Thank you for the extra information: I had considered only that it is a) far from Cuba, b) in empathetic DRV, and c) rural retirement village territory.

It is of course up to the Cuban successors to decide whether they’ll allow the current “leadership” to slip away into exile, not me. As the Chairperson has so correctly asserted, we who are not running Cuba should not opine. Leave all that to Raul, no worries, she’ll be right mate.

How quaint the Communist leaders are: “gone to Lenin” or “gone to Marx” after one of their number carks it; embalming and display for veneration so the personality cult may glorify the inglorious for decades post mortem. It’s just so wonderful they abolished religion, don’t you think? It allows for so much more veneration of living humans, which has just GOT to be the way to go in this secular age!! My very word, we got rid of “the divine right of Kings” – what twaddle that hereditary rule was: nepotism on an abysmal scale.

These days you find that nepotism only here and there: Kim Il Sung/Kim Il Jong; Fidel Castro/Raul Castro; George Bush Sr/George W., Nehru/Mrs Gandhi/Rajiv/Sonia; Mao/Mrs Mao [failed]; Kim Il Beazeley (Sr, Jr); Frank Crean/Simon Crean; Benigno Aquino/Corazon Aquino; House of Saud ; …. with the Commies just as keen on the caper as the Western democrats.

cheerio

One of the major flaws of lefties is to assume that the US trade embargo has helped Fidel stay in power. Thus the US is at least partially to blame for this (as for everything else that’s wrong in the world).

You have not really proved your point. Those damn stubbborn yanquis with their blockade and refusing to normalize relations with Cuba gave Castro a great PR weapon. Any worthwhile demagogue needs a great enemy to rant around. Remove the US and Castro would have lost a lot of his raison d’etre.

Democracy on it’s own isn’t enough, GregM. It brings many Indians very little. Less than 50 cents a day for 250 million of people. I’d have rather lived in non-democratic Beijing during the last 15 years than in “democratic� Uttar Pradesh.

But that’s an argument in favour of tooth and claw capitalism as is currently practiced in communist China (the avarice of which would make a nineteenth century robber baron blush), not against democracy. Still I wonder if you would rather live in Beijing if you were one of the losers in China’s economic miracle, the hutong you live in being expropriated to feed Beijing’s transformation, with no compensation to you, nowhere for you to go and no recourse for you to an independent judicial system to enforce whatever paltry rights you might have. It gets very cold on the streets of Beijing in the depths of winter.

But let’s look at like with like comparisons: First, would you prefer to live in thriving, bustling Beijing or in thriving, bustling Mumbai both being transformed by the application of capitalist economics?

And at the other end of the scale would you prefer to be some landless peasant in Uttar Pradesh or some landless peasant in China who has to take work in one of the many illegal murderous Chinese coal mines in order to make enough to stay alive?

A one-year program, including:
* exile to a country villa in Dalat (Viet Nam) for Fidel, Raul, and the top brass
* interim assembly to pass laws on free speech, free assembly, election procedures, new political parties
* truth and reconciliation commission to begin work
* “Cuba 2020″ gabfest attended by all non-Communist thinkers, toilers who missed out on a decent life, etc
* return to 1940 constitution as an interim framework
* dismantling of Neighbourhood Watch surveillance of citizens
* dismantlng of Fidel’s stage in central Havana
* UN to provide election observers
* negotiations on future status of Guantanamo territory
* negotiations on future of lands, buildings, houses expropriated by Fidel’s boys
* two free cigars for every tourist
* soup kitchens in major cities
* industrial and agricultural improvement programs funded by Western European nations and/or Australia

[with apologies to everyone, most especially to Chairperson Katz]
hasta la vista

Paulus, please try to keep calm. Katz’s opinions were opposed, from several angles. It’s the Cuban population that’s been stuffed around & rooted, not the very flexible and empathetic Katz. No-one I know has gone anywhere near him/her.

All together now, shake your booties and keep your ideations flexible!!

Empathetic. Empathetic. Empathetic.
Empathetic. Empathetic. Empathetic.

While it is entertaining to watch Katz get gang-banged …

I guess there’s no accounting for how folks get their jollies.

For myself, I’d feel imperiled were my would-be assailants capable of achieving the slightest tumescence.

It’s the arguments and attitudes of Katz on this thread that I oppose, not Katz the person.

wbb, look at poor people in Timor Leste, queuing for hours in the sun to cast a ballot. Your comment comes close to saying the wretched of the Earth must simply endure whatever loathsome garbage is flung at them.

I say, Batista evidently had masny faults… but the ragtag “army” of the Sierra promised elections (restoration of democracy) and didn’t deliver. There, I believe, it sowed the seeds of its every subsequent failure. And many miseries for the Cuban people.

Think f the many facets of democracy: mass ducation, free press, separation of powers, no coercion of population [except as legislated by a freely elected parliament], social welfare, competing political parties, lack of discrimination, checks on corruption, etc etc Poverty is not an absolute bar to these. As a democrat who enjoys the adsvantages of freedoms I want to see democracy – in its various forms – become as widespread as possible. Yes, it’s a fragile flower but I’m watering it every day. Are you?

You see, wbb, I think that poverty is likely to be REDUCED in the long term under a system of government that’s democratically accountable. Not a certain outcome, but more likely. So I don’t believe any society has to CHOOSE between poverty and democracy. They’re not stark alternatives. My empathy is for the poor bastards who suffer under dictatorships. Much as I know I should show ideational flexibility, I cannot find it in my heart to show empathy for dictators and their apologists, in whatever nation they live.

While it is entertaining to watch Katz get gang-banged, I would caution participants that sexual violence is one of the no-no areas that will get a site black-listed by Senator Conroy.

Now, back to serious matters, if anyone’s still interested.

One of the major flaws of lefties is to assume that the US trade embargo has helped Fidel stay in power. Thus the US is at least partially to blame for this (as for everything else that’s wrong in the world).

But this assumption should not go unchallenged. An interesting recent article by the veteran peace activist Tom Hayden concludes that, in the case of modern Vietnam, the freeing up of trade has actually helped the Communist government hang on to power. He writes:

“The party introduced its drastic doi moi market policies in 1986, a “renovation” plan that opened doors to private foreign investment and a Gorbachev-style internal perestroika. An exhaustive European study concluded in 2006 that a remarkable result of the doi moi reforms has been “the absence of organized social opposition among workers, peasants and youth. They are generally content with their growing economic opportunities.”"
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20080310&s=hayden

This might well be the case in Cuba too, if American sanctions were lifted. No one has yet explained how the ability to buy Levis and Quarter Pounders on the streets of Havana would translate into political reform.

Go to India. Go to Cambodia. See what democracy means to those without great material wealth or the benefit of mass education.

Democracy on it’s own isn’t enough, GregM. It brings many Indians very little. Less than 50 cents a day for 250 million of people. I’d have rather lived in non-democratic Beijing during the last 15 years than in “democratic” Uttar Pradesh.

Democracy is grand. But we still have to calibrate the lives of those who don’t live under it. It’s not just all equally bad.

Hence you don’t have to hate democracy to think Castro was a saint compared to Pol Pot.

While Ambigulous has a fixation with name-brand dictators, he has little understanding of the rarity that is the flower we call democracy – but which is more accurately known as great material wealth combined with decades of mass education.

Go to India. Go to Cambodia. See what democracy means to those without great material wealth or the benefit of mass education.

Then reflect on just how ignorant your comment is. In the midst of poverty and without decades of mass education people cleave to democracy.

No, I will go on to explain this to you further. Australia led the world in democracy. It did so with its universal male suffrage legislation of the 1850s, a time not of great material wealth and twenty years before legislation was passed for mass education. Material wealth and mass education flowed from democracy, not the other way round.

In all the time that I have had the posts that appear at LP and have posted here I have never read one that comes close to the one I am responding to in its arrogance and its ignorance.

I would have thought that the natural instinct of social democrats and of those who are “left of centre” would always be towards democracy, based upon an intelligent understanding of its liberating effects. But from the post I am responding to it appears that this is not the case.

Democracy does not grow on trees. Certainly not a tree that was sprouting anywhere near Cuba in the 1950s.

If you had to ‘ve lived under a dictator, I’d've choosed Castro before most others.

As a general comment (and I’m not saying Katz falls into this category) over the years I have come across people on the Left who are by no means Stalinists or even Leninists, and who understand what was wrong with the former Soviet Union and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and what is wrong with present-day China and North Korea, yet who are nonetheless prepared to cut quite a bit of slack for Castro’s Cuba.

Certainly Katz does not fall into that category. He is, on the evidence of his own words, someone who cuts Castro quite a bit of slack and advances arguments for doing so, using his unique tool of ideational flexibility, which of necessity apply equally to the regimes of the not-lamented Pol Pot and every Stalinist’s pin-up boy Kim Jong-Il. When challenged on those arguments he re-asserts them, embellishes them and expands upon them. He advances no case from which we can discern that he distinguishes Castro’s rule over Cuba from that of Pol Pot over Cambodia or Kim the Lesser over benighted North Korea. We have no reason to believe other than that these are his deeply held and considered views.

As someone who prides himself as to the purity of his arguments and the consistency of his words we really should respect that he does hold the Westphalian view that he has advanced that those who seize power by violence and will not relinquish it to democratic order should be immune from criticism, as should everything they do to dispossess, enslave, oppress and even murder those who fall victim to their predations.

I know that Katz would rather be seen as sincere and consistent in his arguments, wherever they lead, than be compromised in them. We who are his interlocutors would expect nothing less of him.

So no, out of respect for Katz we must conclude that he is not, as he has elsewhere described himself, a Left libertarian but an unreconstructed Stalinist. To ask us to do otherwise is to ask us to question his sincerity and the purity of his arguments. We cannot do that for then we would think less of him. And we don’t want to do that.

Oh dear, so we were deigning to drop bon mots before the swine, in order to be delighted when the fools took it all so terribly seriously, and positively howled with outrage, were we, Katz??

Oscar Wilde you are not.
Please preface your future contributions on Castro, Pol Pot, or other dictators with a LIBERTARIAN HUMOUR WARNING, or sprinkle those cutesy little
or
or ( symbols so we know you are just joshing…..

Note to readers: on another post Katz describes Katz as a libertarian. We leave the discerning of the libertarian strands in Katz’s cogitations on Castro (above) as an exercise for the reader.

good luck!

BBB

It was GregM’s contributions that I remember with such clarity and fondness. Be gratified, if you please.

Degustibus non disputandum est.

BBB

One wonders how Katz can assert, with apparent sincerity, that ’sovereign’ rights can be seized by arms and then exercised, for some five decades, without reference to the people themselves.

Facts on the ground, Old Sport.

If such were to be the case, we wouldn’t recognise China, Pakistan, Iran, Pinochet’s Chile, most African governments, and most governments elsewhere else where the old sovereignty was overthrown by force of arms.

(As to the Korean issue, your recollection is incorrect. I proved that GregM’s assertion that the Korean miracle took place in the context of trade liberalism and open markets was risibly incorrect.

But I’m gratified that you do remember one occasion when I might have made a major factual error. So thanks for the compliment.

To the non-obsessive remainder of humanity, sorry for straying, finally and after much prompting, so very far OT.)