USA vs Cuba
USA vs Cuba
61 comments
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Mind posting the actual links to the sources?
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I don't have all the links on hand, but it's easily googlable if you just put the numbers in
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Why don't you do that then?
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If you’ve wasted countless hours arguing with antisocialists, you know that respecting their enquiries is a waste of time because they can just dismiss everything that contradicts their meme ideology as Judeo‐Bolshevik propaganda. International organizations? Obviously the state must have given them some fake data and the organizations trusted them unquestioningly because secretly they’re all staffed by a bunch of big dumb stupid idiots.
Anyway, I think that these are the exact sources:
https://data.worldbank.org/country/CU
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?locations=CU-CU
https://data.un.org/en/iso/cu.html
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/countries/country-details/GHO/cuba
Took me fewer than ten minutes to find them.
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Last item omits Cuban interventions in Africa, ie Angola.
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Yeah, really doing Cuba dirty by ignoring their military contributions to ending apartheid!
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Yeah they won.
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And all the hands in South America, including the Venezuelan takeover.
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Right, let’s ignore things like frequent blackouts (https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-turns-off-some-public-lighting-energy-crisis-worsens-2024-03-05/) and the fact that if you protest any decisions by the government you risk being locked up indefinitely (https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/cuba)
Surely signs of a stable government
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As if the illegal embargo and the power infrastructure issues are unrelated 🙄
Human Rights Watch is part of The Human Rights Concern Troll Industrial Complex whose purpose is facilitating regime change.
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Blackouts are certainly a thing, and for the middle class in USA that would be considered intolerable. However, for the poor in the USA who sometimes go without electricity for lack of payment, having access to healthcare and education in exchange for the occasional blackout might be worth the trade.
As for speaking out against the government, citizens may not be incarcerated for speaking out (unless it actually threatens the government such as Manning, Snowden, and Winner), other forms of control are used. Usually that means pervasive propaganda and pitting people against each other through the Culture War.
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US has the highest incarceration per capita in the world, and it's far higher than Cuba. Meanwhile, the blockade of Cuba certainly does make things difficult for a small island. The fact that people of Cuba enjoy higher quality of life than Americans in many ways, shows how communism can persevere even under harshest conditions. Not the own you seem to think it is.
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How about USA vs Vietnam?
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Vietnam won
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for "foreign interventions" I would do something like, "10 million killed since 1947" vs "ended Apartheid" instead of what you got there.
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yeah would've been better, I'm just resharing it
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Let's wish both of them a very pleasant people's revolution in the future
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PPP per capita is 5x lower in Cuba than in the US. In other words, salaries are low and people struggle to afford things in Cuba, whereas the average citizen in the US can afford much more.
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So they can buy less commodities but generally still manage to live longer lives, are more able to read which means they can pursue intellectual and cultural pursuits, etc?
Sounds like a good trade, I bet it would be an even better trade without the blockade.
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I'm not saying life on balance is necessarily worse or better. Just pointing out that cherry-picking statistics can sketch a wrong image.
"Less commodities" sounds a bit dismissive of the difference though. It is significantly less, e.g. the average salary is less than 190 USD per month. Most Cubans struggle to get enough food to get by, and whilst there are measures to avoid starvation, they're not exactly having much to eat either. They're not using their time for intellectual/cultural pursuits, most use their time to find additional sources of income.
Healthcare is free, but the equipment is old. Outcomes are poorer, due to lack of drugs. Cuba has an excellent HIV-program, with mandatory testing and cheap antivirals. Yet, HIV cases (and STIs in general) are on the rise due to a high prevalence of prostitution, caused by the low salaries and high wealth inequality.
Upsides and downsides. Reality is that several hundreds of thousands of Cubans attempt to flee the country every year. Between 2021 and 2023, nearly 500k people tried to do so, ~5% of the population. That's not very indicative of a place-to-be.
It may well be true that the US embargo is causing a lot of these issues. However, economists tend to argue that the lack of Soviet subsidies has a much larger negative effect.
I'm not so sure it's a good trade. There are things we can learn, certainly. But on balance, it doesn't seem better.
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You forgot to factor in the cost of housing, healthcare, and education that people in Cuba don't have to worry about.
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Sure, but other items cost much more compared to their salaries. It's a definite downside.
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The malnutrition stat is completely made up
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You're right, it's actually higher in USA now
Results: Between 1999 and 2020, 93,244 older adults died from malnutrition. Malnutrition AAMR increased from 10.7 per 100,000 in 1999 to 25.0 per 100,000 in 2020.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37936140/
Meanwhile, Cuba is at 0.3 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/malnutrition-death-rates
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This is a Patrick Symmes's article I read a while ago
https://www.patricksymmes.com/articles/publications/harpers/2010/thirty-days-as-a-cuban/
The data you listed comes from IHME, Global Burden of Disease but there's nothing findable online as to how it's actually gathered
I suspect they got it from the Cuban government
It's not easy having a good nutrition in Cuba
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61 comments
I’m not a fan of meme-level infographics of unsourced data.
US unemployment figures virtually never include those who have given up on looking for work, which is a drastic undercounting. Biden’s Misleading Unemployment Statistic
Who knows where the Cuban unemployment figure came from, or how it was calculated or the quality of the data.
Some brief searching of my own tells me that, while the unemployment numbers are roughly correct, the actual pay for those jobs are so low that they have a rough time actually being able to afford anything. Like, minimum wage is 2100 Cuban Pesos per month, but one set of clothing costs about 9700 on average.
https://horizontecubano.law.columbia.edu/news/calculating-cost-living-Cuba
Plenty of people have hard time affording anything in US as well, and lots of people end up working multiple jobs now because jobs don't even pay a living wage.