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Comment Re:Cuba could have lifted it ages ago (Score 1) 540

You think the Castro dynasty would give up their communist ideals just because the US lifts the embargo?

Of course not. But you give the right answer immediately.

The truth is that the US has very little to do with Cuba's problems. All the embargo really does to Cuba is give its leaders someone to blame for everything that Cuba is not. A convenient scapegoat for the government.

Exactly. Embargo is a convenient scapegoat - it lets the government to explain away harsh life and crackdowns by an ongoing conflict, "us vs them", "everything for the victory". Remove it, and it makes that much harder for them to maintain that. Long term, it will accelerate the inevitable collapse of the dictatorship and the transition to something saner. If Castros are smart, they will do what Chinese and Vietnamese elites did, and head the transition rather than trying to resist it, so as to reap the maximum benefits. If not, there will be another revolution.

Either way, all that embargo does is delay that process. So it hurts the people of Cuba, not its government.

Comment Re:RT.com? (Score 1) 540

The embargo started before the Cuban missile crisis (in fact, many historians believe that it was the extreme hostility of US towards Cuba after the revolution that pushed the latter towards Soviets). In any case, the notion that if the embargo is lifted, Cuba would rebuild the missile bases, just defies any common sense. It was not their bases to begin with, and if someone else would want to rebuild them today, the embargo makes it easier not harder (because it takes that much less to pay to Cuba for them).

Comment Re:Overall death toll under communism: 100 Million (Score 1) 540

If you seriously consider the Black Book of Communism to be the "best estimates for communist regimes killing people", you're either deluded or retarded. Heck, even if you take the book at its face value, even then it counts "victims of communism" - and by this they mean anyone who has died due to e.g. starvation during a famine, regardless of whether said famine was artificially induced or not (and Soviet Russia had plenty natural ones in the aftermath of its Civil War). For the actual killing estimates, they tend to take the highest figures from the sources that are basically pure guesswork, like Solzhenitsyn's books.

Comment Re:Cuba could have lifted it ages ago (Score 1) 540

The embargo is by US on Cuba. If US truly wanted to lift it, it could just do that. The fact that it is not lifted because "Cuba does something" means that US doesn't really want to lift it, either.

Which is stupid, because Cuba is as communist as it is only because of that embargo. Hell, look at Vietnam: a country that US actually went to wage war in, with numerous civilian casualties, and now? They're rapidly catching up with China on that whole capitalism business, and you can actually talk to a Vietnamese guy on the Internet and ask him what he thinks (and tell him what you think).

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