I’m not a fan of meme-level infographics of unsourced data.
US unemployment figures virtually never include those who have given up on looking for work, which is a drastic undercounting. Biden’s Misleading Unemployment Statistic
Who knows where the Cuban unemployment figure came from, or how it was calculated or the quality of the data.
Some brief searching of my own tells me that, while the unemployment numbers are roughly correct, the actual pay for those jobs are so low that they have a rough time actually being able to afford anything. Like, minimum wage is 2100 Cuban Pesos per month, but one set of clothing costs about 9700 on average.
https://horizontecubano.law.columbia.edu/news/calculating-cost-living-Cuba
Plenty of people have hard time affording anything in US as well, and lots of people end up working multiple jobs now because jobs don’t even pay a living wage.
There’s a world of difference in having a hard time affording things like a car or a home and having a hard time affording food or clothing.
Forget food and clothing, millions of Americans can’t even afford to feed themselves https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america
And Cuba is even worse so what even is your point?
https://theweek.com/politics/cuba-food-shortage-humanitarian-crisis#
Cuba is a tiny island under a blockade by the burger empire, meanwhile the burger empire has stunning amounts of wealth. Anybody who’s not an utter imbecile can understand what the point here is.
Right, let’s ignore things like frequent blackouts (https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-turns-off-some-public-lighting-energy-crisis-worsens-2024-03-05/) and the fact that if you protest any decisions by the government you risk being locked up indefinitely (https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/cuba)
Surely signs of a stable government
US has the highest incarceration per capita in the world, and it’s far higher than Cuba. Meanwhile, the blockade of Cuba certainly does make things difficult for a small island. The fact that people of Cuba enjoy higher quality of life than Americans in many ways, shows how communism can persevere even under harshest conditions. Not the own you seem to think it is.
Now that’s just blatantly wrong.
Cuba is one of the few countries that is actually higher then the US. Cuba is 794 per 100,000, compared to the United State’s 531
As the chart shows, 36 states have higher incarceration rates than Cuba, the country with the world’s second highest prison rate. New York comes in just above Rwanda, which is still trying thousands of people in connection to the 1994 genocide. Even Vermont, birthplace of Phish, Ben & Jerry’s, and the country’s only socialist senator, imprisons a higher percentage of its population than countries like Israel, Mexico, or Saudi Arabia.
That article is both severely out of date and uses raw numbers instead of per capita. No fucking shit the US is going to have more people in prison when they have 30x the population.
Individual states don’t have 30x population, and not sure what makes the article out of date. Not like there’s been some drastic prison reforms in Cuba or US in the past decade.
As if the illegal embargo and the power infrastructure issues are unrelated 🙄
Human Rights Watch is part of The Human Rights Concern Troll Industrial Complex whose purpose is facilitating regime change.
Blackouts are certainly a thing, and for the middle class in USA that would be considered intolerable. However, for the poor in the USA who sometimes go without electricity for lack of payment, having access to healthcare and education in exchange for the occasional blackout might be worth the trade.
As for speaking out against the government, citizens may not be incarcerated for speaking out (unless it actually threatens the government such as Manning, Snowden, and Winner), other forms of control are used. Usually that means pervasive propaganda and pitting people against each other through the Culture War.
Mind posting the actual links to the sources?
I don’t have all the links on hand, but it’s easily googlable if you just put the numbers in
Why don’t you do that then?
Because I don’t owe you shit, if you’re genuinely curious then type the number into google yourself. I believe in you little buddy.
If you post things like that you owe everyone sources. That’s common sense.
sources for the information are literally listed in the submission 🤦
You made them up, got it.
see if you weren’t a sad troll that you are, you would’ve just spent a few minutes to find the sources and paste them yourself. Instead you chose to make a clown of yourself. https://lemmy.ml/comment/10050009
Sources are listed right in there, and this information isn’t controversial. Claiming something is made up because you’re too lazy two spend a couple of minutes googling the height of imbecility.
If you’ve wasted countless hours arguing with antisocialists, you know that respecting their enquiries is a waste of time because they can just dismiss everything that contradicts their meme ideology as Judeo‐Bolshevik propaganda. International organizations? Obviously the state must have given them some fake data and the organizations trusted them unquestioningly because secretly they’re all staffed by a bunch of big dumb stupid idiots.
Anyway, I think that these are the exact sources:
https://data.worldbank.org/country/CU
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?locations=CU-CU
https://data.un.org/en/iso/cu.html
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/countries/country-details/GHO/cuba
Took me fewer than ten minutes to find them.
Right, it’s not like this information is hard to find or controversial in any way. And the fact that people keep acting like it is just shows how unserious they are. It’s like you gotta give me a source proving that water is wet!
Last item omits Cuban interventions in Africa, ie Angola.
Yeah, really doing Cuba dirty by ignoring their military contributions to ending apartheid!
Yeah they won.
And all the hands in South America, including the Venezuelan takeover.
PPP per capita is 5x lower in Cuba than in the US. In other words, salaries are low and people struggle to afford things in Cuba, whereas the average citizen in the US can afford much more.
So they can buy less commodities but generally still manage to live longer lives, are more able to read which means they can pursue intellectual and cultural pursuits, etc?
Sounds like a good trade, I bet it would be an even better trade without the blockade.
I’m not saying life on balance is necessarily worse or better. Just pointing out that cherry-picking statistics can sketch a wrong image.
“Less commodities” sounds a bit dismissive of the difference though. It is significantly less, e.g. the average salary is less than 190 USD per month. Most Cubans struggle to get enough food to get by, and whilst there are measures to avoid starvation, they’re not exactly having much to eat either. They’re not using their time for intellectual/cultural pursuits, most use their time to find additional sources of income.
Healthcare is free, but the equipment is old. Outcomes are poorer, due to lack of drugs. Cuba has an excellent HIV-program, with mandatory testing and cheap antivirals. Yet, HIV cases (and STIs in general) are on the rise due to a high prevalence of prostitution, caused by the low salaries and high wealth inequality.
Upsides and downsides. Reality is that several hundreds of thousands of Cubans attempt to flee the country every year. Between 2021 and 2023, nearly 500k people tried to do so, ~5% of the population. That’s not very indicative of a place-to-be.
It may well be true that the US embargo is causing a lot of these issues. However, economists tend to argue that the lack of Soviet subsidies has a much larger negative effect.
I’m not so sure it’s a good trade. There are things we can learn, certainly. But on balance, it doesn’t seem better.
You forgot to factor in the cost of housing, healthcare, and education that people in Cuba don’t have to worry about.
Sure, but other items cost much more compared to their salaries. It’s a definite downside.
What about freedom of press and expression?
just ask Assange, Manning, or Snowden
I don’t think they did a bad thing but of course the government doesn’t like that they leak classified information.
Either way, it’s irrelevant when it is so much worse in Cuba.
And you can ask pretty much every reputable international human rights organisation or press freedom organisation.
It’s very much relevant because it shows that every government will censor information that it finds threatening. There is a long history of censorship in the west just like everywhere else. The real difference is what sort of things are censored. In Cuba, censorship focuses on preventing a capitalist counterrevolution.
Whataboutism, a tankie’s favourite tool
double standards, dronie’s favorite tool
Literally proving my point lmao
the point being that you apply one standard to US and another to Cuba, and bleat about whataboutism when people point out
The malnutrition stat is completely made up
You’re right, it’s actually higher in USA now
Results: Between 1999 and 2020, 93,244 older adults died from malnutrition. Malnutrition AAMR increased from 10.7 per 100,000 in 1999 to 25.0 per 100,000 in 2020.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37936140/
Meanwhile, Cuba is at 0.3 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/malnutrition-death-rates
This is a Patrick Symmes’s article I read a while ago
https://www.patricksymmes.com/articles/publications/harpers/2010/thirty-days-as-a-cuban/
The data you listed comes from IHME, Global Burden of Disease but there’s nothing findable online as to how it’s actually gathered
I suspect they got it from the Cuban government
It’s not easy having a good nutrition in Cuba
yeah Cuba is a small island under brutal blockade by the burger empire
Yes
How about USA vs Vietnam?
Vietnam won
Yes, there is a long history but fortunately we live in the present.
Restricting peoples opinions is a very horrible thing to do. It doesn’t matter if it’s to “preventing a capitalist counterrevolution” which is you a bunch of bullshit made up because they want to repres people.
free speech absolutism is an infantile ideology
Can you explain why people shouldn’t be able to express their opinions?
Pretty much everyone and every human right group thinks so, except people on Lemmy.ml, lemmygrad and hexbear. For some they like censorship but only for their advantage which is ludicrous.
I am not for absolutism because in some cases it can be disallowed. But only for very specific reasons and that the government is afraid of different ideologies isn’t a valid reason.
here, educate yourself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I am not for absolutism because in some cases it can be disallowed. But only for very specific reasons and that the government is afraid of different ideologies isn’t a valid reason.
It sure is when the government represents the interests of the working majority. And the government is the only body that can decide what speech is or isn’t allowed, so your whole statement is self contradictory. If you accept that some speech is harmful and needs to be suppressed, then it becomes a question of degrees. And westerners thinking that they got the level of censorship fundamentally right while everyone else has it wrong is just plain old chauvinism. Western societies are currently the most polarized societies with some of the lowest levels of social cohesion. Anybody looking at the west and thinking that this is a good model should get their head checked.
I understand the link you posted and I knew you’d post it. Generally the western societies you hate is very for free speech and tolerance. The world you want is generally very against that. Socialism doesn’'t have to be, but for some reason you guys want that. Which is frankly insane.
If we go by the paradox shouldn’t western societies ban socialism speech?
If your opponent respects your opinion and doesn’t censor you, you should do the same.
A great government shouldn’t have to censor the opinions of its citizens if they are truly so great.
And no a government doesn’t have to be great just because it doesn’t censor, but a government can’t be great if it censors.
If you disagree that’s currently fine.
And westerners thinking that they got the level of censorship fundamentally right while everyone else has it wrong is just plain old chauvinism.
You want more censorship that’s oppressing your opponents from expressing their opinion because you think you are objectively right and everyone else is wrong. I think it’s enough to ban hate speech. There is a huge difference there.
I can’t believe I’m here arguing with you guys again. It’s useless because you guys are so far up your own asses that you can’t hear a ship horn. I’m not against socialism per se but you certainly don’t make a good case for anyone reasonable to support it.
Again, there is nothing to support the assertion that the level of speech tolerance in western societies is desirable or a net positive on society as a whole. You are a product of a particular society which plays an anchoring effect in what you consider to be the right level of free speech. This alone is not a rational basis for deciding that this is fundamentally the right amount of free speech we should strive for.
I can’t believe that this such is a difficult concept for free speech zealots to wrap their head around.
for “foreign interventions” I would do something like, “10 million killed since 1947” vs “ended Apartheid” instead of what you got there.
yeah would’ve been better, I’m just resharing it
Let’s wish both of them a very pleasant people’s revolution in the future
Cuba already had a people’s revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat is as firm as ever there.
please go anywhere in cuba, proclaim this as loud as you can, and count down how long before you’ll be arrested for being an agitator or an undesireable.
Are you under the impression that the Cuban government would prefer not to be referred to as a dictatorship of the proletariat? Do you have a base-level familiarity with Marxist terminology, such as the fact that liberal democracy is referred to as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie?
Dictatorship of the _ just refers to what class is in power, not if it’s a totalitarian dystopia or anything.
Cuba understander has logged on 😂
That account is 10 months old, and this was their first comment
lmao
I think the worst I might get is unsolicited high-fives.
