Unthinking Majority wrote:If you live and work in Cuba and aren't allowed to leave the island by the government to go live and work in another country then yes you are a slave. That's why so many Cubans have had to defect to other countries or flee across the channel to Florida to escape.
Cuba has recently loosened some of these rules, especially since Fidel's death, which is good.
You are allowed to leave the island UM. I do not know where you get that information of yours. In fact, Mexico has a program called Comarca that gives Cubans working visas and permission to stay in Mexico fairly easily.
You do have to pay immigration fees. I have met a lot of Cubans. You do have to go back to Cuba once every two or three years and make a brief visit. Just to keep your status as an active Cuban citizen. You find Cubans in Italy, France, Spain, all over Europe, and you find them in the African continent as doctors and engineers and scientists and professors at local African universities. You find them all over Central America and South America. Also they traveled frequently in the past to the USSR and to China.
The issue was the USA who would not let them get visas recently to go to the USA. It used to be that once you got to Florida or Miami or NYC or something? You would automatically get help from the US government like sponsored housing, food stamps, social services and job support. It made it a great destination for Cubans looking for a middle class life.
Then Jimmy Carter made a public statement about Fidel Castro having his jails full of political prisoners or dissidents and having a lack of human rights in Cuba. Jimmy Carter was actually quite respected by Fidel Castro and Castro thought him a sincere man with sincere Christian beliefs and Christian values that he actually respected. I was surprised when I read all the opinions he held about Jimmy Carter. Lol. And he got pissed off that Carter thought of him as some dictatorial ogre. Lol. So he said hmmm, my jails are full of political dissidents eh? They are full of common criminals.
And the Mariel Boat Cubans happened in 1980. And indeed the US government had to take them in. It was not some upper class Cubans from the 1960s fleeing the appropriation of their property like the Bacardi owning family....or the many elite Cubans who lost their investments and had to flee being taxed or losing their profits in a new state owned economy. It was ordinary criminals and working class Cubans who wanted a middle class life.
The US government loves to spout shit about Cuba that is not true UM.
The Mexican-residing Cubans often want to continue to the USA. But, they have relatives in the USA and many of the relatives find living in the US a very difficult thing. A Mexican immigrant can do a lot better in the US economy than a Cuban who has lived their entire life in Havana. Simply, because the Mexicans are used to a very harsh capitalist system. No one from the government pays your rent in Mexico. There are no food stamp programs or subsidies for paying your electricity bill, water bill, gas food, or basics. The wages often obligate the poorest Mexicans to send their kids to work from an early age and everyone works constantly to make ends meet. It is not the middle-class life from
Good Housekeeping magazine that they have seen on check stands in grocery stores.
Does anyone really consider how Cubans survive with blockades and restricted severely trade with many nations that the US imposes on the rest of the nations in Latin America and other places? According to international law you are not supposed to restrict trade to sovereign nations and their ability to engage in trade relationships. The US does it because it is pissed off that Cuba is independent of the US's government control. As if the entire Caribbean and Latin America is their personal playground and they make the rules and the many nations of the Americas have to obey them. It is imperialistic, oppressive and wrong. Immoral. They did not like Fidel Castro. He was a dictator. They tried to invade. They tried to murder him and topple him. They tried a lot of shit. It all failed.
But they love dictators and nasty politicians in many other nations. They love those assholes as long as they are
their assholes. Which means that they are obedient to what the Washington DC crowd wants to happen in those nations. Just get somebody that agrees with the DC agenda and the USA's intelligence community.
Castro had a battle with Fulgencio Batista. Who was also a dictator but someone the US sugar industries and US investors had a working relationship with and whom they could control from afar. They had no problem with Batista's ties with the American Mafia and Lucky Luciano, etc. No, no problem with that shit. The problem was Fidel Castro being nationalistic and caring about Cuba first, Cuba second, and Cuba third and not being compliant with US demands of controlling the Cuban economy and the Cuban currency and Cuban investments of their prominent millionaires and elites in the Eastern Seaboard of the USA.
Cuba like the Phillipines and Puerto Rico and many other nations the US forces have invaded in the Past had to be compliant and conform to US demands for CONTROL. The US has to control all the nations near the USA and also even far from the USA like the Phillipines. They have to control everyone. And Cuba was a favorite toy island of theirs and they did what they wanted.
Do they consider the conditions lived by the Cuban guajiros or peasants or the issues with a mafioso related president like Fulgencio Batista? They do not give a shit. For them it was all about manipulating the internal politics of Cuba. It was all to benefit the interests of the USA government. No one else. The US government policy for Cuba was based on what the corporations and investor class wanted to go on in Cuba.
All that is never discussed among the people who only buy the US version of events in Cuba.
If they truly cared about the Cuban people, and Cuban freedom and Cuban civil rights and Cuban well being? Everything would have been very different in Cuba. No need for blockades, and no need for assassination attempts of 600 plus times against Fidel Castro.
No need for the Bay of Pigs.
The Cubans who thought the rise of Fidel was about a new Cuban Revolution of a liberal and freedom loving democracy styled after the Kennedy administration and US liberalism and free market and etc etc. They were upset. Upset that their dreams of American model democracy was not forthcoming. They believed US foreign policy was about democracy, freedom and the American way. It never was. It is about lies, invasions, manipulations, killing, blood in the streets, mafia people in control of nations that do not belong to the USA on paper....
It is sickening that in 2023 that fucking old worn out blockade and sanctions still exist against Cuba. Hoping against hope that Cuba crumbles internally enough so that the US can sweep in once more and make it a de facto colony like it has in Puerto Rico all this time. They had a chance to do a good job in Puerto Rico. Make Puerto Rico a prosperous place for Puerto Ricans, stable and with good jobs, and plenty of opportunities and allow the Boricuas to vote freely without manipulating them and or lying to them about honoring their democratic votes. They never did so. They showed the Cubans that the final plot for Cuba might be, empty out the island of Cubans, let the Crypto brothers and crypto currency hotel vultures and other corporations use Cuba as a haven for tax dodging, have drug dealing in the street and crime running rampant and car dependency...then blackouts, and closed hospitals, schools, and never invest in building up the local economy. Just suck it all out. And empty it out of native Puerto Ricans and allow the land to be bought cheaply by the American greed banksters and investors....
Give up your sovereignty, your culture, your history, and your land to the Yankees who run the world. Be grateful for the crumbs that fall off of their tables. After all they bring FREEDOM and JUSTICE to Cuba, to Puerto Rico, to the Philippines, to Guam, to American Samoa, and to everywhere their talons dig in....because the nations filled with these people who are not from the USA and who are not English speaking assimilated Protestant capitalists who are elites......are not HUMAN. That would be that they are equal in their eyes and deserving of respect for their own path chosen in this world. No, can't allow the freedom to choose their own way in the world. Has to be the way of the US government and their rich backers....or blockades, wars, invasions, and destruction. That is the choice. Carrot or the stick diplomacy. Recently it is much more about sticks.
They are just trash.
That is how they think of all these nations of ours. Trash to be manipulated.
You better humanize completely these so called Cuban slaves, or Puerto Rican slaves, or Mexican slaves and fill in the blank slaves you keep calling them.
Because they are not slaves. They want freedom for being people with desires and thoughts and aspirations in life like everyone else.
If it is hard for you to conceive of that? Then I would say you have an issue with class snobbery or racism or some shit in your brain keeping you from seeing them as your equals in everything. And the problem is that you refuse to see the connection to them because for you being poor, or being Latin American or being lower class or being DIFFERENT than you are....is such a huge obstacle that your humanity is in question.
If that is the case? Work on yourself. Not on Cuba and the Cubans. Work on your own blocks in a mind filled with shitty propaganda for decades about a culture or language or society you have no fucking clue about. Do not live in ignorance forever. Do something about it.
Then they wonder why everything backfires on them in human history.
They are seriously ignorant.