The blockade also restricts access to long-term credit which means Cuba is often limited to dealing in cash transactions or expensive short-term credit. This makes bilateral trade more costly for the island and significantly stifles their economic freedom.
Not quite as much as the Cuban Government\’s denial to its citizens of any form of economic, or even political, freedom stifles anything but then motes n\’ beams n\’all that.
Economic Greedom? Doesn’t this newly discovered economic hypotheses rather play into the hands of our Left-Wing idealogues?
Tim adds: Ahem, yes…..
No no no Tim. Communist regimes only ever fail, or fail to achieve Utopia, because the rest of the world are mean to them. Surely you know that.
Isn’t it broadly the same group of people who on the one hand condemn the US embargo on Cuba and blame Cuban poverty on the denial of trade with the capitalist west and on the other hand condemn globalisation, preach localism, and blame third world poverty on trade with the capitalist west?
Ian B – But true socialism has never been tried!
I know this, because lefties often say so whenever the horrible, shitty existence of people living under the Soviet Union is mentioned as being one of the downsides of their political ideas when put into practice.
Post-communist Russia isn’t exactly an advert for capitalism, is it? Nor was Tsarist Russia an advert for enlightened monarchy.
Unless you have a massive ideological axe to grind, the logical conclusion is that Russia has always been run by total bastards, that being an ordinary person in Russia has always been awful, and that the nominal affiliations of the bastard in charge are immaterial.
Tim adds: As someone who lived there from 91 to 97, the very brutal capitalism of post-communist Russia is an advertisement for not communism, yes.
Hmm. I’m not sure you’d be saying that if you’d been living on a pension or a government salary at the time, rather than doing deals with Newly Empowered Capitalists.
Tim adds: Actually, I did say it then. FFS, the winter of 90/91 even bloody beetroots were on ration. I’ve actually seen the State food stores.
I did some subbing on a magazine (Commersant English weekly issue) and one piece that I remember clearly had 70% of Russians never having bought a potato. 2% of the entire population kept chickens. This was still a peasant economy in terms of food production.
Russia looks from the outside very much like a country that went from state capitalist to corporate statist overnight. The monolithic state-owned industries were basically handed over lock stock and barrel at deep discounts to the favoured and well-connected. In the meantime some have fallen out of favour (and into jail) and back into favour and round and round several times.
Why do lefties insist on calling the US trade embargo against Cuba a blockade? Ignorance? Or a desperate cry for attention?
It’s the same with Gaza , the Israelis are blockading it according to all the right thinking people, and saying that they are doing no such thing is, of course, a Zionist lie