by on Feb 22, 2008 @ 09:47 AMPE: “Why is this so threatening to y’all? We can list all of the things that is wrong with Cuba, much of it due to US interference. Perhaps we could make similar lists of our own shitty society. Nah! keep reading your hello magazines, Oh kerry Katona has grown balls, oh J-lo has a new baby called frog-midden. I wonder what the new autumn fashion colours will be, I need that new latest life changing mobile phone, blah, blah, blah! Fuckin borin!”
So will you be emigrating to Cuba any day soon? Oh that’s right, reading about Kerry Katona’s balls is better that reading propaganda about tractor production and imperialists. At least here you have the choice to read Hello, or Red Star or BNP weekly or anything else you choose.
It seems that people vote with their feet - when people leave any South American country, where do they go? The US or Cuba?
Take of the rose-tinted glasses!
Posted by on Feb 22, 2008 @ 10:02 AM
