One point foreigners ought to keep in mind while investing in Cuba today,the concept of odious debt was first developed in Cuba. Who is to say the post communist government will honor the debts and contracts and land/property sales and or leases of the criminal communist regime?

In the meantime, if Europeans and Canadians want to exploit the Cuban people no one can stop them. But please spare us your sanctimonious piety. American have plenty of friendly places in the Caribbean to spend their tourist dollars, starting with our own, Puerto Rico and the US VI followed by our friendly without resorting to spending it on our enemies.

Your personal experience of health care in Cuba, Stef, may have been quite good compared with say, the disease-ridden, delayed, surly service one hears about in the UK’s National Health Service – run on essentially Soviet lines – or the litigation-driven, regulated “private” healthcare system of the US, but I doubt it is all that good.

It also won’t be remotely similar to what the Cubans get.

I’ve actually been there – you?
Or have you just been smoking propaganda plants?

Your personal experience of health care in Cuba, Stef, may have been quite good compared with say, the disease-ridden, delayed, surly service one hears about in the UK’s National Health Service – run on essentially Soviet lines – or the litigation-driven, regulated “private” healthcare system of the US, but I doubt it is all that good. And since we are comparing personal experiences, I keep meeting people who have been to Cuba and return with terrible food poisoning.

I am not going there until it is full of rampant capitalism. Not a day before.

Are you so ignorant that you really believe this? Or are you a propaganda plant?

I’ve actually been there – you?
Or have you just been smoking propaganda plants?

Where for that matter is the evidence that free trade brought down the USSR?

THe evidence is later in post.

a system stretched past its limits by an ever-escalating arms race.

the USA could afford the arms race because it traded freely with the whole world. The USSR could not because it traded less freely with only the socialist countries.

snigger,

Are you so ignorant that you really believe this? Or are you a propaganda plant?

Health and education is certainly better, shortages aside.

If I experience a grabber in the next ten minutes and call 911, I’ll have a paramedic hitting me with MONA five minutes after that, and will have my coronary arteries imaged and roto-rootered 6:30AM.

If I’m woken out of a sound sleep by a sharp paroxysmal headache and experience left-sided facial droop, within 25 minutes of my calling 911 I’ll have an E-doc evaluating me, and a neurologist deciding whether to administer tPA half an hour after that.

A close family member was diagnosed with a severe form of cancer. She was not a member of any political party, and had only a private-purchase high-deductible health insurance plan. The tumor was imaged within a week of the lump being found, and chemotherapy[1] combined with surgery and palliative care began less than two weeks after that.

If Cuba can beat any of that, I’d be a little surprised.0

[1] Using a combination of drugs available for the relatively-free part of the US market, but which the UK NHS and the Canadian version will not provide for this form of cancer and especially not in this combination, due to cost reasons.

We might wonder if they are pre-hacked for surveilance?

No. No need. This is just a clumsy way of insuring that the sim card and phone ID are registered to a particular person. Knowing these makes surveillance no problem, assuming the cell network itself is accessible to the govt. The British Home Office is sneaking up on this problem in different way, by suggesting people ought to provide “identification” and the retailers record it, when they buy a mobile.

logic of the American embargo

I disagree with the embargo, but whole story is somewhat complicated.

Firstly, I think it stemmed from the USSR method of dealing with foreign dictatorships vs. the China method, but by now I think embargo-as-punishing-dictators argument is just lip service on the part of the government.

1. As someone previously mentioned, most Cuban refugees support the embargo (although they’re softening). They make up an important voting bloc in Florida. See Florida re: U.S. Presidential Elections 2000 & 2004 to guess how that pans out.

2. The main export advantage Cuba has is agriculture. America is positively leftist in its agricultural policy (see O’Rourke’s Parliment of Whores for starters). I imagine Big Sugar and Big Tobacco account for 75% of the motivation for the government to keep the embargo.

Politcally speaking, for the U.S. to move to a byzantine system of tariffs and duties is probably the best we can hope for. It really has nothing to do with Cuba per se; it’s all internal politics.

Well I have to hope it would, and a lot faster than the big daddy Soviet Union.

Which we now all know withered for exactly the same reason.

I like the idea that trade sets in motion processes that get away from tyrants, but where’s the evidence that the considerable foreign trade Castro did oversee ever loosened his grip on the Cuban populace? Where for that matter is the evidence that free trade brought down the USSR?

Only now that Fidel is on his death bed is his thumb finally being pried a millimeter or two off the backs of the Cuban people. Gorbachev, on the other hand, presided over significant, sweeping reforms that did open doors to increased trade – but did not halt the breakdown of a system stretched past its limits by an ever-escalating arms race.

The fact that people do blame [the US embargo], rather than Cuba’s boneheaded murderous dictatorship, for the country’s ills shows how counterproductive it has been.

I can’t fault the US embargo on the grounds that it helped to foster inability on the part of some people to trace Cuba’s ills straight to Castro’s tyranny. People too stupid to make that obvious connection would fail to do so even in the absense of any US sanction of Castro’s regime. I suspect in fact that they would have blamed the US all the more for having done nothing to impede the more furious and farther-reaching assault on human rights that a richer and better connected Castro could have got up to.