We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Castro is doomed We all knew that, of course. But when the Manolo puts the evil eye on you, well, time to update your will, launder your cash, gas up the Lear, and oil the hinges on the back door.
Beautiful shoes for everyone! Death to the tyrant who would deny the peoples the beautiful shoes! This it is the political philosophy of the Manolo.
The Cuban embargo should be lifted, not for ideological libertarian reasons, but for pragmatic ones. Doing so will unleash a tide of cash and goods into Cuba, not to mention Americans, and nothing could be more corrosive of the tyrannical regime there.
Much as I love cigars, I won’t buy Cuban cigars, because that is a state-controlled industry and I choose not to do business with the Cuban state. (Plus, I think they are overrated). I would go to Cuba, though, after the embargo is lifted because doing so would allow me to circumvent the state, meet real Cubans, and undermine a Stalinist bastard in my own small way.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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The problem with lifting the embargo and infusing Cuba with cash is that such monies will be used to further prop up the regime.
Right now the only thing keeping Cuba afloat are the hard funds coming in from tourism and remittances from Cubans abroad.
Nah, AK, I’ve been saying the same thing for years.Lift the embargo, get the goods and the cash in and it will happen so fast it will make your head spin.Castro couldnt steal the stuff fast enough to prevent him ending up in mrs Alis boarding house for clapped out,deposed dictators in Saudi, like Idi Amin.
Nah, give him a job in NYC selling shoes like an earlier wannabe of his sort, Santa Anna.
The embargo has been in place for over forty years. You’d think that if it were going to work it would have overturned his regime by now. Open trade will be as corrosive as was it was upon Eastern Europe and as it is proving to be in the PRC. Otherwise Castro just has one more excuse to chirp about during his turgid speeches.
The way to do it would be to round up all the US college students who migrate to Florida for their Spring break, give each of them $5,000 in cash, put them in landing craft and deposit them on the beaches of Cuba. El Maximo Leader’s workers paradise would be history in a weeks time.
The way to do it would be to round up all the US college students who migrate to Florida for their Spring break, give each of them $5,000 in cash, put them in landing craft and deposit them on the beaches of Cuba. El Maximo Leader’s workers paradise would be history in a weeks time.
The way to do it would be to round up all the US college students who migrate to Florida for their Spring break, give each of them $5,000 in cash, put them in landing craft and deposit them on the beaches of Cuba. El Maximo Leader’s workers paradise would be history in a weeks time.
The way to do it would be to round up all the US college students who migrate to Florida for their Spring break, give each of them $5,000 in cash, put them in landing craft and deposit them on the beaches of Cuba. El Maximo Leader’s workers paradise would be history in a weeks time.
It’ll also allow you to hang out on a beutiful beach, meet beautiful cuban ladies and ride around ina 1970 buggy (and pay for it).
You’ll find that Castro isn’t the only dangerous things there. some other things will shake you in your scrubs.
The embargo is killing Castro which is one reason it should be maintained. If it weren’t why should the formerly second richest in Latin America now be competingh for last place in South America? Money that flows to the government never eases the burdens of the people. The way to have Castro overthrown is to make Cubans aware of how he lives and how they live in comparison with free societies. Funny how even his daughter fled Cuba.
The way to overthrow El Maximo would be to simply shoot the bastard. But, seeing as how we can’t do that anymore, the embargo is all we have. I have to agree with ak- lifting the embargo would send a message to Fidel that he won, and the dissidents would never live to see the light of day.
We really need to suspend the assasination laws for this bastard. Hell, someone float me over there and gimme a .50 cal sniper, I’ll do it. I have some Cuban friends, and this man makes me violently ill.
Thomas J. Jackson,
Yes, its been killing his regime for what, forty-six years?
The way to have Castro overthrown is to make Cubans aware of how he lives and how they live in comparison with free societies.
The best way to do that, of course, is to end the embargo, open up unlimited direct flights, etc. How are Cubans to know what life is like in a capitalist society when we deny them ability to actually appreciate that fact?
Yes, we need to end the embargo. But, timing is everything.
As much as he deserves an early death, we can afford to wait. We’re not nearly as good at that game as Syria, and look how that turned out. It can’t be long before el Maximo lays a big, fat, Arafat.
Then, the fun begins. I drool over the possibility of headlines like “Fidel Castro is in stable condition after dying in a Paris hospital (Link)” and “Democracy. Rum-y. Sexy.(Link)“.
That will be the perfect time to flood the country with Western journalists and tourists. P.J. O’Rourke, for example, is fully qualified in both journalism and baccanalia. He no doubt remembers well what it was like to be in the Phillipines when Cory’s “People Power” ousted Marcos. He’d be on the first plane in.
The Spring Break/landing craft proposal mentioned by another poster is box office gold. We could call the movie “The Longest Date (Link)” or “Sunning Ryan’s Privates (Link)“.
Russia and Cuba have a long, historic relationship. So it will be a Russo-American sponsored, unanimous UN resolution demanding elections. I think I read someplace that the office of “President for Life” is only hereditary in Africa. Nevertheless, count on a French abstention.
Bush could resurrect his AmeriCorp’s Redux initiative and put Clinton’s Americorps to shame – we’d out-party them, AND get results.
Damn, this has just gotta happen. Expire, damn you!
One hitch could be if Castro is smart enough to retire, in which case he might have a decent chance of stage managing the election of his sucessor. Then Cuba would be screwed for another 50-60 years.
But, at this point I doubt he’s even psychologically capable of stepping down. Not to mention: is he willing to spend his dying days in one of his own infamous hospitals…or will it be off to Paris, Switzerland, or possibly Canada? Hmmm.
Lifting the embargo means Castro wins, or at least that’s how he spins it to his people.
Isn’t the United States the only country with an embargo on Cuba? Doesn’t Fidel trade with lots of other rich western nations? If he still gets support elsewhere anything the US does isn’t gonna matter much.
Since we all know Castro has the Fountain of Eternal Life secretly tucked away in his house, we can’t expect him to kick off anytime soon. Either we off him or we choke off supply and trade routes entirely to fully isolate him. After that either wait for his ass to get overthrown or use that as the basis to force internal reforms.
Assuming college students and tourists will get Castro overthrown is just silly.
The trade embargo has long been the stupidest goddamnned component of American foreign policy (a field with stiff competition).
I’m sure there would be a short term benefit to the regime from ending it, but it would relatively quickly (months and years, not weeks) be outweighed by liberating effect of more and more Cubans having at least indirect contact with the outside world.
The embargo is mean to keep Cubans poor (hoping this will fuel resentment and a challenge to the regime), but generally, the poor are much easier to keep in line than those with middle-class aspirations and embargo pretty effectively means that there is no Cuban middle class at present and won’t be.
Many people know this but still want to keep the embargo because they can’t stand the idea of the short term bounce that the regime would get from lifting it.
Another way to think about it. If you assume that the regime will change/collapse in the future, which do you want to deal with. A) a completely devestated Cuba and desperately poor population B) a poor but optimistic Cuba with an ambitious population? I see no way of continuing the embargo and having B.
Shoot Castro. Inavde the country. How is this difficult?
Isolation has not worked. And the libertarian plan to flood the country with McDonalds and porn will not work.
Shoot him. The only good communist is a dead one.
“hoot Castro. Inavde the country. How is this difficult?”
With what army?
“but it would relatively quickly (months and years, not weeks) be outweighed by liberating effect of more and more Cubans having at least indirect contact with the outside world.”
How does this increase Cubans exposure to the outside world? You are assunming that with the embargo lifted that Castro is going to let 1) foreigners mingle UN-Supervised with the masses and/or 2) let Cubans leave Cuba?
I don’t think so.
In the current situation any wealth that goes to Cuba will end up in Castro’s pocket.
If opening Cuba to American goods and money would end up in the pockets of entrepenuers and consumers I’d be all for it. But it won’t.
Kennedy shouldn’t have chickened out.
Yes. Every country in the world that isn’t embargoing Cuba, which is about all of them, is “flooding the country” with money and consumer goods. But that money and those goods aren’t getting to the people. So why would lifting the US embargo make any difference? As with Arafat, Stalin, Mao, Franco, Salazar, Tito, Nkrumah and Nehru, it will take the death of the symbolic leader to allow the revolution to be exposed as the disaster it has been.
Guys, we will never lift the embargo since it’s the only chip we have to play with vis-a-vis Fidel. Second, the Cuban exile community will go ballistic if any American politician tries to get rid of the embargo or even appears to be getting too chummy with Havana. Witness what happened to Al Gore in the wake of the Elian Gonzalez affair; the Cubans voted overwhelmingly for Bush and may have been the edge he needed to take Florida in 2000. Third, hasnt anyone ever noticed that whenever it appears that US-Cuba relations start getting warmer Fidel deliberately does something to send them down the crapper again? His doing that is not an accident; he needs the embargo more than we do. The embargo justifies the police state that keeps him in power. With the embargo in place, Fidel can always proclaim that whatever is wrong with Cuba, from its crappy economy to its lack of basic human rights, is the fault of the yanqui imperialists and their lackeys in Miami and that Cubans must always be on their guard against their evil machinations. With the embargo, he is the revolutionary hero defying the power of the United States. Without the embargo, he has no excuse for Cuba’s poverty, not when his people know that Miami has become one of the most important cities in Latin America because of the drive and work ethic of Cubans. Without the embargo, Fidel Castro is Augusto Pinochet or Alfredo Stroessner with a beard.
The ideal solution, I think, would just to announce that the embargo is over and that whoever wants to invest in Cuba can do so and the United States will not do anything to stop them, and that we should do this without consulting the Cubans at all. The blow to Fidel’s ego would be massive; I think he believes his own mythology of the brave David standing alone against the gringo Goliath. To be publicly dismissed in this fashion, left without his pet excuse, well, listening to the ranting from Havana would be entertaining, if nothing else.
Hmmm.
1. “Open trade will be as corrosive as was it was upon Eastern Europe and as it is proving to be in the PRC.”
Sorry but trade had little to do with opening up Eastern Europe. What did it was that the USSR went broke.
As for the PRC, I hadn’t heard that they had elections recently. China is a fairly bizzare set of circumstances. China has all the outward appearances of health, but it’s really rotting from within. It is trying to deal with, at least by official numbers, $700 billion USD in bad debt. Mostly due to government owned corporations that are losing money hand over fist. These corporations cannot be closed and continually demand more money from the nation’s banking system. Mostly owned and operated by generals in the PLA/PLAN, but not all, they are the source of skimmed wealth for many of China’s elite. Last I read the Chinese leaders were trying to sell bonds to Chinese workers, essentially pawning off the debt for cash.
Then there is the gender imbalance demographic problem. As of 2004 in Ghangzou there were 140 middle school boys for every 100 girls, and this culturally driven shift is accelerating. Already there are an estimated, by the Chinese government, 70 million unmarriageable Chinese men. In twenty years there will probably be around 200+ million. That’s pretty corrosive on soceity.
There is a great likelyhood that China is burning long-term economic viabilty in exchange for massive short-term growth either because they’re idiots or because they’re planning on defaulting on their bad debts and declaring war to cover for it.
But democracy in China? No evidence of that at all.
2. The entire reason why Cuba has continued it’s existence so long has almost entirely been remittances by Cuban ex-patriates. Amusingly enough it’s the very Cuban-American citizens that are propping up Castro. Originally the Cuban government had relied upon the USSR. But with that government’s extinction, the Cuban government has had to rely on foreign currency sent in by offshore relatives. This is why all government operated stores now only accept Euros or Dollars.
Since Bush has restricted the amount of yearly remittances, the Cuban government is attempting to hoover up as much loose cash as it can before the crunch comes. All things considered, that crunch will probably be rather soon. Castro is unwell and the Cuban government is lurching even further into backruptcy.
3. The embargo really cannot be lifted due to a wierd combination of politics, history, anti-Castro feeling and legacy property-rights. Castro has resisted compensating American property owners for those assets nationalized during the revolution. America’s stance as always required compensation before any real discussion of lifting the Embargo.
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It’s a curious circumstance. Personally I wonder if Castro’s brother, whose name I can’t even remember, will be strong enough a leader to prevent a coup or to even run the country. Certainly he won’t have the “cult of personality” to his benefit. Being known as “Castro’s brother” doesn’t have that cache.
I think the party in power in the US is quite happy with the status quo. Cuba is the most dependable of all the red states for getting votes for the GOP.
No, Raul Castro doesnt have his brother’s charisma, but he has something just as good: he’s the Minister of Defense and has been since the early 1960’s. As long as the Revolutionary Armed Forces back Raul, and they will, I dont think he has anything to worry about from the power structure. Whether or not the average Cuban will put up with his or her miserable condition for Raul in the same they do for Fidel, well, that’s another story entirely, isnt it?