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through college and graduate school, and most especially, through medical school. These things give Cubans great advantages, not only as to personal quality of life in a decent society, but also as to Cuba transitioning to a mixed socialist/fair market economy. They have a highly educated population. We have a population with an alarming number of people who think that the universe was literally created in 7 days!
Cuba's social programs may be uniquely suited to Cuba, as it has developed over the last 50 years--after one of the most egregious, brutal, criminal fascist dictatorships in Latin America, and decades of the most egregious neglect, oppression and powerlessness of the poor majority. But you really gotta wonder about corporate control here and people control there, as to education and health care. Are the advantages of free medical care and free education to the limit of each students' ability not blatantly obvious for ANY society? We pour TRILLIONS into wars--most recently, a corporate resource war--plus trillions into the pockets of the rich, of multinational corporations, of big private contractors and in all sorts of giveaways to the rich elite, while our poor suffer ill health and truncated hopes and our middle class is increasingly unable to find work, start small businesses, or even hang onto their homes, with two of the major squeezes on them being health care and education. How much entreprenurial genius has been destroyed here? How much inventiveness? How much creativity?
Why does everything have to be black and white, good vs evil, communist vs capitalist? Nothing is ever black and white, except evils like unjust war and torture. The capitalist system has failed in many ways--one of the chief ones being that the "marketplace" has been rendered neither free nor fair, nor competitive. It is dominated by multinational monopolies and conglomerates and truly criminal "organized money" (as FDR called it). Outrageous greed by the few is the "rule", and in this country we have lost the tempering hand of the public, through government regulation, to balance the needs of society--and in addition, currently, the essential need to save Planet Earth, our only home--with the human desire and need for variety and trade. "Trickle down" has NOT OCCURRED, and, when it seemed like it was occurring, as during the Clinton years, it was based on the utter destruction of the economies of other countries like Argentina, Jamaica, Venezuela, Bolivia, Mexico and many more. Then we had the criminals of the Bush Junta outright steal even that limited prosperity here in the U.S. and crash the"first world" economy. The rich got richer and the poor got screwed.
It's time to ask ourselves what to keep and what to throw away, of this capitalist system, and what might work and what wouldn't, of socialist systems--including our own "New Deal" program after the first great, capitalist depression. It is certainly something to think about, that spreading the wealth is better than hoarding the wealth, that many small enterprises are better than big, powerful monopolies, that government intervention on behalf of the public MUST temper the greedbag madhouses of the rich such as "Wall Street," and that a BALANCE between the public good and private greed MUST be maintained if you want to live in a DECENT society.
The story of socialism vs capitalism is NOT black and white. There are desirable qualities--qualities that contribute to human happiness--in both systems. Just consider Social Security--before it was looted (Bush Junta borrowing against it), and was providing equitable dividends (keeping up with inflation). You work all your life and pay into the system, and your employer matches your contribution. At the end of your work life, you receive a pension by which you are able to continue putting food on the table, buying what you need, and having a decent life in your retirement years. Until the Bush Junta, nobody could loot this system. It paid for itself. It was overseen by the government, in everyone's interest. No private greedbag could "sell the company" and steal the pension fund, or use the pension fund as collateral for leveraged loans--for becoming a billionaire at the expense of the workers, as your ponzi scheme collapses and you abscond with your "golden parachutes." The one thing working people could count on was Social Security--which was called COMMUNIST when it was first proposed.
It is utterly stupid to dis a country like Cuba, whose government has survived for 50 years, serving the basic needs of the people--needs that have been grossly neglected here--out of some kneejerk response schooled by the corpo-fascist press and the U.S. corporate-run government, which have NOT SERVED US WELL.
It's time for a complete re-thinking of this corpo-fascist ideology that we have all had pounded into our heads. We think Cuba has propaganda? Gawd. WE are the most propagandized people on earth. We are so propagandized that our people have docilely accepted 'TRADE SECRET,' corporate-controlled vote counting!
We think Cuba abuses prisoners? WHO has one of the the worst prisons on earth on the other end of the island of Cuba? WHO has torturing prisoners as a government POLICY? WHO has the biggest prison population on earth, with half the prisoners serving long sentences for minor crimes?
We think Cubans are not free? Ask some homeless person in any city in the United States where is the closest place where he or she can SIT DOWN? Homeless, ragged, hungry, tired, sick, feeling hopelessness and despair--and you can't even SIT DOWN. You were born here. You are a citizen. You may even be a veteran. And you can't sit down anywhere, and you are not wanted, and you are shunted from place to place, and told to "get out!," and sometimes beaten up or thrown in jail, and even if you are lucky enough to get to an overcrowded, underfunded, increasingly unavailable shelter for the night, you are locked out during the day, and have to wander around because there is no place that you are permitted to SIT DOWN--because you have NOTHING--no resources, no uplift, no "golden parachute" for you, though you may have never hurt anybody in your entire life, never stolen anything, let alone somebody else's pension fund--you are nothing and nobody, citizen though you are, human being though you are and you cannot even sit on a public bench. Is that "freedom"?
That's the specter that the capitalist system wants us all to behold and learn from. If you have no money, you are not even a human being, let alone a citizen of this country. Money = freedom. And for rejecting that concept, and creating a society in which everybody is a human being, and everyone has a right to a decent life, I salute the Cuban people! Their system may not be perfect, but it is NOT dismissable and it DOES have many ideas that we should be considering.
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