{"id":69132,"date":"2016-11-27T09:17:37","date_gmt":"2016-11-27T14:17:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=69132"},"modified":"2016-11-27T09:17:37","modified_gmt":"2016-11-27T14:17:37","slug":"life-in-cuba-circa-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=69132","title":{"rendered":"Life In Cuba, Circa 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

I ran across this while following a link in comments to Jonn\u2019s article about the death of Fidel Castro<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 To give some perspective to Castro\u2019s \u201caccomplishments\u201d, thought I\u2019d post links to what I found here.<\/p>\n

The article is by Michael J. Totten<\/em><\/a>, a US journalist.\u00a0 It first appeared in the Spring 2014 City Journal<\/a> <\/em><\/strong>magazine.<\/p>\n

According to Totten, Cuban officials don\u2019t allow foreign journalists routine entry to Cuba.\u00a0 After reading the article, the reason why should be fairly obvious.<\/p>\n

Totten nonetheless managed to lie his way past customs and spend some time in that \u201cCommunist Utopia\u201d.\u00a0 But unlike Michael Moore and others, he made it a point to get outside the \u201ctourist zones\u201d and see how the Cuban populace actually lives.<\/p>\n

The documents his firsthand observations<\/u> regarding the conditions when he visited Cuba in 2013 \u2013 the conditions outside Havana\u2019s \u201ctourist enclaves\u201d.\u00a0 Totten went out of his way to spend time outside Havana\u2019s \u201ctourist enclaves\u201d, and observe \u2013 and later record \u2013 what he\u2019d seen.\u00a0 In short, he went to those places where Cubans actually live<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The article can be found here<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 It\u2019s longish, but it\u2019s definitely worth reading.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a little excerpt for one TAH reader we all \u201cknow and love\u201d.\u00a0 I\u2019ve added emphasis in a few places.<\/p>\n

Cuba was one of the world\u2019s richest countries before Castro destroyed it\u2014and the wealth wasn\u2019t just in the hands of a tiny elite. \u201cContrary to the myth spread by the revolution,\u201d wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of political science at the University of West Florida, \u201cCuba\u2019s wealth before 1959 was not the purview of a privileged few. . . . Cuban society was as much of a middle-class society as Argentina and Chile.\u201d In 1958, Cuba had a higher per-capita income than much of Europe<\/em>. \u201cMore Americans lived in Cuba prior to Castro than Cubans lived in the United States,\u201d Cuban exile Humberto Fontova, author of a series of books about Castro and Guevara, tells me. \u201cThis was at a time when Cubans were perfectly free to leave the country with all their property. In the 1940s and 1950s, my parents could get a visa for the United States just by asking. They visited the United States and voluntarily returned to Cuba. More Cubans vacationed in the U.S. in 1955 than Americans vacationed in Cuba. Americans considered Cuba a tourist playground, but even more Cubans considered the U.S. a tourist playground.\u201d Havana was home to a lot of that prosperity, as is evident in the extraordinary classical European architecture that still fills the city. Poor nations do not\u2014cannot\u2014build such grand or elegant cities.<\/p>\n

But rather than raise the poor up, Castro and Guevara shoved the rich and the middle class down. The result was collapse. \u201cBetween 1960 and 1976,\u201d<\/em> Cuzan says, \u201cCuba\u2019s per capita GNP in constant dollars declined at an average annual rate of almost half a percent<\/span>. The country thus has the tragic distinction of being the only one in Latin America to have experienced a drop in living standards over the period<\/span>.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yep.\u00a0 Just your garden-variety Socialist \u201cworker\u2019s paradise\u201d.\u00a0 Sounds quite a lot like accounts I\u2019ve read of the former Soviet Union, actually.<\/p>\n

But the threat from Communism is now \u201cpasse\u201d.\u00a0 Remember:\u00a0 Don’t Fear the Commie<\/em><\/a>!<\/p>\n

Rot in hell, Fidel.\u00a0 If even a small part of that article is true, you richly deserve it for what you did to your own nation and countrymen.\u00a0\u00a0 Even the thoroughly corrupt and morally bankrupt bastard Batista was a piker by comparison.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hat tip to TAH commenter <\/em>HMCS(FMF) ret for linking to an article in his comments. A link embedded in the article he linked ultimately led me to the gem above.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I ran across this while following a link in comments to Jonn\u2019s article about the death … Life In Cuba, Circa 2013<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":623,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188,155,170],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reality-check","category-shitbags","category-who-knows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/623"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}