Cuba just relaxed a ban on some 2,000 private sector jobs, opening the economy for more free market activity. This, as the Communist party prepares to bid Adios to Raul Castro, who inherited the country’s leadership from his brother, Fidel. Is the multi-generational U.S. embargo finally paying off? Will the people of Cuba final enjoy the sweet song of liberty?
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33 replies on “Cuba Lifts Ban on 2,000 Private Sector Jobs, as Communist Party Says Adios to Castros”
I enjoyed the film Ford v. Ferrari.
But it left me wondering why Ford got into that Pissing Contest.
Henry Ford literally put into their first cars, into cars that, for some of those customers became the arks that struggled and faltered their way from out of the Dustbowl (which is surprisingly small, just the corners of four states that grew and even blossomed like a seed that takes root in a crack in the sidewalk but died because, there was less there than the farmers realized) to California, where many of them found new and better lives.
Even in those new and better lives, Enzo Ferrari was, for that Ford customer base, no more than the manufacturer of Matchbox Cars that went “vroom vroom” on their own, on a television screen or in the movies or on the radio.
Enzo Ferrari might as well have been Hugh Hefner. He is to me. I scarcely ever see anyone actually driving a Ferrari, outside of Tom Selleck, and he was doubtless scarcely allowed by the studio to drive that Ferrari. I wonder if the setup was like General Lee, a car on the back of a trailer with the boys jumping in saying “yeehaw” then getting out for the next take.
As early as 1957, Toyota, Datsun and Honda were working very hard to catch up with the European and American auto manufacturers, taking the best the Europeans and Americans had to offer and fixing the bugs those manufacturers left in.
Leonard Cohen has lovely description of what the Japanese did:
Thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes/I thought it was there for good, so I never tried
Obviously the narrator is talking about someone he has lost. By 1967, sales for all three of those Japanese auto manufacturers had jumped enough for them to be still behind people firms like Ford, but visibly catching up.
But Ford spent all that money in that Pissing Match with an Asshole Italian manufacturer of matchbox cars.
By 1977 Americans who had bought American cars because, well, just because, all their lives were buying Japanese cars.
Cuba as this generation’s Japan?
We all gotta die of something sometime, I guess.
I enjoyed Scott’s close, but I’ve also been to many countries and some beliefs/cultures clash with American values.
Perhaps it is generations of propaganda, war, regimes, and religious fervor that changed the hearts/minds of people. But it did change them.
Hard wired behaviors tend to be the first ones used even when people are “freed”. Some are strong and have overcome their “upbringing” or experience.
You can’t provide a long-term homeless person with a house and expect they will take care of it and not become homeless again before long.
The reason for their homelessness (mental health, drugs, alcohol, abuse, physical health, etc.) must be addressed and solved or they will simply do/live how they know.
In the case of people like Representative Imam Zohnar from MN, they hate anything not aligned with their religion and will plot for 20, 30, or 50 years (however long it takes) to see the overthrow of the U.S. or any other country.
They act like they are grateful and tell their story of how they escaped the war or genocide to get sympathy and votes. Build their “like” support. It’s okay to lie in that religion if it’s for the end goal of the religion.
Like the far left, they play us like fiddles until they get their power or in place to carry out their real plan.
Of course, there are exceptions to all of these . . . but the majority know how to play to the SJW’s and the conservatives.
They use our laws and our good nature to overthrow us.
All the more reason for immigration control and screening that is very stringent.
In the countries that have never had a working civil service (and instead relied on a spoils system or one so corrupt that only bribes and greasing the skids got anything done) people do not know how society should work. That does take time, and generations, to train. Of course, those getting greased and bribed see no reason why they should stop putting their hand out (unless enough of them get chopped off [ie prison[) that it takes even longer to get a civil society up and running.
It would probably get me lynched in some places, but the British colonial system had some good points, in that they would come in, take over and provide that civil system, teaching the locals how a well run government operates. Then again, if we look at where they were, even 200 years later it seems like some have fallen apart.
Permission to ‘work for and earn a living’ is as immoral and anti-freedom as it gets. Governors ordering private businesses to close should be impeached. IT IS THE BEGINNING OF HAVING PERMISSION TO LIVE!! COMRADE!
Scott … you just succinctly and clearly said what I’ve tried for years, much less succinctly to say.
[The black market means] “The default position for human beings is free markets.”
My auto mechanic has employed 3 Cubans so far and they are the most intelligent, hard working people he has had. The hardest part was learning to trust them because of the language, but once I watched them work, I became very good friends with them. His first hire, Angel, was very good in English and explained to me that in Cuba, there was no such thing as a new part. You had to make due with what you could find. If he needed something new, he got his brother in Panama to send it to him.
Just something for Bill. I was in Gitmo right after the blockade was lifted and the base was locked down. No civilian workers were let thru the gates and there were artillery emplacements under camouflage nets all over the place. F8 Crusaders would take off and fly out to sea, then come back almost supersonic just above the waves, hit the base limit fences, and go vertical, snapping pictures. Of course they’d be more than a mile into Cuban territory before they got vertical, but that was the trick for getting pictures safely without being shot at effectively. Cuba had shut off power and water to the base so they had 3 Liberty ships suppying the base while they built a reactor to do that. It was very scary because you never knew when those jets would be screaming just over your head and blow you hat off!
How sson until Cuba is a freer society than America?
Problem with some Cuban people being “allowed” to run a business…almost no one there has any currency to spend.
I love Scott’s impassioned Roger Ramjet-esque “Truth, Justice, Mom, Apple Pie and the American Way” speeches … In the application to Cuban exiles, the people who FLED Cuba they’re very appropriate. There certainly are right minded, hard working industrious decent honorable people in the world who want what we have in the US but …
One of the biggest mistakes of my generation was the Cold War idea that inside every (______ fill in the blank with whatever adversary you like) is an American crying to get out. It just isn’t so.
I have been places and seen things that were I not viscerally aware the beings I saw were human, they might as well be from another planet as they are that different from us. It is a mistake to project and anthromophosize Americanism on everyone else on Earth. There are a hell of a lot of people that want nothing to do with the things Scott is talking about at the end of this episode.
Americans, especially the good minded decent types like Scott Ott, want to believe that people are the same everywhere and so project onto those others their own ideas, ideals and goals. It just ain’t so.
It’s important to understand that because when you’re dealing with those people you are badly handicapped by your own false assumptions. Which they are quick to pick up on and use against you.
Why am I telling you this? Because that is THE filter. If people truly are as Scott describes them they are potential allies and welcome, as those who fled Cuba are, to come here and add to the sum of our Nation.
It is vital to understand the difference. The Left wants to let the other kind in here and make alliances with those sorts. In doing so the Left is playing with matches in a dynamite factory simply to advance their own power. The lessons of that other kind of people are clearly written on the face of history and the Left knows this. The pursuit of power can therefore be their only motivation.
This was a hard lesson for me, as a midwestern kid raised on a farm outside a small town by about as American a people as you could ever hope to find … From my school teachers to my parents and relatives to my friends and their parents — All were just as Scott describes in his closing remarks. When I went abroad uniformed and otherwise I expected this to be the normal state, I expected to find this either encouraged and developed/developing to one degree or another … Or suppressed by evil men.
The third possibility was the hard lesson. There are people in the world that don’t want what Scott is talking about above. In fact they want to destroy exactly that same thing Scott and the rest of us hold so dear. I’m not talking about tyrants and dictators though they certainly play a role. I’m talking about “normal” for their geography and culture everyday people.
Do not make the grave mistake of thinking everyone is like you and everyone wants what you want. Do not let those people get a foothold in your mind, our culture or our country.
Excellent point! There are many people that despise our culture and want to destroy it.
Thank you, like I said it was a hard lesson to learn.
The dictators and tyrants are not always anomalies that fall from the sky into the populations they dominate. Sometimes they are the arisen from that population and are merely the most dominant, successful examples of it. There certainly may be examples of folks who would like to live like we do and have what we have in those subjugated populations but it’s important to remember that they are not like their fellows and in fact are even rare in some cultures.
Sometimes regime change will work for some circumstances. The majority of the German population were not members of the Nazi Party. Indeed, the Nazi Party intentionally limited its membership to maintain an aloof elitism. If the Nazi Party could have been neutralized Germany would have followed a far more conventional historical path. In that case the dictator arose not from the population but from a small segment that schemed and plotted to seize power and they were successful. This is a valuable historical lesson. Here, regime change would probably have worked. If somehow by magic the top 50 Nazis had been wiped out, the course of history would have changed for the better.
In the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan, regime change is just replacing one tyrant for another and paying the new tyrant to be our friend. The whole concept of “nation building” is flawed when applied to this sort of situation. Bought tyrants do not stay bought.
In populations like exist in Iraq there’s a reason why the most successful government is tyrannical. The tyrant is simply the bloody strongman who rose to the top and that keeps the other bloody strongmen in line. When the despot is deposed it does not create a vacuum that sucks in the concepts of liberty and democracy, it creates an opportunity for other surviving bloody strongmen to rise to greater power and it fragments the state. This makes it much more difficult to deal with the resulting chaos and fragmentation.
Even if you manage to get the guy who’s really controlling Baghdad on your side by hook, crook and bribery, you still have to do the same with a whole bunch of other area “leaders” who have percolated to the top by being more ruthless and cutthroat than their local opposition.
If you want to “free” such a place you cannot just kill Saddam Hussein and stop, you have to go all the way down the line until you’ve killed every strongman and reached that poor guy on the bottom who really does want what Scott was talking about above. Of course as soon as you turn your back someone will kill him and take his place too so …
It’s not just Iraq and Afghanistan. Hezbollah is like this, the Palestinian Authority is like this, all of Greater Arabia and much of South America is like this, there are a lot of places like this. While virtually all of Asia, perhaps excepting the Indian subcontinent, is not necessarily like Iraq it’s also not even close to being like America either — though I can see portions of it moving in that direction and some already there. I.E. Japan and S. Korea. These “not like us” places comprise a significant portion of the Earth’s population.
I do not claim to know the solution to this global issue. I’m not saying that the situation is completely hopeless. I’m only saying that what I do know is that not everyone has an American inside screaming to get out.
I haven’t caught up with the Virtue Signal shows, but I imagine one might address some of the root causes of that.
I read once a fictional example of someone counseling another about her broken relationship, and while fictional it makes sense. The abusive boyfriend was described as seeing everyone as either User or Used. She was later camp, until she started pulling herself together and dealing with some of her own internal issues, at which point she stopped putting up with some of his petty crap. Then, as the counselor described, she moved into the User category and essentially challenged her now former boyfriend. It seems like a lot of people in the “might makes right” societies have to have the frame of mind that “I have to be strong enough to stop you from taking what is mine” even when they wouldn’t take from someone else. Having to be hard and put up a strong front also won’t let you allow anyone else in and find anyone else with similar minds, never forming those bonds of trust that make a “High Trust” society like ours work. When Bill has talked about “following the rules makes you a chump” and the orderlyness of our society keeping people waiting in line instead of cutting or paying taxes instead of saying “the rich don’t pay their share, why should I?” or as now, people (at least talking about) not paying back student loans because they think they’ll be forgiven.. that’s when we fall into that “protect mine, and take yours if I can” attitude I hope we never actually reach.
Immigration should be based on language proficiency, cultural alignment, and lack of a criminal record.
Any other form of immigration policy is a risk, at best.
It’s a good start, but then we have people in political positions who came here as “refugees” and were given all America has to offer and now they do everything they can to destroy it.
If one believes their beliefs are the only “right” ones, they will work to destroy anything that’s not in line with that . . . you know, like the far left “useful idiots”.
Ilhan Omar being a perfect example of what you’re pointing out. Her current net worth is over 2 million dollars, every penny of which she got here in America. Yet she is doing her best to destroy the American system.
It is a mistake to allow these enclaves of refugees to take root. If someone is a genuine refugee then send them and their family out into America as a unit. Don’t start out with large concentrations of foreign refugees in a single area or it leads to trouble.
If a refugee family has to learn to cope with and assimilate to society in Gopher Crotch, Arkansas they become Americans and will reap the benefits of their own character(s). Pressure is applied to them from all sides to adopt Americanism in order to get along with people.
If they form an enclave of people from their nation of origin they just bring that nation of origin and all its troubles and failures with them. They don’t become American, they become a tiny but growing cancer on America that is nearly impossible to excise.
In the case of Ilhan Omar there is now a small but expanding area of Minneapolis, MN which has all the ills and social problems of Somalia but is being fed and propped up by the rest of the U.S. It actually does work exactly like a cancer on the body politic of America.
Yes, while we all have a set of instinctual characteristics that contribute to our understanding of morality (more or less) we also employ a large segment of our culture (principally Judeo-Christian/ Greco-Roman culture in the West, and America in particular). We know the history of every religion and ideology contains elements where interest turns into enthusiasm, then commitment, then zealotry, and worse. We consider ourselves as humans to all be “equal” under the law, while in many cultures that idea never evolved because the core concept was never discovered.
Those anti-Freedom people you describe already invaded the US. And they did not come from foreign lands. Last time I checked, the clintons, pelosi, mitt romney, zuckercuck, bill hates, and the twitter creep, among many others, were all born and raised in the US. The worst enemy is not at the gates, it’s coming from within…
Yes, that was my point.
There was a sad documentary I saw a couple of years ago on the wonderful Cuban system. A doctor making $30 pre month also drove a taxi for some extra income. As Bill has noted, very few people cross the ocean in an attempt to sneak into Cuba. That should tell us something.
… and not all of those who cross the ocean (or desert) to attempt to sneak into America are coming here because they admire our American way of life and want to be part of it. Most now just come for our wealth. It’s like a global treasure map with a big fat “X” on the United States and proportionately smaller “x”s on the rest of the industrialized Western World.
Scott’s ending comment is inspiring. It appears to me, however, the fruits of living in that sixty-plus years of kleptocracy will not disappear in one or two generations.
Bill’s comment on the drive of those first generation refugees is spot-on but, as time went on, the following generations of refugees were less industrious (as a whole). It was not that they were culturally less industrious or innovative than the first wave of Cuban immigrants; just look at the creative inventions used to escape the island (e.g. an old pickup truck lashed to empty steel drums for flotation), a sea crossing of several days across shark-infested waters with a 50-50 chance of survival. BUT… after living several generations in a system where there is no incentive to work hard (because it’s all going to be taken away), where everybody has to participate in the black market to survive, where the only employment that will generate any meaningful income is in the service industry catering to the rich gringos or europeans tourists. The newer generation of Cubans have a word for this form of existance; it is “resolver”, which, loosely translated means to “make do” (i.e. to do whatever you have to do to put food on the table).
This form of existence will grind the drive and industriousness out of any society. I’ve known recent immigrants that have worked in the U.S. for several months only to return to Cuba because life here was ‘too hard’ (i.e. you really have to WORK!)
A cultural mindset like that will not disappear overnight.
Broken links to video and audio as of 8:15am MST.
My dad was a Navy pilot and his career was tracking subs, so I tell everyone that Fidel shaped my future, unbeknownst to Fidel. When we were stationed at Key West, there were many a time that someone braved the 90+ miles of ocean to get freedom. Cuban Americans are some of the hardest working folks I’ve ever known.
Would someone please show this video to AOC and her fellow travelers in The Squawd? Our “new and improved” Democrat Party is doing its damnedest to reverse the USA into tomorrow.
Just great!!!! Cuba is becoming AWAKE and we are becoming WOKE. GOD must have one fantastic sense of humor?
I don’t think I would get too uplifted by the apparent change in Cuba. The United States might just put them back in their place?
I’ve made that approach to Guantanamo, Bill. And yes, it’s a wild ride. MAC flight on a DC-9 flown by a Navy Tomcat pilot. And you can tell that he’s a carrier pilot by the way he flies, too. I don’t normally expect to look out of the window of my plane and look down at fish.
As for the work to have their own piece of “the American Dream”… I long ago decided that the “inalienable rights” described in the Declaration of Independence don’t require a God, and don’t require a government. They are simply the things that most people, if denied the opportunity for them by their government, will try to find ways to get them anyway, and will risk getting killed to do so.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Those are just things that you can rationally expect a perfectly normal, reasonable person to fight you to the death over if you try to take them away from him and his family.
That those rights come from outside / above the government is something a lot on the left have trouble understanding these days, it seems.
I’ve been of the opinion that whatever you want to call that outside power, whether God, Gaia or natural evolution, a person is a person by nature of being a person and that cannot be taken away by your equals. Something higher than you has to be the arbitrator.
“That those rights come from outside/above the government is something a lot on the left have trouble understanding these days, it seems.”
I have given more than one leftist extreme heartburn by pointing out that if rights come from government, then slavery was never a violation of anyone’s rights, as it was the legally codified will of the majority at the time.
Moreover, if rights come from government, protesting various countries’ governments record on “human rights” is utter nonsense… nonsense in the literal sense, without any meaning or reasoning whatsoever. After all, if rights come from government, there are no human rights.
When Hillary Clinton said “the unborn person has no Constitutional rights,” I think she was expressing the opinion that it’s not legally a “baby,” with legal rights, until the doctor signs the birth certificate. “Rights” are a legal fiction, nothing more. They are what more honest people would call privileges, granted by the government and taken away again when they grow tired of you. She probably would have stood pat on that opinion had she not realized that would mean that if someone has a baby without a doctor, and then throws it in a dumpster, the only thing they are guilty of is improper disposal of medical waste. Even leftists might have trouble supporting that.
“…a person is a person by nature of being a person and that cannot be taken away by your equals. Something higher than you has to be the arbitrator.”
“Justice” is a fiction, and always will be unless you get God to personally convene court.
The closest you can get is “These are the rules the majority of us have agreed to live by. If you decline to live by them, you can either accept the punishment of the group or you can live outside the system. You may not get to choose to live outside the system after you have violated its rules, if the violation is egregious enough.”
That’s not “justice,” because it is not dispensed by an omnipotent, omniscient being who can accurately and objectively define what any given defendant “deserves.” That’s only “fairness,” which is an attempt at objectivity by beings who are by nature emotional, and therefore incapable of true objectivity.
One of my many, many objections to leftists is that they have corrupted the English language to the point where when they speak of “fairness,” what they mean is “the result I want.” That’s not fairness, that’s despotism.
Great Points, all – but Scott! Fabulous closing!!
Basically the Cuban people want the opportunity to live what was once called “The American Dream” Work hard, keep the fruits of your labor and make life a little better for your kids.
The major problem with this country is our kids are now so used to having stuff given to them by their parents that they think they don’t have to work for them themselves. GOOD parents teach their kids the importance of hard work and it’s benefits to make them self sufficient. My dad made me earn half the cost of my first bicycle! He’d give me jobs like cleaning up the dog poo in the yard, taking out the garbage, and scraping paint on the house when needed.
Yep, me too. Minus the dog poo.
Well….I had asked him if we could get a dog and he agreed if I took care of it, so that’s my fault!