For some reason, our government and its propaganda arm, the mainstream media, refuses to give up beating the dead horse that is Cuba. We’ve had it in for them ever since they went Commie, and we’re not about to quit now! I just noticed this article from Newsweek entitled “Castro tells the truth about Cuba [1]” which gives us the current bad news:
He has outlasted eight U.S. presidents, survived countless CIA efforts to do him in, and his communist regime has remained in power for a generation after the collapse of his Soviet sponsors. So what does the leader of the 1959 Cuban revolution think now of the system he created? Last week The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg reported Fidel Castro’s startlingly honest assessment: “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”
Some observers suggest that the 84-year-old Castro’s unexpected honesty may be a belated attempt to throw himself on history’s mercy. After all, they say, Cuba is in tatters. According to Andy Gomez, assistant provost at the University of Miami, tourism on the island has declined 35 percent this year, and remittances are expected to drop to $250 million—far below the peak of $800 million earlier this decade. Cuba’s own National Statistics Office has reported that economic indicators, such as construction and agriculture, were down significantly in the first half of the year. And last month, President Raúl Castro began a process of dismissing or transferring some 20 percent of state employees—a major move, given that the government employs more than 90 percent of the country’s labor force. Says Gomez, “The Cuban economy is the worst it’s ever been.”
How dare Castro “survive countless CIA efforts to do him in”, who does he think he is?? Anyway, some of these numbers are meaningless without comparison, so let’s look at the good-old U.S. of A. Tourism receipts are down here also, although only by 14.4% [2] according to the U.N. World Tourism Organization. Remittances are not a large part of the US economy, so it’s hard to draw a comparison here, but pick an economic statistic and it’s likely to be down “far below the peak…earlier this decade”. State and local governments here in the U.S. are projecting job losses of some 500,000 and are facing budget shortfalls of $400 billion dollars. (source [3]) The number of homeless families in the U.S. is up 30% since 2007 [4]. The U.S. Government is now matching every dollar of tax revenue taken in with a dollar of new debt [5], hardly a recipe for success. The gap between rich and poor in America is also at record levels [6]. Almost 40 million Americans, or 1 in 8, were on food stamps this year [7], and food insecurity is estimated to affect some 14% of Americans [8]— the highest number since they started keeping track of the statistics. Poverty statistics to be released later this week are expected to show that about 45 million Americans are in poverty [9], about 1 in 7.
Nor are things all bad in Cuba. Cubans enjoy free universal health care, which is common among European countries and also in Canada.
[10]The U.S. is one of the few industrialized countries that does not offer universal health care. Cuba ranks ahead of the US in several key metrics in the area of health care [11]: infant mortality is lower, life-expectancy is longer, and Cuba has the highest doctor-to-patient ratio in the world. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Cuba was forced to deal with a loss of cheap oil, and they have innovated to a remarkable extent [12] in the areas of local, organic, sustainable food production and energy efficiency. Cuba boasts a 99.8% literacy rate [13] to the US’s rate of 99% [14]. Cuba has an enviable unemployment rate of 1.7% [14], and public debt to GDP ratio of 34.6% (far better than the US at 52.9% and climbing rapidly).
The Guardian reports [15] on a similar dynamic at work in socialist Venezuela. All the bad news is hyped, the good news is buried, and we are supposed to believe that Venezuela is perpetually on the brink of collapse, just as Cuba is supposed to be. And of course, President Chavez of Venezuela has also survived attempts by the CIA to do him in [16], at least politically.
But all these economic statistics may obscure the simple truth: people know that capitalism isn’t working so well right now. Only 53% of people in a 2009 poll [17] thought capitalism was preferable to socialism, and a full 20% preferred socialism outright. Somehow when George W. Bush says that “this sucker could go down”, referring to the entire economy, that’s not a concession of the failure of American capitalism. In contrast, when Castro says “The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore,” that’s taken by our media as an admission of what we knew all along– that pure, beautiful, god-given capitalism would win in the end. We’re still waiting for that triumph though…
