The embargo doesn’t cover medical supplies and Cuban buys what medicine and medical supplies it has mainly from the US. The embargo also doesn’t cover food.
Cuba also does a lot of trade with China and Spain but has relatively little to actually sell because the state controlled industries are so unproductive. Cuba also has the least productive agricultural sector in the Caribbean, despite being the most productive before the revolution.
The embargo is no excuse it doesn’t cover other countries, and Cuba has always had European trade partners. In fact they received free oil, agricultural equipment, and technical support from the USSR, and later free oil from Venezuela until a few weeks ago.
Maybe, except for the tens of thousands who were eating US-supplied lead.
> The third, and perhaps most disastrous of our failures, was the decision to give stature and support to one of the most bloody and repressive dictatorships in the long history of Latin American repression. Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in seven years - a greater proportion of the Cuban population than the proportion of Americans who died in both World Wars, and he turned Democratic Cuba into a complete police state - destroying every individual liberty.
- Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at Democratic Dinner, Cincinnati, Ohio, October 6, 1960 [1]
The Cubans absolutely deserve a representative government, and the US will never lift a finger to give it to them. Not then, and as we can see demonstrated in Venezuela today (the US regime is happy to prop up Maduro's cohort and doesn't care about conducting fair elections), not now. The US would prefer a ruthless dictatorship ruling Cuba that sends all the country's wealth to the US over a representative government that doesn't.
The Cuban economy today is a shadow of what it was before the USSR fell apart, which makes it a moot point to claim they are dysfunctional despite foreign support. The Soviets successfully managed to keep Cuba afloat. Not that that constitutes a ringing endorsement for the Cuban system.
That’s part of my point. They were a basket case with a ton of free support, and still are while trading with China and Europe. It’s just ridiculous to blame the embargo as ridiculous as the embargo is.
If you read what the Soviets had to say about the Cuban government it’s pretty damning.
My disagreement is that, as far as I know, the reputation of Cuba's healthcare system is great, and that, as someone else pointed out, the US embargo has real impact.
I certainly agree the Cuban system, excepting a few areas like healthcare and regardless of the embargo's impact, does not work.
No, but losing the wealthiest nation on the planet as a potential trading partner does mean that you are going to be selling your goods for less than you might be able to otherwise.
Being permanently locked out of the most lucrative deals obviously is going to have an economic impact.
Additionally, the US embargo limits third parties from trading freely with Cuba in certain ways, and prohibits most Americans from traveling to Cuba. Cuba was a popular destination for American tourists prior to the Revolution.
And I'm not sure I'll continue to reply to this thread. Somehow I find myself repeatedly defending the Cuban system, of which I am not a fan!
Why defend them? They have for decades exported repression, stoked civil wars, and held their own population captive.
And again the embargo doesn’t stop most countries from trading with them. They could host tourists from Europe and do, but almost no one wants to go there. I know people who go regularly for various reasons and they have to bring food with them because there’s so little on the island due to their insane agricultural practices.
The Cuban state firms don’t produce anything of value. They’re a net recipient of food aid, their tourism industry is anemic and the largest source of dollars and euros. Their medical exports have been called slave labor by the UN.
What could they possibly sell to the US? Even with endless Soviet support in the form of fuel, tractors, and agricultural experts they never produced as much food as the island did before the revolution.
The fact is that what little the government earns from trade they’ve always spent on exporting revolution. Cuban intelligence for example was helping run Venezuela’s SEBIN and secret prisons.
I’m shocked that people on hacker news defend a place that bans the internet, and locks up people for reading banned books.
You understand that all of this is a feedback loop, right? They've been under embargo for more than half a century. Do you not understand how that can cripple an economy? How it can prevent an economy from growing and developing?
You're confusing defending with pointing out objective fact. I don't have to like Cuba, it's current regime, or really anything about it to point out that acting like the state of it's economy and industry isn't massively shaped by the embargo is silly.
Hell, if it wasn't, then we could say the embargo is pointless and not having it's intended impact. We're not embargoing them just to go "Well, we at the United States of America think you guys suck." We're explicitly doing it to make them feel economic pain for their policies. It's a very strange conversation we're having where I am pointing out the embargo has worked and you're providing ethical justification for why we should embargo them but also ignoring the actual (desired!) outcome of the embargo.
They had near total subsidy from the USSR from about 1960 until 1990, and in that time they developed precisely no industry and no agricultural output. The Cuban government in the first few decades was primarily focused on exporting revolution, and not on economic development. Despite their ties to the USSR they never even produced anything that could be traded back to the Soviet block, unlike their Eastern European counterparts who also didn't trade with the west. Other communist countries outside of the Soviet orbit like Vietnam also developed local industry and the ability export some agricultural products despite also not trading with the West for a long time, but Cuba's government couldn't muster the focus or ideological flexibility to do so. When most of the communist regimes reformed agriculture and small scale industry int he 1980s, Cuba refused and continued on its ruinous course. They only slightly limited the size of state run farms in the mid 1990s, but it still didn't yield sufficient results to feed the island.
In the 2000s China was buying hundreds of tons of sugar from Cuba but stopped because the Cuban government mismanaged production and couldn't meet agreed upon deliverables. There was also a steep decline in Chinese investment from 2017 to 2022 because euphemistically Cuba couldn't protect Chinese investment, or read another way the Cuban government kept stealing from the Chinese.
These failures are NOT BECAUSE OF THE EMBARGO.
> pointing out objective fact
It's not objective fact though. You're falling for Cuban propaganda.
To be clear I'd end the embargo tomorrow if I could, but it's crazy to think that it's what held Cuba back. I won't be lectured by someone who doesn't know anything about this topic.
> They had near total subsidy from the USSR from about 1960 until 1990, and in that time they developed precisely no industry and no agricultural output. The Cuban government in the first few decades was primarily focused on exporting revolution, and not on economic development. Despite their ties to the USSR they never even produced anything that could be traded back to the Soviet block, unlike their Eastern European counterparts who also didn't trade with the west.
You mean a small island nation didn't develop a massive trade relationship with a country on the other side of the planet when their closest neighbor embargoed them? Color me shocked. What did Cuba have to trade with Russia and co that would make it worth the cost to ship to the other side of the globe? Cigars? Produce that would no longer be fresh by the time it arrived?
> Other communist countries outside of the Soviet orbit like Vietnam also developed local industry and the ability export some agricultural products despite also not trading with the West for a long time, but Cuba's government couldn't muster the focus or ideological flexibility to do so. When most of the communist regimes reformed agriculture and small scale industry int he 1980s, Cuba refused and continued on its ruinous course. They only slightly limited the size of state run farms in the mid 1990s, but it still didn't yield sufficient results to feed the island.
You mean countries geographically located near ideological partners traded more heavily with those ideological partners than a country that wasn't? Also, nice to leave out the fact that their farming during the subsidy period was made possible by the USSR providing them with fertilizer - something that they could not produce locally and obviously makes a huge impact on farming efficiency and crop yields. So no, it's not surprising that their post-USSR attempts to improve farming struggled when lacking something as basic as fertilizer, much less all of the high technology innovations that have been pouring into farming since the 70s.
> These failures are NOT BECAUSE OF THE EMBARGO.
You continue to act like all of these happen without the context of decades of embargo and being cut off from their closest potential trading partner - that also happens to be the wealthiest nation in the world.
> To be clear I'd end the embargo tomorrow if I could, but it's crazy to think that it's what held Cuba back. I won't be lectured by someone who doesn't know anything about this topic.
You're posting on a public forum. You can ignore me, but as long as I'm following the rules, I can reply to your messages. So, uh, enjoy continuing to get "lectured," whatever you seem to think that actually means in this context.
Cuba can both be a shitty place with it's own issues and also be severely impacted by being embargoed for half a century. The UN estimates over 100b in economic damages. The US State Department in 1960 explicitly said the purpose of the embargo is to 'make the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.
If you think that Cuba would not be significantly better off from an economic perspective today without the embargo you're nuts. They can still be in a subpar position because of their own corruption issues, the fact that communism doesn't seem to actually work particularly well, etc. etc. - yet also be getting completely fucked by the fact that they can't trade with the US, that ships docking in the country can't dock in the US for 6 months after, etc.
Train travel from LA to NY wouldn't be efficient, but there are plenty of population poles like LA to SF where train travel would make sense and a network of those could make cross country travel feasible if not in a hurry. But as the GP pointed out, it is not that useful if you can arrive to LA by train, if then when you arrive you need to rent a car before you've even left the station.
It is always shocking to me when I land at an airport in the US and there no public transport available.
It is common for conversations about good local public transport to have a retort in some sub-thread about how big the US is, as if the feasibility of long distance travel affected the feasibility of other modes of local travel.
You mention the SF peninsula. When I first moved there, I lived in the westside of SF and had friends living in Sunnyvale. On a weekend, it took 4 hs to get to Mountain View (~40miles, at the time, checking now it seems like Caltrain weekend service might have improved, so the same trip would take about 2hs), and then had to be picked up by car to finish the rest of the trip. It was faster (~3:30hs, if more expensive) to go from Paris to Amsterdam (>300miles) by train.
> No normal person engages in this stuff, it’s hyper activists part of organized groups with real financing
I guess I'm not a normal person then. I didn't realize that I was a hyper activist because I drew on some cardboard and that my group of friends was being financed. I better go demand for my Soros-check from them.
Are you planning on going to a Tesla dealership again to protest? This was top of my Reddit algorithm for several months, no one even mentions it anymore
Doesn’t Musk own the “Nazi social media” website now? Shocking that people literally destroyed Tesla dealerships out of anger and now no one even bothers to show up anymore
Is it possible that you did not fully understand the reasons people were protesting at Tesla dealerships?
Perhaps the protests were less about Twitter than you may be assuming, and more about something else that happened much later than the Twitter acquisition?
They protested un-elected president Musk who will stay in power forever.
Then he left his position exactly like communicated from the very start and people now think that they won, even tho they only annoyed tesla dealership employees and tesla owners.
Many things do, mostly people on Twitter seem to get under his skin quite a lot lol.
If the goal was to "trigger" him I don't think the protests succeed in any meaningful way. Innocent Tesla owner where the primary victims followed by share holder, (damaged) property owners and people affected by insurances premiums due to the vandalism.
And then of course there are still a handful of people in jail for crimes committed in relation to the Tesla protest. Arguably not victims but still a negative effects that clear outweigh any perceived positive effect it all had on Musk.
They didn't care about Tesla they wanted to "hurt" Musk
Musks net worth is about $270 billion more today compared to when the protests began. Does this look like winning?
Conveniently you left out Musk's DOGE effort to take a chainsaw to the federal bureaucracy that people were protesting. And those protest did have the effect of making Elon unpopular enough that the administration didn't want to keep him around.
I didn't leave it out, it doesn't matter to my point. I refute the part about "winning" because clearly the protest did nothing to Musk it only had severe negative effects on thousands of other people.
He left his position as planned from the beginning, the protest had zero effect on what he did trough DOGE.
You are moving the goal post. I never said DOGE did achieve anything.
You said the protest lead to him no longer be part of the administration which is factually incorrect. His position was limited from the start and he left as planned.
It is accurate to state that we don’t know if the protests had any influence on how things went down with DOGE. It is equally accurate to state that we don’t know if they didn’t have any influence on it. It is not accurate to state that he left as planned since the announcements of the USG change by the minute and don’t mean a thing.
I never made such statements, I refuted the parent posts statement that the protest against musk "won" that's all I did before the goal post moving replies came talking about DOGE.
Elon Musk's role in DOGE was limited because he was designated as a "special government employee", a federal employment category defined under 18 U.S.C. § 202 that restricts service to no more than 130 days in any 365-day period.
This was publicly know back in February. The exact date wasn't know since it was not public when he because such a "special government employee".
It turns out they started counting days straight from the inauguration date or rather the Executive Order 14158 (Creation of DOGE) date which was on the same day.
It is totally accurate to say he left as planned and thus also totally accurate to say that one of the statements above claiming the protest "won" by pushing him out of the administration is factually incorrect.
To claim that his role at DOGE was clear is incorrect. Musk’s position was unclear.
Even the DOGE was opaque and its status unclear. Having him with a black eye and chainsaw organising anything was madness. Even Trump eventually saw it.
yes, there's a group still goes once a week on Monday and I go when I can.
There's also one on Wednesday at the main Social Security office
Totally normal people there, not being paid a dime
The engine being written in C++ does not mean the application is. You're conflating the platform with what is being built on top of it. Your logic would mean that all Python applications should be counted as C applications.
Can you mention 3 cases of breakage the language has had in the last, let's say, 5 years? I've had colleagues in different companies responsible for updating company-wide language toolchains tell me that in their experience updating Rust was the easiest of their bunch.
> edition migrations
One can write Rust 2015 code today and have access to pretty much every feature from the latest version. Upgrading editions (at your leisure) can be done most of the time just by using rustfix, but even if done by hand, the idea that they are onerous is overstating their effect.
Last time I checked there were <100 checks in the entire compiler for edition gates, with many checks corresponding to the same feature. Adding support for new features that doesn't affect prior editions and by extension existing code (like adding async await keywords, or support for k# and r# tokens) is precisely the point of editions.
> A vigilant C programmer who manually validates everything and use available tools at its disposal is less risky than a complacent Rust programmer who blindly trust the language
What about against a vigilant Rust programmer who also manually validates everything and uses available tools at its disposal?
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