Cuba’s President: ‘We Can’t Defend the Revolution when We Hide Our Problems’ (world-outlook.com)

submitted 2 months ago by pete_link@lemmy.ml to c/world@lemmy.world

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/33764798

July 20, 2025

[translation of an article published on July 15, 2025, on the website of the Presidency of the Cuban government.]

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[-] Maeve@kbin.earth 11 points 2 months ago

We have recognized, he said, that the worsening of these social problems is related to the economic crisis, which is also having a social impact due to the intensification of the measures of the blockade. Regarding this reality, he considered that the actions being carried out by the U.S. government have the “tenacious purpose of suffocating us economically, and with this economic suffocation, seeking social unrest, seeking rupture, seeking disunity, and the Revolution’s demise.”

[+] rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works -26 points 2 months ago

“Fidel always defended the idea that the issue wasn’t economic growth; any society, any country, can have economic growth, and in Cuba, economic growth must be linked to social development; otherwise, economic growth makes no sense to us,” he said, which “has a lot to do with how we socially redistribute the wealth we all create.”

no. NO. That's now how anything works. Money first, then redistribution.

I fucking hate commies. It's like they are willfully ignorant of how any of this works.

[-] astutemural@midwest.social 32 points 2 months ago

Nope. Commitment to equality in wealth comes first, or you lose your opportunity to ever do it again. The dragons do not give up their ill-gotten hoards.

[+] rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works -16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

How?

And I think you mean equity. Equality doesn't bring the downtrodden up.

edit: and fuck you too. Just answer the question: How? How does a probably violent revolution produce equity for the masses without a free market? HOW?

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

It doesn't have to be violent. We could just collectively decide to ban capitalist corporations in favor of all businesses being worker owned cooperatives. That would get you pretty far towards a more equal and fair society.

[-] rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works -1 points 2 months ago

Sure, "we" could but then the corporation would be violent. They would get governments to be violent for them. See: The Banana Wars.

Besides, market economies are the best way to lift the most people out of the dirt. Should it be all Amazon and Tesla and GE? I don't think so. I'm one of those shitlibs who thinks there's a balanced way to do this without a command economy, without feudalism and without some dystopian corpo-government marriage like we have now.

Like the USA's Progressive movement at the turn of last century. Shit was NOT good and they did get some things fixed.

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The New Deal ultimately was a band-aid to prevent a violent revolution from taking place, a desperate plea from Roosevelt to the rich to ease off before the top blows (and even then, the rich were pissed off enough by that to try for a coup attempt).

WWII and strong unions caused those changes to stick for a time, but the problem is history has shown us that with capitalism, it's only ever temporary relief. Eventually the rich simply can't take it anymore, and they plot against the common man with renewed vigor. They finally got the ball rolling for their benefit in the 70's, and its been a steady decline since then, as they spread doubt, bust unions, bribe politicians who are all too willing to help for a pitiful amount of money or a free camper. Then when the rock is almost entirely milked, as it is now, and as it was back in the gilded age, instead of letting up, they squeeze harder.

You would prefer another New Deal, another breather for the working class where the rich capitulate and give up a slightly smaller piece of the pie again, and let us live a little better for a few more decades.

Problem is, the world wasn't on the brink of climate collapse in the 1930's. A repeat of that solution, for capitalism to be reigned in, but still relying on infinite growth to survive, simply isn't compatible with a livable biosphere for 10 billion people. If we try another New Deal reset, we'll simply make the lives of the working class in first world countries a little easier while the equator burns, and the poor die en-masse as they migrate and struggle for water.

Authoritarian communism certainly isn't the answer, history has proven that time and time again. But if we're to survive, capitalism must end soon, that much is assured.

Anarchism has shown the most promise in history before being quashed by the authoritarians. The rich and powerful will fight it violently, but if enough people come together and resist through merely withholding our labor, we could implement it mostly peacefully, and once that genie is out of the bottle, I very much doubt most people would prefer to go back to capitalism (I'd highly recommend reading The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin, to get an idea of what that sort of future could look like).

Whether or not markets in some form exist is another matter, and one that would need to be experimented with, but basic essentials to life should be free to anyone. Markets could exist for non-essentials.

[-] rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works -1 points 2 months ago

Whether or not markets in some form exist is another matter, and one that would need to be experimented with, but basic essentials to life should be free to anyone. Markets could exist for non-essentials.

I like your optimism and your points but that end paragraph is where you lose me. Say I grow potatoes. Why should I give you my potatoes? I won't, you must buy them from me. If a state takes my potatoes and gives them to everyone and only compensates me what the state wants to I have been robbed.

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 months ago

No one would take your potatoes. Anything you grow or build by yourself is your own personal property that is yours to do with as you wish.

The grand idea of an Anarchist society is that if we collectively worked toward just meeting everyone's basic needs, it would remove the ability for people to coerce others to work for them under threat of homelessness or starvation otherwise (our current arrangement in society).

This basic work to meet the essential needs of everyone, if mostly automated with the aid of machinery and computers, would realistically mean everyone would collectively only need to pitch in about 3 months of their time per year to maintain a reasonable standard of living, the rest of the year would be free time to do with as they please, to form cooperatives with people on equal footing, to spend time with family, to garden, or to create art.

This collective work could not be enforced with violence, coercion, or a state (as none would exist, ideally), otherwise it would quickly descend into authoritarianism. It would have to be taken up willingly by individual communities, and it is very likely they would do so once the benefits are made clear and they are not under the yolk of capitalism coercing them to worry about themselves above all, and instead begin to think on a collective as well as an individual scale. It would be a stark improvement in quality of life of 95% of the population, something unseen in history except briefly during the Spanish Revolution.

[-] rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works 0 points 2 months ago

That is a pipe dream. What's to keep me from coming over to your yard and taking your potatoes? I am a statist, we must have some form of control to keep assholes like me from taking your shit.

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

There would be no real incentive to take my potatoes, since you already have your needs being met.

But if you decided you wanted to steal my personal property anyway for giggles, especially under threat of violence, I would likely tell the neighbors or community we both live in what you're doing, and you may be shunned from the community.

If you attempt to commit violence against me, I could defend myself, and call upon a community defense group to help, similar to how Rojava does it.

I think you'd be surprised how uncommon that sort of behavior would be under what would effectively be a semi-post scarcity society. A person living in anarchist Catalonia during the revolution described how odd it was after they abolished money, and people had the option of simply taking more than they needed. But he described how quickly people adapted to it, and began only taking what they needed, as they became assured they would be able to get more when they needed it, and didn't want to deprive soneone else.

There's quite a repository of archeological evidence that the style of society I'm describing was once the norm until fairly recently in human history, showing us that our current mode of existence, where dominance hierarchies and artificial scarcity rule, is not a deeply rooted or unchangeable aspect of human nature, but in fact an aberration from the norm.

You can read more on that aspect in the book The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Highly recommend it.

Humans are astonishingly cooperative with eachother in a post scarcity environment, but there have been few opportunities in the modern era for that to come out and flourish, as otherwise capitalism wouldn't be able to perpetuate itself.

[-] broton33@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

Can you elaborate?

this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025

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