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Discussion (34 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The bottom line is that many Cuban immigrants in the United States feel that the current government destroyed the country and should be removed and Marco Rubio’s quest to fix Cuba is a reflection of Cuban immigrants values.
I thought the motivation was ideological, chiefly from the cuban exiles voter base, of which Rubio is a part of? Aside from maybe tobacco, cuba doesn't have much natural resources. That's why it's so poor.
I think something similar could be true today, and it doesn't require any natural resources beyond cheap labor, Caribbean weather, and an obedient government.
That is to say, ideology may do some heavy lifting, but the buy-in to actually translate that to action requires a profit motive.
Reading current events is a whole lot easier once you disabuse yourself of the idea that everything happens for a reason.
The rest of us don't need to do anything that doesn't serve us just because they have an axe to grind.
There's a good Scott Horton and Dave Smith conversation about this, but it's so obvious really, when you look at rich Cubans and rich Persians. Those revolutions happened because of their parents and grandparents, and now they want to pretend like they somehow represent the country they left? lol
Maybe that's an example we should pay attention to though. How many of Cuba's problems are caused by the US doubling-down on trying to interfere? Obviously their current power outages are.
Rubio has been pushing a false narrative of his family's history for a long time.
Think about how harmful Trump is to his country and how harmful he can be to a country that he doesn’t have any responsibility to. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand.
People who live outside if their country and say things like this are being shallow. They are understandably frustrated but this is not a healthy way as can be seen in numerous examples in history
Many will also not want to tell you any stories about what their family did in cuba.
Like I'm not trying to downplay the real violence and excesses. But read about how americans talked about cuba pre-castro, what they expected from the place during batista's dictatorship.
The deeply entrenched feudal-type rural poverty provided the raw human material for the mafia to create a vile playground for their own fantasies and sell it to other wealthy americans. Epstein economy shit. Castro didn't come out of nowhere, he harnessed the deep disgust and pain of a people being treated as things for money and pleasure. So yeah the sugar plantation landlords, the batista enforcers, the mafia sex slave sourcers were running for their lives. A lot other people got caught up too, absolutely. But ask your hypothetical cuban immigrant some followup questions. It's not always exactly personal why they hate castro.
Most Americans don’t even realize that there are millions of folks in Miami whose parents fled Cuba when the communists took over. My father’s family owned a factory in Cuba and were ordered to leave at gunpoint in 1960. They boarded a flight that day with few belongings.
To this day, people still risk their lives to flee Cuba on makeshift rafts. The conditions there absolutely suck.
No, we know, we just don't think it should affect our foreign policy.
My own family also fled a similar situation btw, communists ousting them and taking their business, ultimately leading them to emigrate here. But you have no idea how unsympathetic "pre-revolution Cuban factory owner" sounds lol, IDK how naive you think the rest of us are.
My grandfather's family, which owned the aforementioned business that got taken by communists, didn't do anything of use for other people or even for themselves really (e.g. didn't send kids abroad to get educated, as they should have). So karma got 'em (though ultimately the reason for the revolution could be ascribed more to the moral failings of colonial government than people like them).
Now, here, we see how the rich Cubans here are. How they vote. How they think they are better than other Hispanics, etc. Not interested in doing anything those people want.
"A decade ago, Forbes estimated Fidel Castro’s personal net worth at $900 million."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/keithflamer/2016/11/26/10-surpr...
I'm sure most of that went to his sons (the ones that weren't Prime Minister of Canada).
The U.S. Is (insert anything) to Make Rich Men Richer
He doesn’t get a pass.
Either way, this is what the looting stage of collapse looks like to me.
I have no love for communist regimes but this corrupt capitalism alternative understandably isn’t appetizing. Consider the damage the Harvard Institute for International Development did to post USSR and how a country that was eager to adopt western ways was introduced to new levels of looting they didn’t even know was possible. Perhaps if we had a better track record in governance people wouldn’t be so reluctant to adopt it.
Most things aren't binary.
The extremity of the current administration's actions should not be ignored just because others did some things in a similar direction.
"Yawn, same shit different day" is how we sleepwalk ourselves into fascism.
If bad people do the right thing for the wrong reasons, we should be thankful, not angry.
Even for clearly despotic regimes, overthrowing them is not the obviously right thing.