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The State Department released a report on the ties between radical leftism and Cuba
It seems to consist of already public information, well documented in books like Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough. An excellent and humorous review can be found here.
Cuba doesn't seem to be such a big deal nowadays. Most of the documented influence ops are from decades ago, where they assisted semi serious militant groups like the Black Panthers and Weatherman. They do cooperate with aforementioned leftist front orgs like the Natoinal Lawyers Guild, but it's not exactly a secret, they aren't even trying to hide it. And there isn't evidence that these groups would wither and die without Havana's support. It seems surprisingly easy to convince young Americans that their country needs to be burned to the roots.
Anyways, Cuba is definitely getting invaded within the next year or so.
There was a time and place where Communists genuinely believed that central planning and the socialist economy were genuinely superior to the capitalist mode of production, and their victory would come about through increased productivity and a greater standard of living. That did not come to pass, and nowadays the only people who flog that are ivory-tower intellectuals that retreat into decades old data and tortured misinterpretation while ignoring the mountainous piles of lived, subjective experience.
Cuba was always poor, relatively speaking. Communism has made it even poorer. Today's communists don't even try and sell you on the idea of a centrally planned economy anymore, instead degenerating into standard Maoist and third-worldist fare on how American is the originator of all imperialist evil. Even their fellow communists in China have criticized them for their lack of reforms. Defenders of Cuba now mostly do it out of habit, and not out of any genuine belief in a imminent revolution by materialist praxis.
Most of my knowledge of pre-revolutionary Cuba is various forms of 'wah they took our casinos' punditry. How affluent was it relative to Caribbean norms? I'm assuming it didn't have the oil riches that help the richest states in the nation, but I also assume it wasn't Haiti.
Seems that pre revolution it had 1/3 of USA gdp per capita. That is quite nice starting point and Cuba was destined to be rich. It had all the potential of Mexico without any of the problems.
How did Cuba have the potential of Mexico? The latter has had a large amount of industrialization and drug money. Did Cuba have something ability to more than a tourist economy or basically Florida? I also would assume some of their main cash crops that kept them at 1/3 US income pre-Revolution would be less true going forward.
They would have always struggled with high fructose corn syrup undercutting sugar and the globalized economy undercutting everything else, but Cuba was the jewel of the Spanish Empire and their primary administrative center in the New World for centuries. That, combined with its close relationship with the US upon independence, should have set it up for success in the 20th Century. Modern Cuba (both pre and post revolution) had A LOT of European and American infrastructure and investment but pissed it all away.
I could easily imagine Cuba becoming one of those wealthy tax shelter/tourism islands, but large enough to have something of a real economy as well, if only a handful of things had gone differently.
HFCS didn't undercut cane sugar at world market prices until Chinese sugar demand picked up in the 21st century. HFCS replaced cane sugar in the US because massive sugar tariffs and subsidised corn created an artificial market. If that policy had involved crippling tariffs on the main export of a client state with a powerful lobby, it is not clear that the US would have done it.
If you remember the period when bringing back allegedly better-tasting Coca-Cola from Mexico was a thing, the reason for the difference was that Mexican coke used cane sugar and American coke used HFCS. In both cases, the Coca-Cola company unsurprisingly used the cheapest sweetener available.
One does not ‘bring back’ mexican coke, one pays a price premium for it in any store. It doesn’t make enough of a difference to really be worth it, but for those who would like to, you can simply pay more from normal mainstream retailers.
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So you're telling me that in an alternate timeline with capitalist Cuba, all coke would taste like Mexican Coke? Yet another reason to hate communism.
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