Met a Cuban IT technician today in Brazil, he came with his coworker to install my WiFi modem and stuff.
My dad knows I'm a filthy commie and said "hey he's from Cuba!" and I promptly said (to remain neutral as to not cause anything) "I'd love to go to Cuba, cause here in Brazil people either say it's hell on earth or heaven on earth, so I'd like to see it for myself". The Cuban guy, which was very likeable said "there's a politician here in Brazil who says the truth: every May 1st we were coerced into partaking in the May Day Parade or else we'd be screwed over in the future, there are many people in poverty, it's a dictatorship, the military high ups get mansions and the populace lives in squalor, the government makes incentives for the people to use dollars because the bureaucrats can use those to travel abroad etc".
Honestly, I do believe he's telling the truth, because he lived and grew there in a town close to Havana, I forgot the name. His dream was to move to the US, and as someone who worked there I told him " if you're not a qualified worker you're gonna have a bad time, there's lots of poverty, yadda yadda".
What to think of this? Every single metric I've seen of Cuba shows it's better than its Caribbean neighbours, in basically every way besides what those far right institutes say.
What I've gathered from the conversation is that every poor country is similar, from Burkina Faso to Burundi to Laos and Cuba. It's not really a fault of "socialism" but rather a fault of the global North-South dynamic and how it pushes global south countries to be like this as to provide cheap labour and commodities.
Any thoughts on this comrades? I'm sorry if I'm wrong on anything, my theory is not the best and neither is my practice. Thank you for your time.
I don't have answers for the specific issues he brought up but as always it helps to be critical and look for the deeper issue. For example, I've heard a second hand account (as in, someone told me what a Cuban told them) that it's a poor country with the example that meat is not easy to get there. One has to ask, is that a failure of the Cuban government or an effect of the embargo?
For the May Day parade thing we need more information. How are you going to get screwed over if you don't go? Maybe it's just a societal expectation and people will frown/comment if you don't go, but I doubt you're getting fired over it or a parade you missed some years ago will bite you in the ass.
For the "mansions for the higher-ups, squalor for the populace" argument, it helps to ask about the scale of it. Socialism Betrayed mentions that in the USSR the higher ups lived in special, more luxurious apartments and had access to a super market with rarer imports (it mentions bananas or some other fruit, probably because no country traded them because of the US). This is a better standard of living that the average citizen, but it's much closer to them than what we see in western countries.
Hopefully someone has more specifics, but you get the point.
Some cultures in the west not going to the church on a sunday would lead to negative social outcomes, in Cuba they replaced church on a Sunday with paying homage to workers all over the world on May Day, seems fine to me.
Kinda weird one, I dont think Cuba even has homeless people, this is castro's home;
I suspect this is just the typical narrative an ex-cuban will internalize about corruption at a higher level while not recognizing that the country they live ins wealth gap is surely larger than cuba's by a large amount.