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Not true. I am a democrat with a small d. I support democracy in both places.
I don't think we have a democracy any more. We have a democratic tradition (one that is damn hard to kill), but it is mostly a phantom these days--a fake democracy, an illusion (even a delusion). We are ruled by global corporate predators and war profiteers, who dictate our health care system (the rich get health care, the poor don't), our voting system (entirely privatized and non-transparent, and filthily corrupt), our military budget (humungous--mostly private contractors), the use of our military (hijacked for corporate resource wars), our war policy (we have nothing to say about it), our prison system (who gets punished and who doesn't-rich vs.poor), our justice system (who gets a proper defense and who doesn't, rich vs. poor), our mode of transportation (which harms everything from how our communities are organized to the planet's entire ecosystem), our entertainment (what movies/TV get made, what books get published--all decided by corporate monopolies), and our access to news/opinion (all rightwing crapola, all the time)--as well as what we eat (corporate frankenfood), and everything we buy and who makes it (mostly crapola manufactured by slave labor in foreign lands). They also dictate "bailouts" for themselves--outright looting of trillions of dollars, placing the debt on our children's children. And, really, that is just a short list of how undemocratic our country has become. And, clearly, we have NO ability to hold our leaders accountable for their actions including horrendous crimes.
Bottom line of democracy: transparent vote counting and holding leaders accountable. Both gone.
Cuba is a tiny country that has been under siege by our government for its entire existence. Its current government is many orders of magnitudes better than the one that the Cuban revolution overthrew, yet we have never acknowledged the brutal injustice and unmitigated corruption of the Batista regime. We have expressed NO sympathy for the dead and the tortured of that regime, nor for the excruciating poverty that it inflicted on the Cuban people. Our brutal embargo on trade with Cuba, lo these forty years, is an act of war. That's what our policy is--using war and aggression to impose hideous dictatorships on others. We've done it in virtually every country in Latin America.
Castro, like Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, was a patriot and champion of the people, and no ideologue. Both would have won free elections, if we had permitted them to occur. In Vietnam, we directly nixed UN sponsored elections, and proceeded to destroy that opportunity to have an ally in the communist world and began preparing for war. As for Cuba, we supported the Batista regime and opposed that quite just revolution from Day One, and pushed the leaders of that revolutionary war further and further into the orbit of the Soviet Union. The Cuban Missile Crisis (Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba) was our own fault. It was the direct result of the US Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba--to overturn the revolution and restore the hideous Batista regime--the year before. The Cuban people--the poor, the workers, the leftists, the liberals, the teachers, the peasant farmers and others who had thrown off the Batista dictators--were scared. We scared them--with invasions and threatened invasion, numerous assassination attempts against their leaders, the embargo, and our funding of the Batista dictators and collusion with them on war plots, in Miami.
So, it is no surprise that the Cuban revolution saw democracy as a danger. If they had created an open society, it would have been riddled with US/Miami mafia spies, war plotters, assassins and fascists. This is the reason--if not the excuse--for the lack of democracy in Cuba. It is how history played out. And the amazing thing is that Cuba did not become North Korea--run by a crazy Stalinist dictator completely out of touch with the country's people, and sick with personal egotism and paranoia. That is NOT a description of Fidel Castro!
I also think that--in judging Cuba (if we had any right to)--we need to understand the distinction between political democracy and economic democracy--for this is the heart and soul of capitalist vs communist government systems. Here, we have political democracy (currently a delusion, but in theory and tradition, anyway ). We supposedly can say anything we like. We supposedly elect our leaders. We are supposedly the "sovereign people of this land"--a sort of collective monarchy--whose will (the "will of the people") rules our government. Our leaders are supposedly our servants. But even if this system--democracy--is fairly clean and straightforward, it does not insure that most people have an adequate income, can feed their families, can get medical care, can travel freely (that takes money), can get their voices heard by government leaders, can get access to capital and credit to start businesses, and can avoid unfair prosecution or conscription into unjust war. If the democracy is working properly, it can address some of these things--as the "will of the majority." But it is still only political democracy, and can be--and has been--corrupted by the rich acting through multinational corporations, so that the "will of the people" can no longer be done. That is what has happened here, to our political democracy. Capitalism--a "dog eat dog" economic system, in the interest of the few--has overruled democracy.
Communist theory comes at these issues from another direction--that the resources of a country--its natural resources and its worker energy, its land, its agriculture (ability to feed the people), its manufacturing capability--should be commonly owned, for the purpose of everyone having a job, an income, education, medical care, pensions, food on the table, etc. It opposes the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few. And it considers political democracy to be too hijackable by the rich, which it certainly is, in practice. Witness this stupid "Punch & Judy" show we see on TV here that they call "free speech." Look at this trillion dollar "bailout" of the rich! Communism considers political democracy to be inherently a delusion. There may be temporary prosperity, at the will of the rich, but "the will of the people" will never be permitted to rule, because of political democracy's association with capitalism.
But, in practice--possibly because of how it arose historically, in two big countries that were entirely lacking in democratic tradition--Russia and China--communist government swiftly felt victim to dictators, and in the case of Russia, an insane, psychotic dictator. That is the hazard of having no political democracy--you develop an elite anyway, and you have no defenses against tyrants.
I don't agree that political democracy is inherently delusional. It is, on the contrary, essential to human well-being and happiness, if it is working properly. I also think that the main thrust of communist ideas and leadership totally failed to understand that the "marketplace" is a human need. It is in our genes! We love variety, color, new products, exposure to other cultures, making things, selling things, traveling, clever industry, marvels; we even love the chaos of the marketplace, its unpredictability. This is a deep need. And truly the communist system's ignoring of this need is what brought the system down--in Soviet Russia, directly, and in Communist China, in their own more indirect way. Russians, and other members of the Soviet Union, were sick unto death of the drabness of communist society. I visited Russia in 1972 and I can tell you all sorts of stories about this. This was the heart of that momentous change--communism was too dull.
Obviously, we--the human race--have to find the governmental system that best combines our political and economic needs. That is, in fact, what we are doing--evolving the organization of human activity. And it is quite stupid to look only at the downsides of some system, and not at its upsides--if those are real--and at WHY people organize things the way they do, and--very important--what works? It is utterly self-defeating to demonize other people for how their system developed and to make war on them because we don't like how they've organized things. A system like Cuba's, that has lasted for 40 years in relative peace, and that is NOT demonic--has gone in the other direction away from Stalinism--is, for one thing, fascinating, and, for another, may actually have features that the rest of us can learn from. (Their medical system is one of them.)
i don't understand why you would object to my comparing the US and Cuba. Can you point me to the hundreds of thousands of people whom Castro has slaughtered in order to steal their oil? WE did that--in a supposed democracy. Castro may be a good, bad or indifferent "dictator"--or, as I think more accurate, "monarch"--but WE, the supposed democrats, committed that terrible atrocity and many more. Or, rather, it was done in our name, without our consent. (Nearly 60% of the American people opposed the war on Iraq--Feb. 2003, all polls.) I WILL compare them. And it most certainly does NOT mean that I am an "apologist for a dictatorial regime." And I think it's fair to say that you, in refusing to compare them, become something of an apologist for the Bush regime. You think that what WE do--or what is done in our name, without our consent--to slaughter and oppress other people, is irrelevant. I think that it is, in truth, highly relevant.
And this more even-minded, even-tempered, objective view of things--which I am advocating--is why most of Latin America's leaders, and most of its people, want the US to end the embargo of Cuba, and have already established trade and diplomatic relations with Cuba. They see something of worth there. They do not see a heinous dictatorship. The notion that Cuba is a heinous dictatorship--which is peculiar to our own country--has been created by the corrupt Miami mafia, the inheritors of Batista--to control US foreign policy in Latin America, in their own greedy interests. It is not a reflection of reality--as most Latin Americans realize. They don't fear Cuba. They fear us. Castro doesn't threaten them. We do. Castro hasn't sought to destroy democracy in Latin America. We have.
We may not have a single dictator (although Cheney came close). But we have a dictatorship nevertheless--the collective dictatorship of our Corporate Rulers. Rule by the few, who dictate everything from our wars and our foreign policy to our health care system and the minimum wage. And we desperately need to throw them off, and restore democracy in the US. It is this dictatorship that concerns me--not Cuba's. Cuba has done us no harm. I cannot say the same for our own leaders.
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