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 can relate to you since I am a child from an abusive ableist Hong Kong Canadian family. For my story, My grandparents originated from mainland China during the repressive Chinese warlord period, and they fled from China to Hong Kong in 1950 when the Communists began to unify mainland China. At that time, Hong Kong is a British colony. My parents were born in Hong Kong and fled to Canada as refugees before the British empire hand Hong Kong back to China.
The rationale that my parents provided for their departure from mainland China is not about Communism itself, but rather the Chinese tradition (which refers to the brutal warlord practices that the Communist eradicated) and the overpopulation problem. My parents had justified brutal authoritarian rule in mainland China with their claim that the authority need to stop conflicts for limited resource for survival. My family claimed that they only fled Hong Kong to Canada when the British colony shows a video where a group of people in plain clothes ram an armored vehicle on a group of protesters.
Interestingly, my father and grandparents now supported the current mainland Chinese government from the ability to transform China into a superpower despite their hatred towards the Communist ideology similar to the Russian Populists towards the Soviet Union. This is in contrast to the liberal alias of tankiejerker who claimed to support slogan leftists, but oppose any successful leftist movements and blindly believe everything that Pax Americana oligarch said at face value. However, my family are still unwillling to return to mainland China.
Despite their claim of victim of Communism, my family practice a policy of victim blaming from their belief that repression from government are self-inflicted and avoidable at anytime. My father even boosted that armed gangsters are "righteous" people who only attack "bad kids". He said that you should always serve armed gangsters because armed gangsters ruled Canada and even the police obey the armed gangsters in fear.
My mother did face abuse from my grandparents, but she always blame the Chinese Communist government for the toxic warlord tradition from her inability to distinguish between the warlord government that my grandparents lived in and the Communist government that my grandparents fled from. Although my mother had never lived under Communist rule, she claimed she can speak about the current mainland Chinese government because she thinks that the toxic warlord practices of my grandparents are somehow the true example of the current Chinese government. The British Christians presented themselves as an alternative to the "Chinese tradition" of my grandparents to gain the trust of my mother, so my mother always think that Western culture are benevolent and that any abusive practice in the Chinese Christian churches are somehow the remnant of "Chinese tradition". Under the influence of Western Christians, my mother follow the policies of blind obedience to authority, wilfull ignorance, and patriarchy that led to her deception and decades of abuse by my ableist abusive father.