Massive Cuban Layoffs

[Omicron]

Anyone that has traveled in Cuba has had an opportunity to take one of their outrageously priced tours. The Havana tour is a complete slam of the colonialism imposed on the Cubans by the Americans. The tour guide goes on endlessly for hours about the terrible Americans, to the extent that I had to somewhat mitigate the info for my impressionable son. I also did not want him to believe that colonialism was all bad.

I think it will take a generation before Cubans believe that North Americans are okay ... and until then we will represent nothing more than the buckets of dollars.

Sounds like they or someone was confusing the Spanish period of colonialism, using slaves on sugar plantations, with the imperial stage that happened after America got control of the place after the Spanish American war.

They were both bad but for very different reasons. The Spanish period was truly horrible. The American period was mostly just stupid, and American writers like Mark Twain used to slam it every chance he got (and like media controlled by big-money today, eventually magazines and newspapers started doing something which at one time would have been inconceivable, given how highly regarded he was, which was block publication of stories and editorials by Mark Twain when they figured he was pushing it too far with his statements of opinion about America's establishment class as imperialists).

 

[Ron in Regina]

Sounds like they or someone was confusing the Spanish period of colonialism, using slaves on sugar plantations, with the imperial stage that happened after America got control of the place after the Spanish American war.

Nope. No confusion there. Pretty clear about what was being described, and the
terms it was described in. 9/11 was discussed, and compaired to what the Tour
Guide claimed was their four equivilant's of their 9/11's...with the American
Government as the antagonists.

Again, a clear distinction was made between the American Government and the
American People. The issue wasn't/isn't with the American People.

The American Embassy didn't have anything to do with the Spanish. Neither did
the Dupont's or the Hershey's, etc....let alone several decades of American
policy with respect to Cuba, the attempts on Castro's life, etc...

 

[Omicron]

Nope. No confusion there. Pretty clear about what was being described, and the
terms it was described in. 9/11 was discussed, and compaired to what the Tour
Guide claimed was their four equivilant's of their 9/11's...with the American
Government as the antagonists.

Again, a clear distinction was made between the American Government and the
American People. The issue wasn't/isn't with the American People.

The American Embassy didn't have anything to do with the Spanish. Neither did
the Dupont's or the Hershey's, etc....let alone several decades of American
policy with respect to Cuba, the attempts on Castro's life, etc...

And they called that "Colonialism"?

In history, they'll call the Cuban "colonial" period that time when the Spanish were in charge.

 

[Ariadne]

Nope. No confusion there. Pretty clear about what was being described, and the
terms it was described in. 9/11 was discussed, and compaired to what the Tour
Guide claimed was their four equivilant's of their 9/11's...with the American
Government as the antagonists.

Again, a clear distinction was made between the American Government and the
American People. The issue wasn't/isn't with the American People.

The American Embassy didn't have anything to do with the Spanish. Neither did
the Dupont's or the Hershey's, etc....let alone several decades of American
policy with respect to Cuba, the attempts on Castro's life, etc...

It does sound like the same tour with the same tour guide ... there's a lot of paranoia about the US gov't, but there was also talk about the Americans that came to Cuba and ran the show. I found there to be an awful lot of anti-American propaganda. Personally, I would never return to Cuba ... two weeks was enough ... not to mention being trapped in a hurricane for a few days. It's the people, culture, and economy that will keep me away.

 

[Ron in Regina]

And they called that "Colonialism"?

In history, they'll call the Cuban "colonial" period that time when the Spanish were in charge.

Whatever Man. Just sharing first hand experiences. That's all. The Cuban's
alive right now didn't live through Spanish Colonialism first hand in their
lifetimes. Cubans alive, right now, have shared their fresh experiences
with their children who're now adults.

Those are the ones that Ariadne is describing (I believe) in post #59.
What happens in the future when 'right now' is thought of as history,
I'm not even going to speculate about, as I don't think that is what
was being described.

 

[Ariadne]

Sounds like they or someone was confusing the Spanish period of colonialism, using slaves on sugar plantations, with the imperial stage that happened after America got control of the place after the Spanish American war.

They were both bad but for very different reasons. The Spanish period was truly horrible. The American period was mostly just stupid, and American writers like Mark Twain used to slam it every chance he got (and like media controlled by big-money today, eventually magazines and newspapers started doing something which at one time would have been inconceivable, given how highly regarded he was, which was block publication of stories and editorials by Mark Twain when they figured he was pushing it too far with his statements of opinion about America's establishment class as imperialists).

In my understanding, the Cubans also associated Americans with oppression, and propaganda was presented as truth ... a Cuban truth used to control the population. The billboards reminded me of Russia in 1979.

 

[Ron in Regina]

It does sound like the same tour with the same tour guide ... there's a lot of paranoia about the US gov't, but there was also talk about the Americans that came to Cuba and ran the show. I found there to be an awful lot of anti-American propaganda. Personally, I would never return to Cuba ... two weeks was enough ... not to mention being trapped in a hurricane for a few days. It's the people, culture, and economy that will keep me away.

I would like to go back there some day, to see how things have changed and
evolved in the post-Castro era that will unfold. I was there about a month before
Fidel stepped aside for Raul....& Raul is no spring chicken.

For me it was an eye opening, but very positive experience. I enjoyed the people,
the music, the ethic in those I interacted with, the resourcefulness with respect to
everything from their art to their automobiles.

There was a storm the night I arrived, but I left Saskatchewan on New Years Eve,
so I slept on top of the sheets with the wind howling in my room my first night there.
The Cubans wore heavy jackets the first couple days I was there (mid-70's F), but
that was quite comfortable for someone who'd left -35c before arriving.....

Most of the Folks I associated with where more than bright enough to distinguish
between reality & propaganda....just like most people here on this Forum. Some
(& I think this is a universal trait like that whole Left-Right B.S. on this Forum) ate
up the propaganda, but by no means all or even most. They can all speak it, but
believing it & speaking it aren't the same thing.

Yeah, it does sound like we might have had the same Havana Tour Guide, or at
least one cut from the same mental mold.

 

[Omicron]

Whatever Man. Just sharing first hand experiences. That's all. The Cuban's
alive right now didn't live through Spanish Colonialism first hand in their
lifetimes. Cubans alive, right now, have shared their fresh experiences
with their children who're now adults.

Those are the ones that Ariadne is describing (I believe) in post #59.
What happens in the future when 'right now' is thought of as history,
I'm not even going to speculate about, as I don't think that is what
was being described.

I'm not disbelieving or disputing... I'm just thinking it's funny that they, as communists, would call it a colonial period, when normally communists are all about "imperialism"... to the extent that even non-Marxist historians will not call the American period of Cuba "colonial"; they'll call it Cuba's "American empirical" age.

But... Cubans never were "Leninists", nor "Maoists", so I dunno... maybe in there mind American empiricism was indistinguishable from colonialism, which is just interesting... that's all.

 

[Ariadne]

These billboards were everywhere.

 

[Ariadne]

I'm not disbelieving or disputing... I'm just thinking it's funny that they, as communists, would call it a colonial period, when normally communists are all about "imperialism"... to the extent that even non-Marxist historians will not call the American period of Cuba "colonial"; they'll call it Cuba's "American empirical" age.

But... Cubans never were "Leninists", nor "Maoists", so I dunno... maybe in there mind American empiricism was indistinguishable from colonialism, which is just interesting... that's all.

The way I remember, they talked endlessly about colonialism. It was very apparent to me that Cubans learned a different history than the rest of the world.

 

[Ron in Regina]

The way I remember, they talked endlessly about colonialism. It was very apparent to me that Cubans learned a different history than the rest of the world.

It was definitely a different perspective on history. For a comparison,
discuss the war of 1812 with an American & a Canadian. Same war,
but two very different versions for the most part from most folks....

I assume that can be found between any two nations on opposite sides
of a conflict, and thus the confusing revisions of events in the whole
Israel/Palestine goat-rodeo. The truth usually lies somewhere in
the middle.

If the "rest of the world" is North America, then yes....the Cuban version
of history is very different. North America's version might be very different
than somewhere else outside of the conflict or ideologies of either side of
the Cuban/American conflict.

 

[Omicron]

These billboards were everywhere.

Oh! You meant Che posters! Gotcha! Yes, of course, those are all over Cuba. You had me scratching my head; duh. I'm one of those guys who's blind to advertising.

We're a bit more discreet with historical icons... we print them on currency.

Speaking of different interpretations of the same issue from different sides...

In Cuba, Che's a national hero, the true heart behind the revolution. Castro had the brains, but Che had the heart. Without Che, there would have been no revolution, no matter how smart Fidel was.

But to Americans and western Europeans, he's hip and trendy t-shirt and poster art. There's probably a brand of beer or a line of sneakers named after him, with that face as the trademark.

And now guess who's got conservative Brits and half the blue-hair of the Commonwealth tied in a knot?

China, with the launch of their Lady Di line of lingerie, featuring statuesque female models wearing sizzling lingerie, with Lady Di's face photoshoped onto the bodies.

 

[Ariadne]

I mean billboards with propaganda ... I just posted the obvious first. They are everywhere. Here are a few more

 

[Omicron]

I mean billboards with propaganda ... I just posted the obvious first. They are everywhere. Here are a few more

Okay, yeah... that kind of stuff. To me, the only thing notable about it was that it's stuck in a style reminiscent of an older time... sort of like how their girlie shows are what you'd have seen in Vegas in the 50's.

You'll see a lot of stuff similar to that style if you go to the 'stanis (those dickey little republics south of Russia that got cut loose after dissolution of the Soviet Union). They'll tend to be propagating whoever's the leader-of-the-day. You'll also see a lot of it in some African nations.

Art Historians would probably say it describes a genealogy of style-influences.

Stuff like that doesn't affect me. All issues of period-style aside, I can't see any significant difference between that and a modern Coca Cola ad telling me to buy their brand of fizzy sugar-water, and I bet if you were to talk to Cubans, you'd find their attitude about billboards like that would cover a spectrum similar to the responses you'd get from asking people in north America to comment on a Coca Cola ad.

Anyway, another poster noted how if you get off the tourist track and talk to ordinary Cubans, it's interesting how well educated they are, and how well-aware they are of what life in America and the rest of the world is like (they can pick up TV and radio from Miami just as easy as anyone), and how amazingly blase they are about the differences in material standard of living. (For example, on one occasion in a restaurant, a fellow traveler was gloating about how she was going to buy a new car, and the server piped in, "Why? Did your old one wear out?" She didn't want to give him a tip after that one.)

The two things they have over the rest of the Caribbean and Central America are Education and Health care, so maybe they could reorganize to turn themselves into a Spanish speaking center for education and medicine.

They're already adept at holding their costs and expenses down to central American levels, so with the right kind of leadership they could become the cultural center of central America... the place to go to get a higher education in Spanish; the place to go to get trained as a doctor; the place to go to *get* medical treatment at central American prices, etc.

Of course, what would bring that crashing down would be if they let a few guys take over and turn it back into a classic central American Batista-style regime, at which point they'd just become another struggling central American economy with a few rich people, so...

Hmm... if they're going to decide that Marxism-Castroism is unsustainable in a world sweetened with US government subsidized high fructose corn syrup when the only thing you have to trade is naturally grown sugar, then maybe they should talk to Wal-Mart, which has taken a major shift towards selling organic foods, in order to offer a line of organically-grown sugar; Wal-Mart is big enough to take an entire nation's production of organic sugar and spread it around, although Wal-Mart plays hardball fringing on dirty when it comes to negotiating price, so maybe Costco... Costco treats employees better than Wal-Mart, so they'd be a more natural fit.

And in order to maintain their social infrastructure, they should talk to Sweden to get advice on how to maintain a high degree of socialization under democracy, in order to hold their regional position in Education and Health Care.

I already know what the biggest fly in the ointment would be: All those Cuban ex-pat sugar-plantation owners wanting their land back.

If that happens, Cuba goes back to being the miserable Caribbean/central-American nation it used to be, but that's a problem they're going to have to figure out for themselves, because it's *not* something the US can have an opinion about, given how upon occupation of Japan at the end of WW-II, the first thing the US did was bust up the ancient feudal landholdings of the remnants of the Samaria class and redistribute it among the Japanese people, which was *key* to enabling reconstruction of Japan into a modern, progressive industrial democracy.

 

[taxslave]

Canadian governments take note.

 

[ironsides]

Si, los socialistas tomen nota.

 

[Ariadne]

Okay, yeah... that kind of stuff. To me, the only thing notable about it was that it's stuck in a style reminiscent of an older time... sort of like how their girlie shows are what you'd have seen in Vegas in the 50's.

You'll see a lot of stuff similar to that style if you go to the 'stanis (those dickey little republics south of Russia that got cut loose after dissolution of the Soviet Union). They'll tend to be propagating whoever's the leader-of-the-day. You'll also see a lot of it in some African nations.

Art Historians would probably say it describes a genealogy of style-influences.

Stuff like that doesn't affect me. All issues of period-style aside, I can't see any significant difference between that and a modern Coca Cola ad telling me to buy their brand of fizzy sugar-water, and I bet if you were to talk to Cubans, you'd find their attitude about billboards like that would cover a spectrum similar to the responses you'd get from asking people in north America to comment on a Coca Cola ad.

Anyway, another poster noted how if you get off the tourist track and talk to ordinary Cubans, it's interesting how well educated they are, and how well-aware they are of what life in America and the rest of the world is like (they can pick up TV and radio from Miami just as easy as anyone), and how amazingly blase they are about the differences in material standard of living. (For example, on one occasion in a restaurant, a fellow traveler was gloating about how she was going to buy a new car, and the server piped in, "Why? Did your old one wear out?" She didn't want to give him a tip after that one.)

The two things they have over the rest of the Caribbean and Central America are Education and Health care, so maybe they could reorganize to turn themselves into a Spanish speaking center for education and medicine.

They're already adept at holding their costs and expenses down to central American levels, so with the right kind of leadership they could become the cultural center of central America... the place to go to get a higher education in Spanish; the place to go to get trained as a doctor; the place to go to *get* medical treatment at central American prices, etc.

Of course, what would bring that crashing down would be if they let a few guys take over and turn it back into a classic central American Batista-style regime, at which point they'd just become another struggling central American economy with a few rich people, so...

Hmm... if they're going to decide that Marxism-Castroism is unsustainable in a world sweetened with US government subsidized high fructose corn syrup when the only thing you have to trade is naturally grown sugar, then maybe they should talk to Wal-Mart, which has taken a major shift towards selling organic foods, in order to offer a line of organically-grown sugar; Wal-Mart is big enough to take an entire nation's production of organic sugar and spread it around, although Wal-Mart plays hardball fringing on dirty when it comes to negotiating price, so maybe Costco... Costco treats employees better than Wal-Mart, so they'd be a more natural fit.

And in order to maintain their social infrastructure, they should talk to Sweden to get advice on how to maintain a high degree of socialization under democracy, in order to hold their regional position in Education and Health Care.

I already know what the biggest fly in the ointment would be: All those Cuban ex-pat sugar-plantation owners wanting their land back.

If that happens, Cuba goes back to being the miserable Caribbean/central-American nation it used to be, but that's a problem they're going to have to figure out for themselves, because it's *not* something the US can have an opinion about, given how upon occupation of Japan at the end of WW-II, the first thing the US did was bust up the ancient feudal landholdings of the remnants of the Samaria class and redistribute it among the Japanese people, which was *key* to enabling reconstruction of Japan into a modern, progressive industrial democracy.

You seem to have a lot of ideas to implement in Cuba ... have you considered going down there and starting a company to help the new independents develop their businesses? I'm pretty sure that in spite of their highly educated population, they'll need direction and mentoring.

 

[EagleSmack]

You seem to have a lot of ideas to implement in Cuba ... have you considered going down there and starting a company to help the new independents develop their businesses? I'm pretty sure that in spite of their highly educated population, they'll need direction and mentoring.

Maybe he can open up a Blimp Factory down there.

 

[Said1]

500k, wouldn't that be like all of them? Perhaps Castro really was a capitalist pig at heart......liberalizing markets the hard way through force, tsk, tsk. This isn't the worst thing, they'll have to allow for private bank loans, exports etc, etc. With some damn fine legislation in place they might bounce back.....or not..... At least they'll be able to get newer vehicles, lol. :lol:

they should have adopted gradualist policies decades ago, like China.

 

[Omicron]

You seem to have a lot of ideas to implement in Cuba ... have you considered going down there and starting a company to help the new independents develop their businesses? I'm pretty sure that in spite of their highly educated population, they'll need direction and mentoring.

Me thinks you're being a tad tongue-in-cheek but...

They're still in better shape than places like the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and most of the central American countries, none of which "capitalism" has been doing any big favor for lately, which means if someone wants to help Caribbean people with business expertise, those places would be where to go, but just *try* to cut through the reigns their stogy land-owning class has on their agriculturally-based economies.

Fundamentally, their problem is that their number one commodity, sugar, can't compete on a global market against high fructose corn syrup when the corn is grown super-cheep with US government subsidies.

Corn syrup always was cheep to make, but it's mostly glucose, which is sweet, but not sweet with that *zing* that fructose has. Fructose is what gives honey it's bite. The fructose monomer of sucrose, which is a disaccharide of fructose and glucose, is what gives table-sugar its bite.

But pure glucose is kinda bland on the sweetness scale, so corn syrup never got traction until an Illinois chemist (some time in the 70's... '72 I *think*) figured out a way to make corn syrup high in fructose.

That made it possible for corn syrup to compete with cane and beet sugar on the sweetness scale, so it was 50/50 in the marketplace, but then the US started subsidizing corn production, *not* to make cheep corn syrup, but to make cheep beef (the American Cattleman's Association is one of the most idiotically powerful lobbies conceivable to the mind of man; they can make the NRA look like a bunch of lilies if you get their dander up).

So, the super-cheep corn syrup was vicarious, but it had a huge effect on two things:

1) It set off the current round of obesity in north America. The reason is because it became cheep for junk-food manufacturers to sweeten *everything*, and the human gut has a funny reaction to high doses of sugar.

Specifically, about 1.5 hours after eating a big glop of sugar, the stomach has a peroxide reaction that makes it feel artificially hungry, such that even a well fed person will feel a craving for something.

That corresponds to the mid-morning coffee-break, so people would rush to the vending machines or doughnut shops to kill that hunger-pang with whatever they could find, and it tended to be more of something sweet.

This would go round and round all day, every day, and people got fat.

The reason the Atkins diet can cut weight even though it's loaded with fat is because it isn't sweet, such that people simply eat less, and what it means is that you don't have to cut out all carbohydrates, you just need to cut out the sugar. If you do that, you can have your bread and pastas, and you won't gorge yourself like you will if your diet is full of sugar to trigger a fake sense of hunger.

2) It smacked economies dependent on naturally grown sugar exports, which means not just Cuba, but most of the Caribbean, and like the rest of the Caribbean, Cuba will fall back on tourism as one option, but it's still not going to be enough.

Now, as long as a nation can feed itself - which Cuba can - theoretically they don't need to produce anything else as long as they're happy living like peasants, where ownership of a thread and a needle is a luxury, but as soon as they want goodies like cars and ipods they *have* to produce *something* over and above food either by digging resources to manufacture, or by producing something to trade to places that do manufacture, and the only thing Cubans know is sugar cane (and cigars).

So... options are: Shift to pesticide-free sugar-cane to tap into a market for organic sugar (>face-in-palm< ... I just had a thought ... what do you want to bet there are people who would buy "organic cigars" for a premium if told it would reduce their risk of cancer), or...

... or...

Hmm... well, lots of things. They're in a climactic zone where they could grow just about anything in abundance if they put their minds to it, but it's funny how, just like their propaganda is of a style that went out of fashion in the Soviet Union back in the 60's, and just like how their girlie show's are like Vegas in the 50's...

After they kicked out the plantation owners and distributed about half the land to peasants to grow family crops... they kept the rest going as sugar plantations (only now with the state as the boss, in a sort of reverse-collectivization mode, where the land had already been consolidated into massive estates, so they divested some to the peasants, whereas under Stalin, land that was distributed between families was forced to be consolidated, but unlike the Soviets, the Cuban state actually managed the smaller sugar plantations according to seasonal cycles).

Which means, they're so old-fashioned - well educated, but culturally old fashioned - I wonder if they could be talked into growing something else.

Hmm... actually... come to think of it...

They were happy enough with what they've got, except for one thing... they needed oil, which they'd been getting from Russia in exchange for sugar, but now Europeans are out-bidding Cuba for Russian oil, plus the rest of the world is finding it cheaper to sweeten itself with high fructose corn syrup, so they can't trade their sugar for oil like they used to, so Cubans with their great education should just short-circuit it all by converting their plantations into bio-fuel.

Anyway, you ask why I don't go there to provide business consulting?

Well, aside from the fact that I think they're educated enough to solve things themselves, there's two things:

1) As a nominally communist state, they already know more about how to be capitalists if they want than do most people in the west.

As communist youth, they're taught why capitalism is "evil", which involves teaching them details of how capitalism works (things like the dilemma of how it's in the interests of one manufacture to pay his workers as little as possible while his competitors should pay workers as much as possible so there will be people with money to buy the first manufacturer's goods) which means if they were to choose to operate in a capitalistic mode, they've already got most of the basic, albeit cynical, MBA training that people in the west pay tens of thousands of dollars per year to learn at a business college...

... Which means, if they were to choose to operate in a capitalistic mode, they already know all about how to do it... that's how communist Chinese suddenly appeared to be so knowledgeable... so I don't think they need any help that way...

But there's a second thing.

All hurricanes aside, I wouldn't live there for the same reason I would not live in Israel, which is that they have some unresolved land disputes.

Israel took land from Palestinians without paying them for it, and Castro took land from sugar-plantation owners without paying for it, and just like how there's Palestinians who, generations later, are bitter about it, so also is Miami full of former-plantation-owning Cuban ex-pats who are bitter as hell about having lost their land.

Ultimately, the solution is going to be to either surrender the land back, or do what Canada has been slowly-and-systematically doing with native land claims, and that's pay them off. Israel with all its Jewish wealth needs to systematically start paying off every Palestinian with a land claim, and Cuba is going to have to either pay off the former plantation owners, or let them back in if they promise to be good this time.

I mean, yeah, Castro nationalized things like the telephone network, but he payed for it, giving AT&T what AT&T was saying in its books the network was worth, but Castro never paid the plantation owners.

So, I dunno... Cuba doesn't really have the money to compensate the descendants of the plantation owners, but maybe they could be allowed to come back and take their place again if they were to do something like go through a Swedish school of business management, although somehow I doubt their hot-headed Latin nature could handle that, plus maybe neither could Cuban workers, because the reason Sweden works is because although owners and managers learned to behave more like facilitators than like bosses, it was balanced by the fact that Swedish are hard workers, so they naturally make good employees who don't need to be tyrannized into being productive, so I dunno...

In any case, given that they were trading sugar for oil, and given that the problem is they can't sell their sugar to buy oil, they should be educated enough already to see how to convert that sugar or an equivalent crop into bio-fuel, and that should fix that, so I don't see what I could offer...

Plus I hate hurricanes, and I don't like living in territories tormented with unresolved land disputes.

Land disputes are the worst. They *never* go away (just ask any Israelite how they could hang on for two thousand years), and the only solution I've seen is to somewhere, somehow, compensate the former owners, and *even then*, although proper compensation generally settles the dispute, previous owners will grouse about it not having been their decision to sell.