One of the most obvious ways in which the status quo is defended in this country is through the inconsistent way in which general rules are derived from particular examples, when it comes to countries and ideologies and social systems. For a perfect example of this, consider this piece in City Journal, which purports to use Havana as evidence for why communism is a failure. The Dish summarizes it like so: “After visiting Havana and stepping outside the city’s small, sanitized tourist sector, Michael J. Totten reviews how dismally the island’s Communist experiment has failed.” Which should inspire us to ask: if Havana is necessarily indicative of what communism is, then why isn’t Camden, New Jersey indicative of what capitalism is? Why is the difficulty in getting quality health care for the poor an indictment of Cuba and communism but not for America and capitalism, when so many here suffer and die for lack of medical care? Without apparent irony, Totten points out that “Americans can get houses in abandoned parts of Detroit for only $500—which makes them practically free—but no one wants to live in a crumbling house in a gone-to-the-weeds neighborhood. ” What’s unclear is why I’m supposed to believe that there’s something intrinsically more Cuban or communist about Havana than there is intrinsically American or capitalist about the thousands of dead places in America, like those dilapidated parts of Detroit.
Amazingly, the word “sanctions” does not appear in Totten’s piece. The fact that the most powerful country in the world has waged an economic, diplomatic, and espionage war on a tiny country, one that prior to the revolution had been ruined by a vicious despot who enabled American gangsters to drain the country of its wealth and who tortured and murdered political dissidents– these things go unmentioned, as they would be inconvenient for someone on a mission to reassure his readers that America is right and all will be well. What is always, always missing from pieces like Totten’s is that the alternative to Castro was not some sunny, spoiled American fantasy, but Fulgenico Batista and all of his monsters. After all these years, American conservatives, still carrying water for fascists, on the unassailable theory that at least they aren’t communists. This is what America has done to Cuba: it has broken the country and then said to the world, “See? Look, it’s broken!” And the media has played along again and again.
What makes educated Americans so particularly Americans is this constant tug-of-war between their cultural distaste for the typical markers of rah-rah American chauvinism and their desperate desire to be told that their country is right and good and the world will continue as it always has. That, in my experience, is the kind of foreign policy reporting that you get at the Dish, at least from the underbloggers and not from Sullivan’s essays themselves. But the truth is that looking at a tiny, poor country we’ve devastated ourselves and declaring America the victor is no longer going to cut it. The rot in this country is deep, and you cannot project your way out of capitalism’s crisis, and no amount of Michael Tottens will save us from our humbling.
Update: My friend Keane Bhatt sends this along. From an interview with Salim Lamrani, who wrote a book called “The Economic War Against Cuba”:
“Indeed, since 1992 and the adoption of the Torricelli Act, these sanctions apply equally to third countries that might wish to trade with Cuba. This constitutes a serious violation of international law which prohibits any national legislation from being extraterritorial, that is to say, from being applied outside of national boundaries. For example, French law cannot be applied in Spain and Italian law cannot be applied in France. Nonetheless, United States economic sanctions remain applicable to all countries that trade with Cuba.
Thus, any foreign ship that docks in a Cuban port finds itself forbidden to enter U.S. ports for a period of six months. Cuba, being an island, is heavily dependent upon maritime transport. Of the commercial fleets that operate in the Florida Straits, most conduct the bulk of their activities with a clear understanding of the importance of this market and do not run the risk of transporting merchandise to Cuba. When they do, however, they demand a higher tariff than that applied to neighboring countries, such as Haiti or the Dominican Republic, this in order to make up for the shortfall that results from being banned from U.S. ports for having done so. Therefore, if the standard price for transporting merchandise to the Dominican Republic is 100, this figure that can rise to 600 or 700 for Cuba.”
The point is not to say that the Cuban system has worked well, or that the track record for explicitly communist countries is good. What I am saying is that it is bizarre to point to the economic problems of a tiny country without pointing out that your own country has used its own immense power to wage economic terrorism against that tiny country for a half-century.
last time WHO ranked healthcare systems, Cuba was only a couple notches below the U.S., despite spending drastically less.
Totten was specifically disputing that the country was “ruined” and “drained of its wealth” before the revolution, hence why he pointed out the income figures. It was ruled by a brutal dictatorship, but you could say the same thing about 1960s South Korea when it was industrializing, or China today – they’re not preclusive.
As for the sanctions, those were from one country – the US. And for all the pressure to get them dropped, the Cuban government always got very wary whenever the opportunity for that ever happened along with any other eased-up relations with the US. Castro, as far as I can tell, disliked the economic effects of the sanctions but liked the way they helped to keep his regime in power.
In other words, they produced precisely the kind of conditions Totten says are the product of communism.
The sanctions? I’m not sure which part you’re referring to here.
I’m saying that if your claim is that the sanctions have had negative impacts on the Cuban economy as a whole, but not on Castro’s leadership, that would look pretty much like the society he describes in his endless inside/outside metaphor.
Personally, I think you are far underestimating the impact of the diplomatic, economic, and espionage warfare by the most powerful country (and most powerful economy) in the history of the world.
The sanctions are only from America. It’s hard to blame that for the wholesale destruction of the Cuban economy; they can still buy and sell from everyone else in the whole rest of the world. Most of their exports are fungible products like sugar, cigars, and rum, for which US sanctions should not produce measurable export problems, particularly since we have massive sugar subsidies that would keep their product out regardless. It certainly doesn’t explain their inability to access very basic goods like cooking oil, antiseptics, and rice which are sold as commodities on world markets. I think that the sanctions should be lifted because they’re stupid, but the idea that Cuba’s failures can be written off to the American blockade is excuse-making for a system that is less productive than it was 60 years ago.
And while I take your point about generalizing, where is the example of the successful socialist country that Totten should be looking at? They all failed in much the same way: shortages of basic goods, increasing reliance on the black market to overcome the socialist calculation problem, an oligarchic elite disconnected from the increasing privation of ordinary citizens unable to access basic goods like food and fuel. At this point, I think the burden of proof is on the Socialists to prove that they can produce a society which does not result in mass deprivation and repressive dictatorship.
Suppose that depends on what we mean by socialism. I concede that the explicitly Marxist countries have a dismal track record.
State ownership of major swathes of the economy. Draconian flattening of the income distribution, which may nonetheless co-exist with an opulent lifestyle for the political elite. Suppression of the basic operations of capitalism. It was reasonable for Orwell to think that this was achievable. 60 years later, the evidence all runs the other way.
I think it did some damage, but was its development noticeably a lot worse under Communism than with, say, the Warsaw Pact countries that weren’t under US-only sanctions? They were starting from a lower base, admittedly.
Sorry, the phrasing on that wasn’t clear – Cuba was starting from a lower base.
“60 years later, the evidence all runs the other way.”
I get so tired of this. Every attempt at reform in the direction of Western Europe, Scandinavia et al is decried as Socialism; yet simultaneously, the ONLY examples of Socialism are the USSR, Cuba, and North Korea.
But I don’t call Scandinavian countries socialist, because they’re not. They’re social democracies. Cuba has government ownership of the means of production, a model that has failed in the same way everywhere it has been tried.
Megan, that seems like a pretty big generalisation. Public-private partnerships and fully public ownership of means of production have achieved varying levels of success in eg US, UK, Canada, Germany, China across different business categories. To classify the world with an all-or-nothing public/private binary is, in my opinion, to erase useful lessons about when and how PPP works.
“Cuba has government ownership of the means of production, a model that has failed in the same way everywhere it has been tried.”
And Norway’s oil industry is only 67% state owned. Lemme guess: if it wasn’t for the dynamic brilliance of the other 33%, the Norwegians would be eating dog food, right?
How about if we align timelines?
55 years after the American Revolution, we had the Cherokee Trail of Tears, and the Potawatomi Trail of Death, just for starters. Not to mention other folks of various hues with troubles of their own.
The sanctions are only from America.
Making life difficult for any company that wants to do business in America and Cuba.
I suppose you could argue that being locked out of the US tourism market has had no affect on an economy that was heavily dominated by US tourism prior to the revolution. I mean it would be a stupid argument, but one could make it.
It certainly doesn’t explain their inability to access very basic goods like cooking oil, antiseptics, and rice which are sold as commodities on world markets.
Yep a Small Caribbean country with few natural resources having problems generating foreign capital is surprising. Stop the press. Small Caribbean country has small Caribbean country problems.
Actually, Cuba was a major agricultural exporter, areas where it has lost ground. Island tourism was certainly a thing in the 1950s, but nothing like the industry it is today, which was made possible by mass affluence and air conditioning, exports were about 10 times as important to national income as tourism. Cuban tourism was certainly its major source of income as far as American moviemakers were concerned, but it was a substantial exporter of sugar, rum, and of course, tobacco. It was also a leading local producer of staples such as rice, where they now seem to be lagging. Production of basic commodities such as coffee, beef, chicken, and milk have declined outright.
There’s a plausible case that American tourism would be more profitable than European tourism absent the sanctions, you can’t argue that that’s behind their agricultural problems; these things are traded on world markets. There’s substantial evidence that single-source commodity boycotts fail to change prices, as with the attempted Arab boycott of America and Israel after the 1973 war.
Since tourism was a negligible part of their economy in 1958–it is much more important, relatively, today, though still only about 2/3 of export revenue–it might explain why Cuba hasn’t gotten richer, but it doesn’t explain the absolute decline in prosperity that Cuba has, by all accounts, experienced since Fidel took over. I agree that the appropriate comparison is to its former self, not a richer nation, but even by that comparison, Cuba does not look good; it went from one of the richest countries in the region, indeed the world, to an economic laggard.
According to what cockamamie metric cooked up at the Mont Pelerin Society were Cubans under Battista “among the wealthiest people in the world?” Are you nuts? Blindedly by ideology? Monetarily compensated libertarian hack?
At any rate, the best way to think about Cuba is not to compare it with prerevolutionary Cuba; it’s to compare it with how geographically and demographically similar neighbors are doing right now, in the year 2014: countries like the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Surinam, Jamaica. These are all countries which, like Cuba, have had a rough time adjusting to the current global economic order; and they’re all countries that lag far, far behind Cuba in life expectancy.
“Monetarily compensated libertarian hack?”
^^ This is the correct answer.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/project-s-h-a-m-e-on-megan-mcardle-portrait-of-a-taxpayer-subsidized-libertarian.html
Believe everything you read on the internet, huh?
Megan McArdle has a long history of mangling statistics and making stuff up. So it’s probably safe to assume she’s doing the same thing here.
She’s probably using the mean income, or basing it on GDP, or something. Neither of which are terribly relevant to the average citizen of a highly unequal society. Not that a privileged daughter of New York’s elites has to think about such things.
This.
Or, for that matter, let’s look at much wealthier Brazil, with rampant hillside slums go through periodic paroxysms of violence and where the Summer Games are going to occur on a waterfront so polluted that there are floating bodies in the bay.
Actually, Cuba was a major agricultural exporter, areas where it has lost ground.
You mean like every other poor agricultural exporter since the 1950s? I mean it is sort of vaguely fascinating that you think a Communist country, with marginal agricultural land, should have been able to escape the trap that other poor agricultural exporters have been unable to escape during the last 50 years.
Island tourism was certainly a thing in the 1950s, but nothing like the industry it is today, which was made possible by mass affluence and air conditioning, exports were about 10 times as important to national income as tourism.
That’s Cuba people, famous for it’s Island tourism and Casinos in the 1950s. She is technically right though, it was different.
There’s a plausible case that American tourism would be more profitable than European tourism absent the sanctions.
Err no. It would have been. Given you know proximity, Island cruises, what has happened with its neighbours tourism industries… Plausible case my ass.
There are two sources of income available to its neighbours – off shore finance (also known as enabling fraud and tax evasion) and tourism. Cuba has access to neither. To their credit they actually have created a fairly modern industry, pharmaceuticals. Something none of their neighbours have really managed. They also seem to be having some success creating an indigenous health care industry (selling cheap health services to foreigners). Has this been enough to lift them economically. No. Might it in long term? Perhaps. Is this pretty impressive for a small island with few resources. Kinda, yeah.
I agree that the appropriate comparison is to its former self, not a richer nation, but even by that comparison, Cuba does not look good; it went from one of the richest countries in the region, indeed the world, to an economic laggard.
No it went from a country where an elite were very rich (or rather there was a lot of money floating around, much of it with dubious origins), to a country where that elite departed with their money. For a developing country the important metrics for people who care about people, rather than those like yourself who care about ‘money people’, is how the average person has done.
The really dumb thing about this critique of yours is there are actually very good criticisms that can be made of Cuba’s model. I could make them, they’re not hard. Of course that would require engaging with Cuba the country, rather than Cuba the ‘propoganda point’. This would require acknowledging the strengths, weaknesses and historical contingencies of what Cuba was working within.
Many major agricultural exporters have gained a great deal of ground since 1950. Brazil, for example, is an export powerhouse, which drove much of its spectacular growth over the last decade.
Spectacular growth which has accrued to what, the top 0.5% (Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world).
While the ecosystem has been increasingly devastated to provide fresh (temporarily) land for export commodities.
Yeah. Brazil is real successful.
You’re comparing Cuba with Brazil now? One country is a medium-sized island with rough terrain, which, by the 1950s had already claimed the entirety of its arable land for agricultural production. The other country has, within its borders, what is by far the largest tropical wilderness in the world, vast swathes are *still* claimable for agriculture.
Seriously, wondering why Cuba hasn’t kept pace with Brazil in agricultural output is like wondering why L.A. County hasn’t kept pace with Saudia Arabia in oil output.
Can I also point out: this flaw in your Cuba-Brazil comparison is glaringly obvious. A 7th grade geography student would see it instantly. Put down your von Hayek for just a second, and pick up an atlas.
The valid comparison for the Soviet Union is Russia, not the US. If you compare the Soviet Union with Russia prior to the Soviet Union, or after, it doesn’t look that bad. That’s not an apologia, just recognition of the fact that Russia has always been a repressive and brutal country. It’s hard to overcome your culture, particularly if your elite was formed in repression and your new country was formed during a period of brutal and vicious civil war/external invasions.
Also, it’s hard to call any country Marxist given that Marx was an analyst of Capitalism. The Communist Manifesto was a rallying cry, not a political program.
The Soviet Union from 1933 to 1945 killed more of its own citizens than the Romanov Dynasty had in the 300 years prior to 1917. You are astonishingly dim.
a) The population of Russia in 1800 was 35.5 million. In 1931 it was 161.0 million. So there’s that.
b) Do you have good stats for the number killed by the Romanov dynasty? Remember to include those who died due to poverty/neglect (given you’re including those who died of starvation under Stalin I assume). Bonus points if you can make it relevant to population.
c) How are we factoring in the ways in which technology improved mechanism of repression?
And I may be astonishingly dim, but I’m still sufficiently switched on to know that the Soviets inherited the Gulag, secret police, anti-Semitism and other factors of Soviet life.
Fun activity. Compare Soviet life with US life:
+ Collective Farming. Hmm, sounds awfully like corporate agriculture…
+ Central Planning. Hmm sounds awfully like Corporate Management…
+ Ideology replacing thought and intelligence. Hmm, sounds awfully like MBA/neoliberal culture…
+ Propaganda and Censorship. Have you seen the NYT and network TV…
Which is not to say that they are the same, but more that there are less differences that we pretend.
SHHHHHHHhhhh…. You’ll upset the FREEDOM brigades!
Come on, that’s silly. Look at DDR vs BRD. It’s not hard to get perspective from the people who actually lived this comparison, if not from travel then from movies and books.
The DDR was essentially occupied by Russia. The US chose to build up West Germany, Russia chose to extract from DDR as a form of reparations.
Most of Eastern Europe was under occupation, and so probably isn’t hugely relevant. Those parts that were the most independent generally did best, with Yugoslavia actually doing pretty well under Tito.
And given that E. Europe was always less developed that W. Europe, direct comparisons probably aren’t that helpful anyway.
Cian, I think we may be talking past one another. Arrogance, laziness, and imperfect management are human foibles common to everyone across all times and places. These account for (3) and (4). But the large output differences rule out (1) and (2) as similarities of latter-day USSR to present-day US. That’s why I think your analogy is weak.
I get that libertarians need to believe that Cuba’s economic problems have been caused by Karl Marx, Che Guevara and SDS, because this is, as Louie CK might put it, one their “little believies.” Hey, keep your little believies, libertarians! It’s what makes you special people.
The way Totten describes Havana’s building stock and infrastructure reminds me a lot of Santo Domingo, which I visited in 1999. Except the DR is 110th globally in life-expectancy, while Cuba is 38th…slightly ahead of the United States.
I’m not sure Detroit and Camden are the most relevant examples of capitalism here. How about Haiti? How’s capitalism doing there?
Exactly. The correct comparisons are the geographic ones. Totten and McArdle live in a conceptual space where all economic transactions occur on the head of a pin, and geography does not exist.
Huh? Haiti? You’re cherry picking like Camden and Detroit. What about Jamaica, PR, the Bahamas, and the Lesser Antilles? Each of these has better quality of life than Cuba.
Jamaica doesn’t. At least not if you’re the median inhabitant.
The Bahamas possibly does, but there’s a huge gulf between the quality of life of whites and blacks.
Get your geography and demography right. Lesser Antilles and the Bahamas are both geographically and demographically very different from Cuba. They are small islands with no large agrarian/post-agrarian population. They also have large European and Euro-American populations.
PR is part of the United States, and illustrates the point (hilariously disputed by McArdle, above) that strong ties with the USA can be beneficial to a Caribbean island-nation’s economy.
Jamaica is indeed comparable with Cuba. I agree. Largish island, large agrarian/postagrarian population, small European/Euroamerican population. And Jamaica has a dismal life-expectancy rate compared with Cuba.
Yep. Very nice about-face. This kind of example can only be compelling as the slice-of-life fraction of a more comprehensive, rigorous analysis of C vs C.
I’m gonna give one warning: everybody be polite, or I’m gonna shut the comments down.
Jeez. Lots of collar-straightening hereabouts whenever McArdle rolls into town.
I think the East vs. West Germany story is more complicated. Both were occupied (Germany still is, in effect, with about 200 US military installations on its territory).
East Germany was a very prosperous country by the eastern European standards (I was there in the 70s), but West Germany was serving as the “shopping window” of capitalism. It was purposely developed and organized to mitigate, as much as possible, the socioeconomic conflicts typical for capitalism.
So, the story of two Germanys is really a Cold War story; it doesn’t demonstrate how the two systems function by themselves. Same is, of course, the US/Cuba story.
Totten’s shock about what Cuban health care is actually like makes me doubt that he has a clue what US health care is like in a state with high rates of uninsured. Bringing your own iodine and bedsheets vs. dying in agony of long-untreated cancer because you couldn’t afford the screenings? I know which I consider a more “advanced” system.
Puleeze. A bit overly dramatic, don’t you think? Yes, we are the big, bad, evil people who have ruined everyone’s life. Cuba has been a poor, helpless little country. Give me a break. No, it wasn’t a paradise before. But is that any reason for a thug like Castro to come in and make it an even uglier place? Then blame all the troubles on the big, bad U.S.A.
Capitalism isn’t perfect but it is preferable because it is (a) voluntary and (b) ethical. It is ethical because it involves a free and voluntary exchange between parties. Communism is not voluntary and it is not ethical because it is based on state coercion. That seems like a no-brainer.
Capitalism is neither voluntary-you cannot opt out of it- not I’d it ethical- people suffer based on random chance.
How is it ethical and voluntary when right at this moment you’re probably working for someone lying on a beach in Hawaii, and the only direct purpose of your activities is making him or her more money. Whatever the work you do, if it didn’t generate a profit for someone, you’d be out starving.
You could suggest that this mechanism works well for most people, but ‘ethical and voluntary’ is not a good description.