The Last Communist City

[vt]

Michael J. Totten The Last Communist City A visit to the dystopian Havana that tourists never see Spring 2014 Ted Soqui/Corbis Downtown Old Havana, just blocks from the capitol Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 science-fiction film Elysium, starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, takes place in Los Angeles, circa 2154. The wealthy have moved into an orbiting luxury satellite—the Elysium of the title—while the wretched majority of humans remain in squalor on Earth. The film works passably as an allegory for its director’s native South Africa, where racial apartheid was enforced for nearly 50 years, but it’s a rather cartoonish vision of the American future. Some critics panned the film for pushing a socialist message. Elysium’s dystopian world, however, is a near-perfect metaphor for an actually existing socialist nation just 90 miles from Florida. I’ve always wanted to visit Cuba—not because I’m nostalgic for a botched utopian fantasy but because I wanted to experience Communism firsthand. When I finally got my chance several months ago, I was startled to discover how much the Cuban reality lines up with Blomkamp’s dystopia. In Cuba, as in Elysium, a small group of economic and political elites live in a rarefied world high above the impoverished masses. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, would be appalled by the misery endured by Cuba’s ordinary citizens and shocked by the relatively luxurious lifestyles of those who keep the poor down by force. Many tourists return home convinced that the Cuban model succeeds where the Soviet model failed. But that’s because they never left Cuba’s Elysium. I had to lie to get into the country. Customs and immigration officials at Havana’s tiny, dreary José Martí International Airport would have evicted me had they known I was a journalist. But not even a total-surveillance police state can keep track of everything and everyone all the time, so I slipped through. It felt like a victory. Havana, the capital, is clean and safe, but there’s nothing to buy. It feels less natural and organic than any city I’ve ever visited. Initially, I found Havana pleasant, partly because I wasn’t supposed to be there and partly because I felt as though I had journeyed backward in time. But the city wasn’t pleasant for long, and it certainly isn’t pleasant for the people living there. It hasn’t been so for decades. Outside its small tourist sector, the rest of the city looks as though it suffered a catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina or the Indonesian tsunami. Roofs have collapsed. Walls are splitting apart. Window glass is missing. Paint has long vanished. It’s eerily dark at night, almost entirely free of automobile traffic. I walked for miles through an enormous swath of destruction without seeing a single tourist. Most foreigners don’t know that this other Havana exists, though it makes up most of the city—tourist buses avoid it, as do taxis arriving from the airport. It is filled with people struggling to eke out a life in the ruins. Marxists have ruled Cuba for more than a half-century now. Fidel Castro, Argentine guerrilla Che Guevara, and their 26th of July Movement forced Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959 and replaced his standard-issue authoritarian regime with a Communist one. The revolutionaries promised liberal democracy, but Castro secured absolute power and flattened the country with a Marxist-Leninist battering ram. The objectives were total equality and the abolition of money; the methods were total surveillance and political prisons. The state slogan, then and now, is “socialism or death.” Cuba was one of the world’s richest countries before Castro destroyed it—and the wealth wasn’t just in the hands of a tiny elite. “Contrary to the myth spread by the revolution,” wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of political science at the University of West Florida, “Cuba’s 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.” In 1958, Cuba had a higher per-capita income than much of Europe. “More Americans lived in Cuba prior to Castro than Cubans lived in the United States,” Cuban exile Humberto Fontova, author of a series of books about Castro and Guevara, tells me. “This 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.” 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—cannot—build such grand or elegant cities. But rather than raise the poor up, Castro and Guevara shoved the rich and the middle class down. The result was collapse. “Between 1960 and 1976,” Cuzan says, “Cuba’s per capita GNP in constant dollars declined at an average annual rate of almost half a percent. 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.” Communism destroyed Cuba’s prosperity, but the country experienced unprecedented pain and deprivation when Moscow cut off its subsidies after the fall of the Soviet Union. Journalist and longtime Cuba resident Mark Frank writes vividly about this period in his book Cuban Revelations. “The lights were off more than they were on, and so too was the water. . . . Food was scarce and other consumer goods almost nonexistent. . . . Doctors set broken bones without anesthesia. . . . Worm dung was the only fertilizer.” He quotes a nurse who tells him that Cubans “used to make hamburgers out of grapefruit rinds and banana peels; we cleaned with lime and bitter orange and used the black powder in batteries for hair dye and makeup.” “It was a haunting time,” Frank wrote, “that still sends shivers down Cubans’ collective spines.” By the 1990s, Cuba needed economic reform as much as a gunshot victim needs an ambulance. Castro wasn’t about to reform himself and his ideology out of existence, but he had to open up at least a small piece of the country to the global economy. So the Soviet subsidy was replaced by vacationers, mostly from Europe and Latin America, who brought in much-needed hard currency. Arriving foreigners weren’t going to tolerate receiving ration cards for food—as the locals do—so the island also needed some restaurants. The regime thus allowed paladars—restaurants inside private homes—to open, though no one from outside the family could work in them. (That would be “exploitative.”) Around the same time, government-run “dollar stores” began selling imported and relatively luxurious goods to non-Cubans. Thus was Cuba’s quasi-capitalist bubble created. When the ailing Fidel Castro ceded power to his less doctrinaire younger brother Raúl in 2008, the quasi-capitalist bubble expanded, but the economy remains heavily socialist. In the United States, we have a minimum wage; Cuba has a maximum wage—$20 a month for almost every job in the country. (Professionals such as doctors and lawyers can make a whopping $10 extra a month.) Sure, Cubans get “free” health care and education, but as Cuban exile and Yale historian Carlos Eire says, “All slave owners need to keep their slaves healthy and ensure that they have the skills to perform their tasks.” Even employees inside the quasi-capitalist bubble don’t get paid more. The government contracts with Spanish companies such as Meliá International to manage Havana’s hotels. Before accepting its contract, Meliá said that it wanted to pay workers a decent wage. The Cuban government said fine, so the company pays $8–$10 an hour. But Meliá doesn’t pay its employees directly. Instead, the firm gives the compensation to the government, which then pays the workers—but only after pocketing most of the money. I asked several Cubans in my hotel if that arrangement is really true. All confirmed that it is. The workers don’t get $8–$10 an hour; they get 67 cents a day—a child’s allowance. The maximum wage is just the beginning. Not only are most Cubans not allowed to have money; they’re hardly allowed to have things. The police expend extraordinary manpower ensuring that everyone required to live miserably at the bottom actually does live miserably at the bottom. Dissident blogger and author Yoani Sánchez describes the harassment sarcastically in her book Havana Real: “Buses are stopped in the middle of the street and bags inspected to see if we are carrying some cheese, a lobster, or some dangerous shrimp hidden among our personal belongings.” Perhaps the saddest symptom of Cuba’s state-enforced poverty is the prostitution epidemic—a problem the government officially denies and even forbids foreign journalists based in Havana to mention. Some Cuban prostitutes are professionals, but many are average women—wives, girlfriends, sisters, mothers—who solicit johns once or twice a year for a little extra money to make ends meet. The government defends its maximum wage by arguing that life’s necessities are either free or so deeply subsidized in Cuba that citizens don’t need very much money. (Che Guevara and his sophomoric hangers-on hoped to rid Cuba of money entirely, but couldn’t quite pull it off.) The free and subsidized goods and services, though, are as dismal as everything else on the island. Citizens who take public transportation to work—which includes almost everyone, since Cuba hardly has any cars—must wait in lines for up to two hours each way to get on a bus. And commuters must pay for their ride out of their $20 a month. At least commuter buses are cheap. By contrast, a one-way ticket to the other side of the island costs several months’ pay; a round-trip costs almost an annual salary. As for the free health care, patients have to bring their own medicine, their own bedsheets, and even their own iodine to the hospital. Most of these items are available only on the illegal black market, moreover, and must be paid for in hard currency—and sometimes they’re not available at all. Cuba has sent so many doctors abroad—especially to Venezuela, in exchange for oil—that the island is now facing a personnel shortage. “I don’t want to say there are no doctors left,” says an American man who married a Cuban woman and has been back dozens of times, “but the island is now almost empty. I saw a banner once, hanging from somebody’s balcony, that said, DO I NEED TO GO TO VENEZUELA FOR MY HEADACHE?” Housing is free, too, but so what? Americans can get houses in abandoned parts of Detroit for only $500—which makes them practically free—but no one wants to live in a crumbling house in a gone-to-the-weeds neighborhood. I saw adequate housing in the Cuban countryside, but almost everyone in Havana lives in a Detroit-style wreck, with caved-in roofs, peeling paint, and doors hanging on their hinges at odd angles. Education is free, and the country is effectively 100 percent literate, thanks to Castro’s campaign to teach rural people to read shortly after he took power. But the regime has yet to make a persuasive argument that a totalitarian police state was required to get the literacy rate from 80 percent to 100 percent. After all, almost every other country in the Western Hemisphere managed the same feat at the same time, without the brutal repression. Cuba is short of everything but air and sunshine. In her book, Sánchez describes an astonishing appearance by Raúl Castro on television, during which he boasted that the economy was doing so well now that everyone could drink milk. “To me,” Sánchez wrote, “someone who grew up on a gulp of orange-peel tea, the news seemed incredible.” She never thought she’d see the day. “I believed we would put a man on the moon, take first place among all nations in the upcoming Olympics, or discover a vaccine for AIDS before we would put the forgotten morning café con leche, coffee with milk, within reach of every person on this island.” And yet Raúl’s promise of milk for all was deleted from the transcription of the speech in Granma, the Communist Party newspaper. He went too far: there was not enough milk to ensure that everyone got some. Even things as simple as cooking oil and soap are black-market goods. Individuals who, by some illegal means or another, manage to acquire such desirables will stand on street corners and whisper “cooking oil” or “sugar” to passersby, and then sell the product on the sly out of their living room. If they’re caught, both sellers and buyers will be arrested, of course, but the authorities can’t put the entire country in jail. “Everyone cheats,” says Eire. “One must in order to survive. The verb Ωto steal≈ has almost vanished from usage. Breaking the rules is necessary. Resolví mi problema, which means ‘I solved my problem,’ is the Cuban way of referring to stealing or cheating or selling on the black market.” Cuba has two economies now: the national Communist economy for the majority; and a quasi-capitalist one for foreigners and the elite. Each has its own currency: the Communist economy uses the Cuban peso, and the capitalist bubble uses the convertible peso. Cuban pesos are worth nothing. They can’t be converted to dollars or euros. Foreigners can’t even spend them in Cuba. The convertible pesos are pegged to the U.S. dollar, but banks and hotels pay only 87 Cuban cents for each one—the government takes 13 percent off the top. The rigged exchange rate is an easy way to shake down foreigners without most noticing. It also enables the state to drain Cuban exiles. A million Cuban-Americans live in south Florida, and another half-million live elsewhere in the United States. They send hundreds of millions of dollars a year to family members still on the island. The government gets its 13 percent instantaneously and most of the remaining 87 percent later because almost every place that someone can spend the money is owned by the state. Castro created the convertible peso mainly to seal off Cuba’s little capitalist bubble from the ragged majority in the Communist economy. “Foreign journalists report on the creation of ever more luxurious hotels, golf courses, and marinas,” Eire says, “but fail to highlight the very simple and brutal fact that these facilities will be enjoyed strictly by foreigners and the Castronoid power elite. Apartheid, discrimination, and segregation are deliberately built in to the entire tourist industry and, in fact, are essential to its maintenance and survival.” Until a few years ago, ordinary Cubans weren’t allowed even to set foot inside hotels or restaurants unless they worked there, lest they find themselves exposed to the seductive lifestyles of the decadent bourgeoisie from capitalist nations like Mexico, Chile, and Spain. (I cite these three countries because most of the tourists I ran into spoke Spanish to one another.) A few years ago, the government stopped physically blocking Cubans from hotels and restaurants, partly because Raúl is a little more relaxed about these things than Fidel but also because most Cubans can’t afford to go to these places, anyway. A single restaurant meal in Havana costs an entire month’s salary. One night in a hotel costs five months’ salary. A middle-class tourist from abroad can easily spend more in one day than most Cubans make in a year. I had dinner with four Americans at one of the paladars. The only Cubans in the restaurant were the cooks and the waiters. The bill for the five of us came to about $100. That’s five months’ salary. The Floridita bar in downtown Havana was one of Ernest Hemingway’s hangouts when he lived there (from 1940 until 1960, the year after Castro came to power). He was in the Floridita all the time—and, in a way, he still is. There’s a statue of him sitting on his favorite bar stool, grinning at today’s patrons. The décor is exactly the same, but there’s a big difference: everyone in the bar these days is a tourist. Cubans aren’t strictly banned any more, but a single bottle of beer costs a week’s salary. No one would blow his dismal paycheck on that. If he were still around, Hemingway would be stunned to see what has happened to his old haunt. Cubans certainly aren’t happy about it, but the tourists are another story—especially the world’s remaining Marxoid fellow travelers, who show up in Havana by the planeload. Such people are clearly unteachable. I got into an argument with one at the Floridita when I pointed out that none of the patrons were Cuban. “There are places in the United States that some can’t afford,” she retorted. Sure, but come on. Not even the poorest Americans have to pay a week’s wage for a beer. Cubans in the hotel industry see how foreigners live. The government can’t hide it without shutting the hotels down entirely, and it can’t do that because it needs the money. I changed a few hundred American dollars into convertible pesos at the front desk. The woman at the counter didn’t blink when I handed over my cash—she does this all day—but when she first got the job, it must have been shattering to make such an exchange. That’s why the regime wants to keep foreigners and locals apart. Tourists tip waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides, and chambermaids in hard currency, and to stave off a revolt from these people, the government lets them keep the additional money, so they’re “rich” compared with everyone else. In fact, they’re an elite class enjoying privileges—enough income to afford a cell phone, go out to restaurants and bars, log on to the Internet once in a while—that ordinary Cubans can’t even dream of. I asked a few people how much chambermaids earn in tips, partly so that I would know how much to leave on my dresser and also to get an idea of just how crazy Cuban economics are. Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they’ll bring in $600 a month—30 times what everyone else gets. “All animals are equal,” George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism, “but some animals are more equal than others.” Only in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class and even the poor outside Cuba. About half the dinners I had were acceptable, and a few were outstanding, but the breakfast buffets in my hotel, the Habana Libre, were uniformly disgusting. Bacon was half-raw, the sausage made from God-knows-what. The cheese was discolored, the bread hard and flavorless. Yet the grim offering was advertised in the lobby as “exquisite.” Maybe if you’ve spent your entire life on a Cuban ration card, it’s exquisite, but otherwise—no. The question wasn’t what I wanted to eat, but what I thought I could eat without my stomach rising up in rebellion. Leftists often talk about “food deserts” in Western cities, where the poor supposedly lack options to buy affordable and nutritious food. If they want to see a real food desert, they should come to Havana. I went to a grocery store across the street from the exclusive Meliá Cohiba Hotel, where the lucky few with access to hard currency shop to supplement their meager state rations. The store was in what passes for a mall in Havana—a cluttered concrete box, shabby compared even with malls I’ve visited in Iraq. It carried rice, beans, frozen chicken, milk, bottled water, booze, a small bit of cheese, minuscule amounts of rancid-looking meat, some low-end cookies and chips from Brazil—and that’s it. No produce, cereal, no cans of soup, no pasta. A 7–11 has a far better selection, and this is a place for Cuba’s “rich” to shop. I heard, but cannot confirm, that potatoes would not be available anywhere in Cuba for another four months. Shortly before I left Havana, I met a Cuban-American man and his wife visiting from Miami. “Is this your first time here?” he asked. I nodded. “What do you think?” I paused before answering. I wasn’t worried that I would offend him. He lives in Miami, so his opinions of Cuba are probably little different from mine. But we were in a crowded place. Plenty of Cubans could hear us, including the police. They wouldn’t arrest me if I insulted the government, but I didn’t want to make a scene, either. “Well,” I finally said. “It’s . . . interesting.” He belted out a great belly laugh, and I smiled. His wife scowled. “I hate this place!” she near-shouted. Fidel himself could have heard, and she wouldn’t have cared. She wasn’t going to be quiet about it. Tourists who visit Cuba and spend all their time inside the bubble for the “haves” could leave the country oblivious to the savage inequalities and squalor beyond the hotel zone, but this woman visits her husband’s family in the real Cuba and knows what it’s really like. “His family is from here,” she said, “but mine’s not, and I will never come back here. Not while it’s like this. I feel like I’m in Iraq or Afghanistan.” I visited Iraq seven times during the war and didn’t have the heart to tell her that Baghdad, while ugly and dangerous, is vastly freer and more prosperous these days than Havana. Anyway, Iraq is precisely the kind of country with which Castro wants you to compare Cuba. It’s the wrong comparison. So are impoverished Third World countries like Guatemala and Haiti. Cuba isn’t a developing country; it’s a once-developed country destroyed by its own government. Havana was a magnificent Western city once. It should be compared not with Baghdad, Kabul, Guatemala City, or Port-au-Prince but with formerly Communist Budapest, Prague, or Berlin. Havana’s history mirrors theirs, after all. An advertisement in my hotel claimed that the Sierra Maestra restaurant on the top floor is “probably” the best in Havana. I had saved the Sierra Maestra for my last night and rode the elevator up to the 25th floor. I had my first and only steak on the island and washed it down with Chilean red wine. The tiny bill set me back no more than having a pizza delivered at home would, but the total nevertheless exceeded an entire month’s local salary. Not surprisingly, I ate alone. Every other table was empty. The staff waited on me as if I were the president of some faraway minor republic. I stared at the city below out the window as I sipped my red wine. Havana looked like a glittering metropolis in the dark. Night washed away the rot and the grime and revealed nothing but city lights. It occurred to me that Havana will look mostly the same—at night, anyway—after it is liberated from the tyrannical imbeciles who govern it now. I tried to pretend that I was looking out on a Cuba that was already free and that the tables around me were occupied—by local people, not foreigners—but the fantasy faded fast. I was all alone at the top of Cuba’s Elysium and yearning for home—where capitalism’s inequalities are not so jagged and stark. Michael J. Totten is a City Journal contributing editor and the author of five books, including The Road to Fatima Gate.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: The Last Communist City

A friend who lives in the middle east and who is married to a Lebanese woman gave me a copy of of Michael Totten's The Road to Fatima Gate, highly recommending it. Three chapters in I got suspicious and emailed some other friends who live there. The vitriol unleashed was something to behold. All made it clear the guy did not have even a basic understanding of the country he was writing about. I am sure the situation in Cuba is depressing, but I wouldn't trust this guy. He's a swashbuckling pseudo-journalist who seems to have made up his mind about stuff before he arrives. He doesn't speak the language(s), and if you skim back over the article you'll notice he doesn't report on any real encounters/conversations with locals.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: The Last Communist City

On the morning of October 8, 1969, José Mujica woke up and got dressed for a funeral. He and nine other young men—nephews of the deceased—piled into a Volkswagen van and waited on the side of a two-lane road that led from Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, to the small city of Pando, about 14 miles east. Six other cars and a hearse—rented from the fanciest funeral home in the country—drove past, and the VW joined the cavalcade, rumbling through the flat green cattle pastures that hug the South American nation’s coastline. The journey was somber and quiet, until about three miles from Pando, when the mourners subdued the hired drivers of the cars and stuffed them into the back of the Volkswagen.

In reality, there was no funeral to attend, no corpse, and no mourners. The Pando-bound people were members of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional—also known as the Tupamaros—a Marxist guerrilla group that wished to install a Cuban-style dictator in Uruguay and rid the country of its supposedly kleptocratic government. Mujica, who at 35 years old was one of the group’s earliest and most charismatic members, got into the backseat of one of the cars and clutched the wooden handle of his Spanish-made Z-45 submachine gun. When he arrived in Pando, a sleepy industrial city of 12,000, he and his small battalion robbed its banks and tried to take over the local government, killing a police officer and one civilian in a brazen, chaotic shoot-out in broad daylight.

Four decades later, at 74, José Mujica donned Uruguay’s blue-and-white executive sash and became its president after his left-wing coalition party won the country’s 2009 election. Although his hair had grayed and his belly had expanded, Mujica looked over the crowds gathered at the capital’s central square for his inauguration with the same olive-pit eyes that had scanned the road to Pando back in 1969. The crowd looked back at him admiringly, as he delivered a fiery oration in front of a Jumbotron screen bearing his image.

If a man’s character is his fate, as Heraclitus wrote, then Mujica’s has brought him on an exceptional ride, one that occasionally creeps into the headlines of newspapers and websites but rarely gets a treatment beyond his life’s major plot points. Mujica is a former revolutionary (some might call him a terrorist) who was shot six times, imprisoned for 14 years, tortured, and kept in solitary confinement for upward of three years, only to be released, renounce violence, enter politics, win election to the nation’s highest office, and lead Uruguay as it rose out of recession, all the while legalizing gay marriage and abortion, which is noteworthy for a country that counts Catholicism as its dominant religion. He donates 90 percent of his income to charity, lives at his small farm rather than the country’s lavish presidential palace, drives a Volkswagen Beetle, almost never wears a suit, and rails against the excesses of consumerism and the West’s reliance on it as economic ballast.

Long article...the rest at

http://www.vice.com/read/president-c...-0000323-v21n5

[lakedaemonian]

Re: The Last Communist City

Interesting article.

But there's two things I'd want to chuck in:

1) An interesting, relevant, and "glass half full" anecdote.....once Soviet subsidies for the Cubans to do their dirty work(Central America, Angola, and South America) ended and the Cuban economy collapsed......so did the diet of the average Cuban.

While Cubans literally became hungry and in some cases malnourished the overall effect on the Cuban health system was that obesity rates collapsed as did cardiovascular disease.

Maybe there's hope for the US, but I don't see the bad news in the US matching what Cuba suffered since 93.

2) The author white washes over the how/why that the likes of Castro and that monster Guevara made it into power in the first place.

I don't know the details of Cuban wealth distribution pre Revolution, but I do know that Cuba was clearly fertile ground for insurgency/revolution....if it wasn't...Castro would not have been able to succeed.

So I suspect the author is either ignorant or disingenuous because if Cuba was a wealthy and fair society it probably would have been resilient enough to withstand and destroy Castro's insurgency.

A very important component of Castro's success was the existence of a political/economic climate receptive to, rather than than resilient against, revolution.

-----

What's worth adding for anyone who has drunk the Cuban Revolution Kool-Aid is the incredible level of foreign military adventure Cuba pursued as a Soviet proxy with circa 250,000-500,000 Cuban troops deployed and conducting combat operations in a number of theatres around the world.

I've run into a few of the Cuban doctors that Castro enjoyed exporting as part of his aggressive hearts and minds policy. It would appear they are little more than indentured servants. Cuba has thousands of Cubans working in Venezuelan healthcare in exchange for Bolivarian energy support for the Cuban economy. At least that's been my understanding of it.

I reckon Cuba was pretty bad during the Batista era....and it's been far from flash during the Castro era.

[don]

Re: The Last Communist City

Starting with the Monroe Document, working forward through the US/Cuba slavery connection, to the Spanish-American War and the Platt Amendment, to US organized crime's 'situation perfecto' in Cuba, to the Bay of Pigs and Operation Mongoose, and 50+ years of economic warfare by the world's hegemon . . . any of this in the book?

[Woodsman]

Re: The Last Communist City

A friend who lives in the middle east and who is married to a Lebanese woman gave me a copy of of Michael Totten's The Road to Fatima Gate, highly recommending it. Three chapters in I got suspicious and emailed some other friends who live there. The vitriol unleashed was something to behold. All made it clear the guy did not have even a basic understanding of the country he was writing about. I am sure the situation in Cuba is depressing, but I wouldn't trust this guy. He's a swashbuckling pseudo-journalist who seems to have made up his mind about stuff before he arrives. He doesn't speak the language(s), and if you skim back over the article you'll notice he doesn't report on any real encounters/conversations with locals.

Totten is full of crap and dollars to doughnuts, I'm betting this guy is on the payroll of at least one 3 letter agency or equivalent.

For an "independent" journalist, he is content to cash checks from such groups as the Government of Azerbaijan, right wing Likudnik organizations, and the Lebanese March 14 alliance (an anti-Syrian group and the current Western-backed, ruling coalition principally comprised of Sunni, Druze, and Christian parties).

But we're supposed to believe he's a liberal and independent, even though much of his work appears in the right wing press. The posted article appears in National Review, the neocon flagship. And this self described "liberal, libertarian and neocon" thinks the Iraq war was a great idea. Here he is with his rationale for support:

"If you don’t join us now, when Saddam’s regime falls and Iraqis cheer the US Marines, you are really going to feel like a jackass. And your jackassery will be exposed beneath klieg lights for all to see."

Jackassery indeed. Totten is also a regular at David Horowitz's Frontpage Magazine but likes to characterize himself as a liberal. Pull the other one, why don't you.

Every time this gentleman speaks I hear the Mockingbird singing. I call bullshit.

[vt]

Re: The Last Communist City

You can contrast the failures in Cuba with the enormous success of South Korea after the war in 1950-1953 (don't forget North Korea), and the East Germany vs. West Germany contrast prior to 1989. Free markets and free societies work better. This is in spite of the boot of Russian and Chinese patronage.

Communism is an utter failure in Cuba, as it has been everywhere.

We need to make the free market system better. However the romance with the past of communism some long for is sad.

[Woodsman]

Re: The Last Communist City

You can contrast the failures in Cuba with the enormous success of South Korea after the war in 1950-1953 (don't forget North Korea), and the East Germany vs. West Germany contrast prior to 1989. Free markets and free societies work better. This is in spite of the boot of Russian and Chinese patronage.

Communism is an utter failure in Cuba, as it has been everywhere.

We need to make the free market system better. However the romance with the past of communism some long for is sad.

VT, what the heck are you talking about? Who here expressed any romantic attachment, admiration, support, enthusiasm, or any other positive reaction to communism in Cuba or anywhere else?

[gwynedd1]

Re: The Last Communist City

Any comment about Cuba's economy being an example of "communism" is a complete fraud. The little island has been under economic sanctions with the largest trading partner in the world. So it isn't really proving anything other than sanctions make poor people poor and actually helps keep the elites in power because fewer resources are easier to monopolize. But a fertile communist valley is better than a capitalist rock in the ocean. Why do so many people think that the official economic system is the only economic driver? There are resources, culture, crime, scale , issues of war and peace.

Not sure what the beef is about anyway. As a fundamental principle, working without pay is a violation of basic principle, ergo what example do I need that communism violates basic principles? The problem is that the FIRE sector also violates that principle. Thus to me FIRE sector =~ communism at the fundamental level.

[vt]

Re: The Last Communist City

Totten has written for Newsweek and the New York Times, hardly paragons of conservatism.

"Totten has described himself as a "weird combination of liberal, libertarian, and neocon."^[6] He has supported the Iraq War, stating during the run-up, "If you don’t join us now, when Saddam’s regime falls and Iraqis cheer the US Marines, you are really going to feel like a jackass. And your jackassery will be exposed beneath klieg lights for all to see."^[7] However, he believed that the critics of the war who noted the lack of progress from 2004 to 2006 were correct while the Bush administration was wrong. He supported the 2007 'surge' strategy.^[8]

On June 23, 2010, Totten applauded Barack Obama's decision to accept General Stanley McChrystal's resignation, and Totten labeled it "one of the best decisions the president has made since he took office."^[9]"

Criticized Bush and supported Obama at times. Seems objective.

Whenever an article appears that goes against preconceived notions some tend to dismiss it as biased one way or the other. Open minds look for agreement, and at least are critical of both sides of the arguement not summarily dismissing them automatically.

In reality it's difficult to find an objective press or individual. We are like competing tribal families, not open to different viewpoints that challenge preconceived ideology.

[vt]

Re: The Last Communist City

Yes Cuba has had sanctions but also tens of billions of aid from Russia and Venezuela.

South Korea did it on their own with free markets. East Germany was a disaster under communism that West Germany was not because of free markets.

We are all here likely because, in varying degrees, we agree that FIRE is a cancer on the economy and TECI a potential great cure.

The USSR failed miserably without any sanctions.

The U.S. is now somewhat of a crony capitalist AND crony socialist economy, where competing elites drain the lifeblood of the middle class and free competition.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: The Last Communist City

...South Korea did it on their own with free markets....

In 1961 Park Chung-hee seized power in South Korea in a military coup and ruled as a dictator until he was assassinated 18 years later in 1979.

He improved the economy by central planning with classic 5-year plans, relying on a crony network of insider government officials, monopolists, and oligarchs.

It worked, but it was a dictator's centrally-planned economy, not a democratic free market.

[Woodsman]

Re: The Last Communist City

Totten has written for Newsweek and the New York Times, hardly paragons of conservatism.

I don't care if he's a conservative. Good for him, but why insist on calling himself a liberal libertarian neocon? If one can't recognize that phrase as an attempt to obfuscate and confuse, then there's not a whole lot to talk about. What I care about is the veracity of his claims to independence. I suspect he represents some interest he will not come clean about, primarily because of who pays him and runs his stories.

As for Newsweek and the Times, it depends entirely on one's perspective. They certainly represent the establishment and status quo, particularly when it comes to US foreign policy and its international adventures. They wait for a "mother may I" before ever publishing anything that might offend the White House no matter who sits behind the big desk. Allow me once again to refer you to Carl Bernstein's excellent work.

Really, your credulousness surprises me here. You're not pulling my leg, are you?

Criticized Bush and supported Obama at times. Seems objective.

I'm pleased you think so. I disagree.

Whenever an article appears that goes against preconceived notions some tend to dismiss it as biased one way or the other. Open minds look for agreement, and at least are critical of both sides of the arguement not summarily dismissing them automatically.

Thanks. Open minds also look at the totality of someone's record and compares deeds with actions and goals with outcomes. Additionally, the open minded take into account historical precedent. Mostly, open minds tell the truth and know a lie when they see one. Proving it, of course, is another matter. That's why I say this is my informed opinion. Yours is different.

In reality it's difficult to find an objective press or individual. We are like competing tribal families, not open to different viewpoints that challenge preconceived ideology.

We're smart enough to figure out POV without a declaration on the masthead. And I doubt the whole notion of an objective press.

What I despise is dishonesty and an intent to mislead or deceive and this precisely the sense I get each time I read this man's work. You seem to believe he's a square shooter and, hey, that's fine by me.

[lektrode]

Re: The Last Communist City

...What I care about is the veracity of his claims to independence.....
.....

+1

methinks its best keep the 'you' out of your critique of vt's posts and focus on the writer's veracity etc, eh woody?
but do appreciate your insight and effort to illuminate on stuff like this - altho - just wondren, but still cant figure out if your .edu specialty is history or political 'science' ?

[lakedaemonian]

Re: The Last Communist City

VT, what the heck are you talking about? Who here expressed any romantic attachment, admiration, support, enthusiasm, or any other positive reaction to communism in Cuba or anywhere else?

I suspect VT is referring to the admiration often found in Hollywood, academia, and elsewhere for the likes of Cuba and it's analogs...such as the martyrdom of the monster Guevara(with "Che Shirts" as common as cockroaches on campus) and Venezuela's Chavez.

Guevara has received quite a lot of coverage in the last decade in movies/books with a good chunk of it conveniently leaving out a fair bit of the bad stuff.

I equate the mass media coverage, at least in the recent case of Guevara, not too indifferent from the Osama Bin Laden/Zero Dark Thirty example.

The mass media movies BECOME most peoples historical context. While there's only so much that can be told in the medium of film over a few hours......in both cases a number of very important components were left out intentionally or unintentionally of the narrative.

There also seems to be quite substantial and aggressive coverage of US policies towards Cuba that were/are less than awesome which is fair game......but the lack of balance regarding Cuban foreign policy over the last 60 years is pretty lacking in comparison.

And the balance I'm referring to is the little known and quite considerable presence that Cubans had on the kinetic front lines of the Cold War with the same Cuban government continuously operating through that entire period up through now.

It's quite common to read mass media coverage of the US picking on Cuba as the central tone.

But when's the last time there was anything of substance in the mass media about Cuba in Angola, Central America, or today in their desperation to retain influence/control in Venezuela via very aggressive means?

I don't think anyone on this forum appears to be a overt supporter of Cuba, nor do I see any who are aggressive supporters of US policy towards Cuba.

For me personally, I find the lack of balance in sharing the history of bad news the most frustrating.

An honest conversation is healthy, if it applies to both parties.