[deMolay]

CASTRO THE MULTIMILLIONAIRE
Forbes magazine estimated Castro's fortune in at least 900 million dollars. Many of those who are familiar with the dictator's business believe that Forbes is being too conservative.
The Cuban dictator runs Cuba as if it was his own farm and the 11 million poor Cubans as his slaves. Castro's businesses include the Convention Palace (Palacio de Convenciones); CIMEX; MEDICUBA; resort hotels and much more.

PALACIO DE CONVENCIONES (CONVENTION PALACE)
The Palacio de Convenciones is one of the businesses mentioned by Forbes magazine as being one of those that have helped the Cuban dictator become one of the world's richest persons, while the Cuban people are forced to live worse than animals.
Here is how the Castro regime describes the Palacio de Convenciones:
"The Havana International Conference Center Complex is Cuba's leading company in the industry. The Center is an institution that specializes in organizing, promoting and hosting a wide variety of special events. Its sprawling 60,000 sq.m. premises are located in a residential district of Cuba's capital city, only five minute away from downtown Havana. Pabexpo, its fairgrounds, contains five air-conditioned, interconnected exhibition halls. The Complex offers accommodations at the Palco Hotel, a modern three-star facility. The Conference Center Complex provides catering services at the Bucán, El Rancho and El Palenque restaurants. In 1998, Club Habana, a top-notch social and sports center, was added to the complex facilities."

[eastbay]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gollum', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eastbay', 'T')hat's funny. Still grinning and would be laughing if not for others in the house.... lol.


It's a lot easier to be a capitalist when there's a planet filled with cheap easy-to-get resources to exploit. Make the resources costly and scarce and things get rough. Really rough.

It's a lot easier to be a communist when someone's dropping off a free (almost) tanker full of oil each week. The post-Soviet period has been a rough 20 years for them, that's no doubt. But nowhere as rough as the first 20 years without cheap oil will be on the capitalist nations. Boy Howdy. Now that will be some special kind of rough.

[davep]

cough, anarchism, cough

[gollum]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eastbay', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gollum', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('eastbay', 'T')hat's funny. Still grinning and would be laughing if not for others in the house.... lol.


It's a lot easier to be a capitalist when there's a planet filled with cheap easy-to-get resources to exploit. Make the resources costly and scarce and things get rough. Really rough.

It's a lot easier to be a communist when someone's dropping off a free (almost) tanker full of oil each week. The post-Soviet period has been a rough 20 years for them, that's no doubt. But nowhere as rough as the first 20 years without cheap oil will be on the capitalist nations. Boy Howdy. Now that will be some special kind of rough.

[paimei01]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('deMolay', 'B')iggest difference between Capitalism and Communism. Capitalist countries have not murdered off its own citizens as have the Communists. Russia under Stalin estimates 60M deaths due to political muders and state induced famines. Communist China, some estimates of over 100M of its own citizens butchered. Communism has proven deadly for its own citizens. The Gangster Mao was even reputed to have eaten the flesh of his political enemies. A true butcher. The estimates for Castro's brand of Communist Gangsterism as many as 100,000 lined up against the wall and shot for disagreeing with the Bandit Leader and Gangster in Chief. Hopefully they can bring him to trial at the World Court on charges of Crimes Against Humanity before his worthless a*s dies and stretch his neck. Dangling at the end of a short rope.

[efarmer]

Necessity is the mother of invention. We act as if we are in a shoe store, do I want the capitalist sneakers, the commie work shoes, the socialist slip on, or the nationalist jack boots?

Obviously, via synthesis and attempting to keep inside resource limits something new is required.
China is a hybrid system with Communist bootstrapping for peasants and a command capitalism for the emerging class.

Failing that we can always depend on the old standby, anarchy with muscle and bribery.
Thankfully, in addition to everything else we have tried, we have kept our skill set up with
the old standby methods pretty well.

When I listen to gutshot capitalists crow about defeating communism I am reminded of a brain damaged boxer trying to rake enough words together to describe his great victory over a foe
who succumbed from too many blows to the head instead of just being walking wounded.

The Soviet Union was rotten and crumbling, whipped into action before our best bogey man died out and hurt the most lucrative and dependable enterprise we had ever known as a nation, we stimulated our economy with deficit spending to arm up for World War III and gave them a nudge into the crypt and we have been bleeding out slow ever since blowing bubbles to keep a humongous misallocation of resources that lives on cheap petroleum alive and appearing to expand. It is a hollow victory since it is obvious we had no idea of what to do next, and so we went on Superpowerpalooza II, the world tour.

We need a new type of shoe to walk in.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('the48thronin', 'I') agree with Eastbay..GASP!..It can't be...let me wrote this one down in my diary before I decide it cant be true....LOL

[ian807]

Communism fails. The remaining problems are these:

1) Capitalism fails too, just more slowly. Uncontrolled greed without central leadership to balance it leads to terminal resource depletion. Ask the Haitians, or the Mayans, or the Easter Island folks and possibly the Romans, whose empire grew beyond the ability of the surrounding empires to support (Other empires being the resource of choice).

2) Class warfare is alive and well, suppressed at the moment with cheap food, gas, drugs and entertainment, but the moment that stops, the guillotines will be coming out of storage. In the USA, many semi-automatic weapons will magically become fully automatic, and the national guard armories may be pointing their guns away from the rebellious citizenry and at the local wealthy folks cowering in their "safe" rooms or at the army, who may be making their own decisions as to target.

So what to do? Nothing works very well. Mixed systems like those in the Scandinavian countries seem at least stable and possibly our best bet for governance.

Any ideas beyond what we've tried so far?

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ian807', ' ')central leadership.....
Any ideas beyond what we've tried so far?

[davep]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ian807', 'A')ny ideas beyond what we've tried so far?

[Fiddlerdave]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', 'C')uba went form the richest society in latin American to the poorest society in latin American in just 50 years of socialism.

But now that Castro has seen the light after 50 years of being dictator, things are getting better. Heck, just last year the Castro brothers decriminalized the possession of cell phones for Cubans.

[Sixstrings]

Not too many actual quotes in this interview, but assuming the journalist isn't spinning things than these are some pretty stunning late life admissions for Castro. The ideals of the "Revolucion" are taken very seriously over there; so it's surprising he'd so casually brush it aside like this.

Especially interesting was the part where he says something to the effect that he regrets urging the Soviets launch nukes on us. I guess he's an old man now and realizes that as a young firebrand he came very close to starting WWIII.

And thank goodness he's back to the green uniforms -- those track suits are undignified. Makes me think of somebody who's a little senile and doesn't have anyone taking good care of him enough to dress him right.

As for the failure of Cuban communism.. clearly it is time they adopt the Chinese model. But on the whole, it's just a situation where the poorest of the Cuban poor don't suffer as much as the American poor -- and on the other hand, they don't have many people living the good life either. Their life expectancy is pretty impressive, and they have lots of doctors. I guess "failure" is all in how you define success.

Their human rights record is bad, but not as brutal as North Korea or even China. It's not fair that Cubans aren't free to leave the island -- that definitely should change. And while things aren't actually as bad there as some other regimes, they should release whatever political prisoners they have left (by comparison, don't forget that it's we Americans who imprison the most out of any nation on Earth).

[Pretorian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Fiddlerdave', '
')And if Communism, socialism etc. work so "poorly",

[americandream]

Your problem is a lack of objectivity. Everything that comes forth from you is loaded with what essentially ties in with your own preferences. As if history really cares what any of us feels.

No doubt the Luddites were impassioned believers in the sanctity of rural parochialism. Nonetheless, personal opinions could not withstand the onslaught of the advent of peak land and the compulsion for wealth owners to devise new means of surplus creation. Hence the impulse for modernity and the emergence of bourgeoisie globalism.

These are facts nothing can withstand. Not contrived populism in the form of corporate nationalism (fascism) nor imposed ignorance in the form of patriarchal feudalism (religions, most notably ones pushing conservative agendas as we find in the Christian Right and Islam). Capitalism must prevail ALWAYS until it finally arrives at its OWN IMPASSE, its infinite resource profile within the context of a finite planet.

We foolishly believe that ad hoc remedies such as Singularity driven isolated solutions or market dynamism or all the other solutions mentioned periodically on here can essentially manage capitalism's resource profile, in much the same way that the Luddites believed that their remedies could arrest the rise of capitalism. Alas, history has shown that land's relentless peaking (as evidenced by the Enclosures) would overwhelm these sentiments and that wealth creation would assume new proportions. Once the process of capitalisation was underway, nothing could halt it, not even the conquest of colonial lands although there were attempts to arrest capital's ascendency in the Civil and Boer Wars to name two confrontations between the old and the new ways.

Unless we are able to extend the margins of capitalism's resource profile by the mining of other planets (and I have commented elsewhere on this site about the problems of space junk proliferation) or we can apply the Singularity solution to that profile in totality, not just bits of it, some form of communalism will arise as a matter of fact. It's birth pains may well be violent and involve the widespread destruction of forces opposed to its rise, but the objective forces of history, subject as they are to material realities, always prevail.

Now you can blither on till you are blue in the face and wish this or that fate upon me or those you disagree with, but unless one can reasonably answer how it is that the infinite may sustainably transition the finite to its demands, one is pissing in the wind.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Pretorian', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Fiddlerdave', '
')And if Communism, socialism etc. work so "poorly",

[Tyler_JC]

No one, not even the Tea Party folks, wants the government to eliminate all regulations, all taxes and all services and just let the "Free Market" handle all of our problems. When you sit down and actually talk to these people instead of just reading the silly poster they drag around with them, they'll admit that a rule against dumping nuclear waste in the town's water supply is a good idea. They'll support a police department to protect the townsfolk from criminals and a fire department to put out fires that might burn their house down. They want a military to protect them from foreign aggressors and a public school (or at least a subsidized private school) to educate children. They even might support government funded/subsidized transportation (highways) or at least the use of eminent domain to build vital networks.

So even the strongest supporters of what is called the "Free Market" want at least some government services and if they are being intellectually honest, a few compulsory taxes. The idea of a 100% purely Capitalist economy is just as absurd as a 100% purely Communistic society. Every society from hunter gatherers to modern post-industrial suburbia has a mixed economy. The only question is the relative sizes of the government sector and the private sector.

Cuba has private enterprise (albeit, mostly illegal private enterprise) and at no point in its history has America (the arch-type Capitalist economy) been without compulsory taxation and government services.

So this whole discussion of Pure Capitalism Vs. Pure Communism is kind of ridiculous. No?

Even americandream will admit that his vision of a communal society would include significant amounts of private enterprise, private trade, private investment, etc.

[americandream]

To the extent that communalism works to mitigate the consequences of capitalism, Tyler, I think it is reasonable to assume that it will be so applied. To that extent and that alone. It would be naive to assume that small scale trading will disappear. There will be some vestige of it, but only to the extent that surplus is available (small scale crafts, smallholding and tradesmens guilds etc). No one in their right mind would run a business in an environment where resourcing costs are astronomical and annual profit growth is but a dream from a previous era.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tyler_JC', 'E')very society from hunter gatherers to modern post-industrial suburbia has a mixed economy. The only question is the relative sizes of the government sector and the private sector.

[Tyler_JC]

Alright then, how about:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'E')very society from the feudal villages to modern post-industrial suburbia has a mixed economy. The only question is the relative sizes of the government sector and the private sector.

[eastbay]

Sounds good, JC. It'll be a mixed economy as we pass through again, no doubt.

Anyhow the liberal media screwed up and initially misquoted our dear friend Fidel, it appears.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6894UK20100910

Castro, speaking at the University of Havana, said his words had been misinterpreted by his interviewer, U.S. journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, who quoted a U.S. analyst saying they indicated Castro now supports a smaller state role in the island's Soviet-style economy.

[deMolay]

Dear Brother Fidel, is going to axe 500,000 state workers and up to 1,000,000 could get the boot. He is moving to the capitalist system. Communism has been a failure. The dolt has finally woke up, much like Rip Van Winkle. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100913/ap_ ... N1dDUwMA--