I love it... "what you see" really?
What do you see? A flood of innovations, patents and great art coming out of Cuba to enhance mankind?
Cuba on the frontier of medicine, design, production and art?
Please, enlighten us.

What I see, here in FL, is anyone with half a brain in Cuba, doing their damnedest to get to where they can flourish... and I SEE that. Some of my best friends are actual Cuban immigrants that cowered from sharks and their kids.
Communism does one thing, lowers the bar to the lowest common denominator and punishes anyone who pushes past that in any way... envy.


During the Soviet era the top doctors and scientists were watched and under lock and key because they wanted to leave. It was the only way they could get any military work done... even all of that was based on intelligence from the west.
They invented NOTHING.

Yeah, I hear Cuban kids can be really scary... ;)

LOL!!!
Funny!

Fortunately, you are not my teacher. I have excellent teachers. I attend a very good university, with a well respected school of history and am currently on track for a first, with my grades putting me into the top 5% in a school of 260 students. What I am not, is an economist.

As a matter of fact, I agree that in the countries where revolutionary socialism, or soviet style communism has taken root, what has actually resulted, effectively is state-capitalism.

Socialism, in its purist sense, has never actually been put effectively into action; partly because in order for it to truly work it needs to be global. What has been successful in many countries, is the adoption of some of the values of socialism, whilst still harnessing many of the advantages of capitalism.

I would no more wish to live in a state of pure socialism, than I would seek to live under the most extreme form of laissez-faire, free market capitalism. Neither system alone answers all of society's needs/problems, neither system alone truly allows for the realisation of all its citizens' potential. What works, in my opinion, is a balance of the two.

Where that balance lies is a lot to do with cultural norms and assumptions. Your cultural assumptions (right down to the layers of meaning which we attach to words and concepts, despite the fact that we share a base language) are different to my cultural assumptions. You and I are not just on opposite sides of a spectrum, we are almost on different spectrums.

Come on people, who doesn't love the communist party??
http://media.threadless.com//product/383/zoom.gif

Oh, really?
 

And your idea of what they lived under is...?

Bullitt: yup. Party animals. What's even more fun is I can make the same joke in Russian. Is beink Communist Party animals...

DanaC: that little exigesis moves me to paraphrase Edmund O. Wilson, who made this observation re communism, but this serves as well: Socialism: interesting idea, wrong species.

Any time you see a sentence like that about a system, it's a sure sign that that system does not work. That kind of special pleading for other-than-market economy has been going on continuously since 1921 when the Communists actually found themselves in a position of responsibility for the first time, and it's never worked. Capitalism, OTOH, has never needed a syllable of special pleading ever. You could look that up. Big or small, capitalism works, because it works with, not against, human nature. It is in the nature of humans, indeed in a way of all terrestrial life, to require a profit motive.

All you really need are two things: capitalism, and good ethics. You don't need socialism to make ethics -- far from it. Socialism, therefore, is simply an attempt by useless eaters and drones to secure a good income as members of officialdom. Better they should learn the mysteries of the backhoe and go dig ditches. Foundations and groundlevel pools too.

In a related topic, Castro's Cuba is sending cheap doctors to Chavez' Venezuela. The doctors are no doubt pleased to hear they will be paid ten times their US$15/month salary -- until they discover that the Cuban government is taking away eighty percent of it -- so the doctors/med techs are taking home the munificent sum of a dollar a day. The Cuban staffers have already had to resort to extreme measures to keep the medical people confined -- government minders, locked compounds, no one allowed out except in pairs -- and nonetheless, whole piles of Cubans are disappearing into the brush and reemerging in Mexico and the United States. Smart and wealthy Venezuelans are heading out of the country in droves too.

C'mon, you know the horrors of the Soviet Union and Mao's China are nowhere close to socialism. The west's cold war propaganda machine used communism and socialism, interchangeably, to describe what was neither.
Britain is closer than they ever were.

I recognize this kind of thinking in two groups of Americans. The "what could have been" Trotskyites and their neo-con cousins. Memes are funny things.

Bruce, the horrors were part and parcel of the socialist system; it required them because revolutions devour their children, particularly if they are attempted as a comprehensive revision of human nature. Human nature is not malleable enough to be changed by revisions of the political order. These revisions, etcetera, are always about moving the citizens about like chessmen, in accordance with some higher-up's plan.

"Barbed wire always seems necessary to keep the chessmen on their squares." -- P.J. O'Rourke

You mean Sundae Girl was forced to move to London or she climbed the barbed wire to get out of where she was and again to get into where she is?

so·cial·ism (sō'shə-lĭz'əm)
n.
1-Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
2-The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.

No, I don't mean that as you know very well, Bruce.

1) None of which work. That dates back to the French physiocrats, about whom P.J. O'Rourke and Adam Smith together had this to say:

"Before totalitarianism had ever been tried, Adam Smith was prescient in his scorn for it:

'The man of system. . . is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. . . He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces on a chessboard.'"

From The Wealth of Nations' chapter in which Smith takes the physiocrats' theory to bits. O'Rourke adds then:

"Barbed wire always seems to be needed to keep the chessmen on their squares."

This is true of the polite variations of socialism as well as of the impolite variety. It doesn't work, people leave, and then coercion is exerted to stem the outflow. Phooey to all that. Voting with their feet, toes pointing away, is the sign your policies aren't working at all well.

2) Marxist-Leninist theory is in any case exploded after a century of trial and struggle. Lenin was seeing the failure of the overall theory to account for macroeconomic phenomena in his time: capitalism kept not impoverishing the proletariat, so they weren't overthrowing the capitalists. Indeed, the contrary was occurring: the proletariat kept getting richer. In puzzlement, Lenin took to attributing this phenomenon to the presence of empire. Since this enrichment also takes place without empire, viz., the United States and its steady enrichment with or without overseas possessions, I'd say this Leninist theory doesn't hold up.

Which comes back to what I said.

Any system that has to restrict internal travel and lock-up their entire population is a failure before it even starts.
That one detail alone is enough to doom the entire system.

I think you'd probably find that more countries restrict travel than don't.

Which of the successful ones do?