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It still sucks because his brother will take power, but maybe this will lead to a series of events in which communism will die in Cuba....
Que viva la libertad!
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/americ...tro/index.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,331149,00.html
http://www.nbc6.net/news/15338697/de...02210202192008
Give him a break, the guy is 81 years old.
The only thing wrong with communism is the people who complain about it.
:afrog:
The only thing wrong with communism is the people who enforce it.
The only thing wrong with communism is the fundamental logic upon which the theory is based.
The only thing wrong with communism is that I keep finding practitioners under my bed.
hint: communism doesn't have dictators. Think about it...
In Soviet Russia, Presidency Resigns Fidel!
Not true... those people are immediately put to death.Quote:
Originally Posted by mendhak
The real downfall of communism was the complete inability to purchase a comfortable pair of Levi blue jeans.
Communism is the alter ego of DEMOCRACY....:D
Excuse my ignorance but why is Fidel seen as a hate figure yet Che Guevara is seen as ikonic?
He's perceived as evil outside Cuba because, apparently 50 years later and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, communism is still a threat to America.
The fun part would be to see a communist or socialist government with a free market economy... if that's even possible.Quote:
Originally Posted by KGComputers
I'd love to see a free market economy.
Supposedly that's what the US of A has... doesn't seem very free, though. But I still won't pay more.
I would consider pointing nuclear weapons at the East coast of the US as a threat to america. I dunno, that's just me. Castro is just as hated inside cuba as he is outside of it.Quote:
Originally Posted by mendhak
You're right, those nuclear weapons had nothing to do with the CIA attempting to overthrow the Cuban government. And I'm sure the immigrant population in the US are a proper representation of the complete statistical views of his popularity at home.
Pity me.
so does this mean the end of all the communist dictators in the world, or will his brother just do the same as fidel?
Nope you forgot North korea.Quote:
Originally Posted by Thunder!
And Petoria!
Even if they did, the fact is that both the Soviet Union (who actually placed the missiles there) and the United States had thousands of nuclear missiles closer than 50 miles off of each other's shore already. Ever hear of nuclear submarines? There are many more things i could say about this, but the fact is that the missiles weren't placed there to be a threat. They were there to piss us off. It was all part of the cold war. As for the immigrants, i would be willing to bet that a lot of them want to come to the US for the same reason we want to stay here. Our country is richer and gives a better way of life.Quote:
Originally Posted by mendhak
You americans are absurdly proud of your so called 'better way of life'. Statistically, 1 in every 4 americans is morbidly obese, while 1 in 3 falls within the obese weight range. The only reason that you haven't entered another great depression is that your creditors haven't asked you to pay back your loans in a currency you can't print. Your culture is second only to japan in its xenophobia, which is of course ridiculous because america isn't old enough for the world to forget that every one of your ancestors is a genocidal immigrant (and by that I mean that they killed the only REAL americans, the native americans). Your health system is actually pretty terrible, compared even to Cuba.
Don't blame that on the citizens. Blame it on the government and advertising... paired with peoples' stupidity. Ok.. fine. Blame it on the people.
People can directly visit CUBA. CHINA and North Korea or do business....Quote:
The fun part would be to see a communist or socialist government with a free market economy... if that's even possible.
Greg
So you're saying that the entire reason that the USSR and Cuba conspired together to place missiles on the Cuban coast pointed at the USA was not out of survival instincts or nationalistic self interests, but for the sole purpose of being an annoyance? I can believe that. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Lord Orwell
Of course it was part of the cold war, but nothing happens unprovoked. the USA didn't like Castro and were trying to overthrow him by sending a force of CIA-trained exiles back to CUba, and he did what any country would do in self defense. Keep in mind, a war is both ways. It's two sides in a conflict. This is a basic definition. One side will win and rewrite their version of events for the younger generation, but neither side is truly absolved of Machiavellian scheming to undermine the other.
I'm ignorant. Everyone knows that. But I'm also stupid. (For those of you who don't know that)
What is the difference between communism and capitalism, besides the fact that your leader is not chosen by the public, but rather by himself?
(English is not my first language, so please help me out here...) :afrog:
Simple. Capitalism was an economic system created by God himself, Communism was created by Satan (with help from Iran, Korea, USSR, China and Cuba) to oppose the decent hardworking people that live and work under Capitalism.
Amen, praise Jesus (pronounced hay-soos)
Why does it "oppose" capatalism? (or rather the people under it?) What's the definition? Or requirements of communism? I don't understand this stuff. :cry:
I think, according to some statistics website, Gaia Online is the most popular forum out there. Rumor has it that if you create a new thread, by the time you finish submitting it and go to the main page to view it, it's already on page 3.
http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/
So again why is Che Guevara so revered?
:lol: That happens here at VBF to me as well... (Must be the slow internet connection...)Quote:
Originally Posted by mendhak
Aah, an accidental posting in the wrong thread. Or was it...
I would agree with that, except for a couple of details:Quote:
Originally Posted by MaximilianMayrhofer
1. i AM native american. If you are referring to white people, they make up only 40% of the population.
2. who came up with the xenophobia statistic? I am sure if you dig deeper you will see that we have more immigrants than you do.
3. I was comparing our way of life to Cuba's, not the rest of the world. I personally would prefer to live in Japan.
4. Cuba actually has one of the best public health systems in the world.
5. If you haven't experienced our health system, don't knock it. I've been hospitalized three times. It's a HELL of a lot better than it used to be. When i was a child, they didn't have to accept you in hospitals when you didn't have insurance and my brother died of pneumonia. Today, they are required to. If it wasn't for this fact, both I and my wife would be dead. I had pneumonia as well, and my wife had a cyst on her ovary when she was 15.
You are of course entirely accurate about the creditor thing. Everyone knows it but we can't seem to get Congress to stop their @#$#@ spending. Our current president took over when we actually had a surplus. It took him about a month to turn that into a $500,000,000,000 defecit. Later he dropped that by about 1/2 and touted his ability to "cut spending". Bush's biggest problem isn't that he's stupid. It's that he thinks everyone else is.
The placing of nukes by the soviet union in cuba was part of an unofficial trade agreement between castro and the soviets. Most of the world had placed embargos on cuba and castro's choices were, side with the soviets, resign, or starve. He chose to keep his power. Obviously the soviets and americans were perfectly capable of nuking each other back to the stone age any way so Castro's motivation was in his self interest only. Regardless, pointing a nuke at any one can be considered a threat, which was my initial point. And no, Castro was not very popular with his own people. Considering that around 33,000 cubans emigrate legally to the us yearly and castro has been in power since 1959, Id say that there are enough cubans in Miami to get an accurate approval rating for Castro. The last # I heard was slightly lower than the approval rating for the Current President of the US. At least we won't have to deal with Bush running the show for 50 years. We get a perfectly good brand new retard every 8 years.Quote:
Originally Posted by mendhak
1. Yes, it's considered a threat to point a nuke at someone. And it is considered a threat to attempt to overthrow a government. There are two sides, both are at fault; one side cannot wash its hands of responsibility and suddenly label the other as evil simply because... oh wait, it can!
2. I'd say there aren't enough Cubans in Miami to get an accurate approval rating. Just like I don't think that the obnoxious Americans or drunken Britishers I meet on holidays are an accurate representation of everyone in their home countries. So I did a search on Castro approval ratings. Couldn't find anything. I wonder if these 'approval ratings' are being invented by someone on the ether. The best I could find was this.
Hmmm so an attempt to overthrow a government is considered a threat huh? Wasn’t it Fidel Castro that led an armed revolution against the established Cuban government and overthrew it? Ohhh the irony…Quote:
Originally Posted by mendhak
There are 1.2 million Cuban-Americans in the US with about 11.3 million Cubans living in Cuba. This is about 11% of the Cuban population living in the US, I would say that is pretty substantial. Of course we cannot get a real sense of Castro’s popularity (in Cuba, outside Cuba he’s hated) because of the closed communist society they have, and because anyone that opposes him usually gets sent to jail or disappears into the night. We could of course poll those Cubans that try to escape Castro’s grip on rafts and ask them how they feel about Castro.
X
Established, yes, but established in a coup, so the revolutionaries had as much right to it as anybody else.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xanith
The cuban exile community is so emotionally tied into Cuba that it is hard to get any clear understanding of that issue from them, or anybody closely associated with them.
My opinion is that if the exile community has its way, there will be a bloodbath in Cuba as they exterminate and subjugate the Cubans who support Castro, and there are plenty of them. Of course, those supporters may not truly support Castro, they may just remember what their lot was before Castro took over. After all, Castro wasn't a one man army. Certain segments of the people arose in a popular revolt which Castro eventually took control of, but he didn't start the revolt.
So why did people throw off the existing government? Perhaps because it was excessively exploitative and corrupt. I don't see any evidence that the exile community has learned anything from an extended stay in the US. While I was living down there, Alpha66 (the exile paramilitary group) was in the news every few months, and at one point the exile community blocked the FL turnpike. One of the bizarre demands in that protest was that the US forcibly remove Castro. I was kind of amused that they would feel that a roadblock on a Miami beltway road would generate enough leverage to get the US to invade Cuba.
They've got plenty of power, but it sure looks like they use their power to keep from seeing themselves as others see them. They feel that things were taken from them, and that is correct, since their property was taken from them, but it was taken because of the general misbehavior. It is not in the best interest of Cuba, or the US, that that particular element of the exile community be allowed to regain the power that was lost.
Because a photographer from Life magazine once took a romantic photo of him that made liberals swoon and buy lots of t-shirts and posters with that image on it thus supporting the evil capitalism they so despise.Quote:
Originally Posted by FishGuy
I would argue that it was tobacco-related. Think about it... The Soviet citizens went through lots of shortages. They learned to wait in long lines for (or do without) bread, meat, milk, coffee, and even vodka. But as soon as cigarettes became scarce that was it - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was finished.Quote:
Originally Posted by nemaroller
Whilst we're talking about Cuba, how come the US has this dry foot policy or whatever it is. Two things about it confuse me...
1) If a cuban sets foot on US soil, he automatically get's residency..... yet immigrants from other countries (with far worse human rights records against their citizens) have to jump through hoops.....
and
2) How come the coast guard put so much effort into stopping them when they are just off-shore... if they stop them in time, they get sent straight home... it just seems kinda weird that you have guys waiting on the beach with open arms, but first the immigrants have to make it passed another bunch of guys out at sea (who work for the same government) who are actively trying to stop them.... :confused: Mybe it's kind of an immigration test, if you can sneak past the coast-guard, you're just the kind of immigrant we need. :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Xanith
Yes, he did. We could backtrack all through history and even claim that the Americans have a revolutionary attitude just like Castro, as they fought and overthrew and kicked out their British overlords. But this is about why Castro did what he did and that he cannot be held completely responsible for what history teaches us.
Do you see what I'm saying here?
It was my understanding that any Cuban refugee was taken to the US, while any non-Cuban refugee (mostly Haitian down there) was deported. Perhaps that was only non-USCG recoveries.Quote:
Originally Posted by SurfDemon
The US policy regarding Cuba was originally based in cold war policies, but it has been maintained by other interests for other reasons.
It looks like they have to make it to land.... if they can stop them while they are still in the water, they're going home....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_feet,_dry_feet_policy
This story is a good example
http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y06/mar06/01e3.htm
Of course. America needs skills such as being able to turn a '59 Buick into a boat...Quote:
Originally Posted by SurfDemon
http://img33.photobucket.com/albums/...y/59_Buick.jpg
I certainly don't know all the different rules. After all, there is one or two groups down there that patrol off Cuba to pick up any refugees early on, and those folks are taking them to Miami, not returning them. There was also a case while I was down there, where some Cubans and Haitians got together, and when they were picked up the Cubans were claiming the Haitians were Cuban so that they would get to go to the US rather than being returned to Haiti. What I don't remember was who picked them up. I think it was a commercial vessel rather than the USCG. At that point it may make more difference who gets in contact first. There are organizations in the refugee community who take in any Cubans they can, though I don't know how far out they reach.
Absolutely anything. While I was living in the keys, a windsurfing instructor arrived in the lower keys after windsurfing from Cuba. He was nearly dead from dehydration, but he had made it. That's really straddling the line between bold and stupid......though when I think about it, I can't say I wouldn't try it on a whim....with a bit more water, and more experience on a windsurfing board. Haven't done any of that in years.Quote:
Originally Posted by homer13j
Man, a '59 Buick? It would be hard to find a car that was any heavier.... that is quite a feat!
Google for the cement boat competitions.
Water weighs right around 65 lbs/ft^3, which means that to float a two ton object would require 61 cubic feet of air, which may be smaller than a king sized mattress. Not all that much floatation, really.
The only cars they have in Cuba are pre-revolution American cars, a handful of Soviet Trabants (arguably the worst car ever made) and hordes of Chinese taxicabs.Quote:
Originally Posted by SurfDemon
As soon as that embargo is lifted I'm heading there looking for a restorable '59 Pontiac Tempest - like most it'll probably be retrofitted with a Romanian diesel engine...
Or you could just ship it to Canada today and drive it across the border.Quote:
Originally Posted by homer13j
It's kind of lame to have an embargo on a place in order to cause economic hardship to produce some effect when the rest of the world stopped the embargo decades ago and is trading freely with the place.
Also, I checked out a Cuban car rental site and they seem to have modern everything (except US models, of course).
Nope, inside the USA he's hated. Outside Cuba he's viewed largely with indifference. About the only time Europe, Asia, Africa or Australasia get's interested in him is when you Americans fail to off him in yet another amusing way (I hope you don't stop doing that, by the way; we do like a good laugh). I'd guess that those of us who are interested in him view him with more admiration than contempt but there's so little interest in him overall that it's pretty hard to judge.Quote:
outside Cuba he’s hated
:lol: That pretty close to the truth but I think there's a bit more to it than that. Of the two of them Che was the romantic warrior type while Fidel was the boring political type. Che was an idealist whereas Fidel was more of a pragmatist. All told Che's just easier to make interesting. If you read up on him, though, you quickly start to realise that he was a bully and a thug and some of his actions bordered on the psychopathic. Che may be more interesting but Fidel's a whole lot more admirable.Quote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by FishGuy
So again why is Che Guevara so revered?
Because a photographer from Life magazine once took a romantic photo of him that made liberals swoon and buy lots of t-shirts and posters with that image on it thus supporting the evil capitalism they so despise.
I was refering to Cuban-Americans (living in the US) not by the rest of the world. I am well aware he is admired by socialists living everywhere in the world (including the US).Quote:
Originally Posted by FunkyDexter
X
It's not that he's admired, it's that he's not cared about. If you'd list the 20 most repressive regimes in the world, I doubt that Cuba would make the list and you'd probably find half of them are US trading partners.Quote:
Originally Posted by Xanith
It's just the general dumbness of the sanctions that people find funny, not that they support the person the sanctions are against.
Something tells me I might have a bit of trouble trying to register a car in the US with a Cuban title...Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Sawyer
You do realize those those a for tourists, right? Like the luxury hotels and upscale gift shops they are there to cater to tourists, not Cubans.Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Sawyer
I agree that the embargo is quite silly and a cold war remnant that should have been done away with long ago.
since the embargo has been going on for 49 years, i will assume the cold war was also.
Cuban sugar would greatly impact US markets. Whenever the embargo came up, the cheap price of Cuban sugar was cited as a major reason to maintain the embargo.
That may be cynical, but it is a commonly held view. If it is correct (it has been over ten years since I paid attention to those debates), then the US embargo may have more to do with proping up a sector of the US economy (at the expense of the US consumer) than it does with foreign policy.
Sugar or sweeteners, are used in most US foods. Therefore, the production of those sweeteners is HUGELY important for some highly influential businesses. If the soda manufacturers alone, were able to get a source of cheaper sweeteners, it would be catastrophic for some US suppliers. For that reason, tariffs on sugar are maintained (which keeps prices elevated on those goods that use sugar). The argument was that Cuban sugar would flood the market with a cheap alternative to price-supported, US sugar.
Of course they're for tourists. How could someone in a communist country afford a new car? It's not like it's a workable socioeconomic system or anything.Quote:
Originally Posted by homer13j
My point was that the embargo doesn't stop them from getting anything they want in and they don't even have to break the law to do it. It really is one of the stupidest things that the US government is up to - and considering all the things they're up to, that's saying a lot.
Not for the sugar industry.
How much sugar does the US actually produce? It was my impression that the US imported most of the sugar they used. If Cuba exports its sugar already the supply on the market wouldn’t change any so prices wouldn’t be affected simply by Cuba importing sugar into the US. Also with the US not making a lot of its own sugar I can’t see it adversely affecting that to any great degree either.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
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