No recommendations, but please come back here and post about your experiences.
Greenleaf
joined 2 years ago
Personally I take Putin’s comment about “arming neighbors” or whatever to not be about Cuba, but about Iran and Hezbollah.
In addition to what others are saying… I don’t recall the number but somewhere between like 1.5 and 3 million residents of the former GDR moved west after reunification (and that’s on a fairly smallish population base). That’s because the west completed nuked the east’s economy and industrial base, honestly not that far off from what Russia experienced in the 90s (common for West German companies to buy a factory in the east for pennies and then close it down to avoid competition). But the difference is Russians had nowhere to go but East Germans could head to the west.
So in those conditions - not unlike what you see in the Rust Belt or small towns in the US - the only people who remain are those who can’t or don’t have the employable skills. And they’re left to languish in economic misery. Stew in that for a few decades and you’ll probably be pretty receptive to anyone who comes by to say your problems are all due to some “other”.
That’s honestly pretty bold, given how so many Democrats will say he’s “the last good Republican president” and how he’s generally been canonized as a someone you are supposed to respect regardless of your political leaning.
The Romans almost pulled it off, for a couple centuries at least. The emperor of Rome would name his adopted son as successor, but usually this “adoption” would take place well into adulthood of the adoptee, and usually after they had displayed their talent and abilities, i.e. like Mao “adopting” Deng or something.
And it only took one emperor to screw it up. Marcus Aurelius - of Gladiator fame and favorite of chud pfps everywhere - named his bio son Commodus as his heir. And kinda like how the movie shows, Commodus was pretty fucked up. From then on emperors often chose their bio kids as successors with the expected results.
KKE sounds like the kind of party that could be pushed into sufficiently good positions by the right cadres making the effort?
We are Cuba! is very high on my reading list, I’ll definitely get to it this year.
You can find Yaffe’s interviews on various left wing / commie podcasts. I know she was on Cosmopod a while back but has been on others, maybe Rev Left I’m not sure. I recommend them, she’s a great interview. A Brit who lived in Cuba a long time, like 20 years IIRC.
Perhaps this isn’t the most important thing, but just something interesting to know about Cuba:
Initially, the World Baseball Classic fielded a “Cuban” team that wasn’t sanctioned by the government of Cuba or the Cuban Baseball Federation. So it was run by MLB and was made up of defectors. Then in 2023, for the fifth WBC, the Cuban Baseball Federation was allowed to field a team directed by them. It included Cuban nationals who didn’t defect and haven’t been trash talking Cuba since playing in MLB. So the team included some legit pros like Yoan Moncada and Eloy Jiminez. They got beat but for the first time it was a truly “Cuban” team. I have hard time criticizing people for their funko pops and stuff because I spent more than I should to get a 2023 Cuba WBC baseball cap.
The situation with baseball player defectors is tricky. On one hand, I feel it just isn’t worth the negative press Cuba gets for trying to stop baseball players from defecting. I get it when you’re talking about like doctors or engineers. But pro athletes are particularly socially necessary. Just let them go.
OTOH, the US policy of granting citizenship (or permanent residency, I don’t remember which) to anyone in Cuba really does tie Cuba’s hands here. What Cuba has done economically despite the blockade is nothing short of heroic. Cuba can boast better living standards than the rest of the Caribbean. But… it’s still a poor country (which would be significantly poorer if it was run by capitalists subservient to US hegemony). If there was any other poor country whose people could get US citizenship or permanent residency just by being there and defecting, then you can bet that most people who came there as part of a sports team would take that offer. And even if athletes aren’t quite socially necessary, that’s gotta be pretty demoralizing that if every time your baseball team goes to play in the US, half the players don’t come back. This has nothing to do with “authoritarianism”, it’s the position that any country with any system of governance would have to deal with.
So Cuba doesn’t really have any good options here, but it’s the fault entirely of US policy.
Mostly neutral to positive.
Negative reactions, for myself and others I know, are generally from older wide peepo who don’t actually know what “free Palestine” means or anything about it, but just know that those “woke SJW college students” are protesting over it so they just reflexively lash out without even knowing what they’re lashing out about.
Would such a gathering be possible in Putin's Russia
idk maybe, maybe not. Russia is a capitalist oligarchy like the US. And the US has been cracking down on protests under the context of “muh private property” for weeks now.
or China under the CCP rule?
Yes, absolutely. This notion that they don’t allow protests in China or Cuba is nuts, there’s probably more protests in China than in the US.
Healthy skepticism is always warranted but to be fair to Petro, he’s about as far from Erdogan as you can be. I’m optimistic that he will follow through.