It’s rare that I agree with Fidel Castro …
That got your attention didn’t it? But it is true. Castro, remarking on the American political scene, the President and those running for the office, said:
"Is it not obvious that the worst of all is the absence in the White House of a robot capable of governing the United States and preventing a war that would end the life of our species?" Castro, 85, wrote in one of the "reflections" he often publishes in Cuba’s state-controlled media.
Under the title "The Best President for the United States," Cuba’s ex-president said that if faced with a choice between Obama, a Republican rival or a robot, "90 percent of voting Americans, especially Hispanics, blacks and the growing number of the impoverished middle class, would vote for the robot."
Obama, Castro said, is "hopelessly immersed in seeking re-election," and "the dreams of (civil rights icon) Martin Luther King are thousands of light years further away than the nearest inhabitable planet."
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
~McQ
Twitter: @McQandO
Fidel Castro – Socialism doesn’t work
We could have told him that 50 years ago:
Fidel Castro told a visiting American journalist that Cuba’s communist economic model doesn’t work, a rare comment on domestic affairs from a man who has conspicuously steered clear of local issues since stepping down four years ago.[...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked if Cuba’s economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: "The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore" Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.
[...]
The state controls well over 90 percent of the economy, paying workers salaries of about $20 a month in return for free health care and education, and nearly free transportation and housing. At least a portion of every citizen’s food needs are sold to them through ration books at heavily subsidized prices.
Of course the "Cuban model" only “worked” while the USSR existed. It was essentially based in heavy subsidies paid Cuba by the USSR for being its main proxy in the Americas. And the USSR’s woes most firmly underlined the problems with a centralized demand economy run by the state. Even so, Cuba continued on along that vein even after their greatest benefactor and financial supporter collapsed like a wet paper box. Now, finally, after pushing Cuba into poverty, Castro admits socialism is a bust.
China, while still totalitarian, recognized the economic problems soon enough to avert a similar disaster by loosening up economically. Cuba and North Korea, though, have continued to use the disastrous economic model and are basket cases (Cuba has instituted some modest economic changes, but not enough to break the dependency on the state the government of Cuba had ingrained on multiple generations of its population).
Of course Castro’s admission comes to late for the people of Venezuela who’ve been roped into a Cuba-style socialist government by strong man Hugo Chavez. Predictably, the Venezuelan economy is in shambles.
You have to wonder how many more ruined economies it will take before the socialists of the world (or wannabes) recognize that their brand of government and economics is a disaster and has probably ruined more lives than any other economic system in history.
~McQ
Anti-Americanism Is Still Dead
Or so claims David Axelrod.
Apparently Fidel Castro didn’t get the memo:
…At the press conference, as well as in the final meetings of the Summit, Obama looked conceited.
It’s an interesting little diatribe from Casto, and most of it is the usual nonsense, but what it easily demonstrates is Axelrod is as clueless as I asserted a couple of days ago.
Castro saw through most of the Obama rhetoric and unlike a vast number of Americans, figured it out:
When the US President said, in answering to Jake [Tapper], that thousands of years had elapsed since 2004 until the present, he was superficial. Should we wait for so many years before his blockade is lifted? He did not invent it, but he embraced it just as much as the previous ten US presidents did.
That’s the Cuban version of “meet the old boss, same as the new boss …”.
And my favorite:
Leaders just pass through; peoples prevail. There would be no need to wait for thousands of years to pass by; only eight years will be enough so that a new US President — who will no doubt be less intelligent, promising and admired in the world than Barack Obama- riding on a better armored car, or on a more modern helicopter, or on a more sophisticated plane, occupies that inglorious position”
Yup – completely charmed and impressed by our new leader, no?
Castro picks up on and states what he saw – conceit and superficiality. My guess is he wasn’t the only Latin American leader who came away with that impression.
Interesting.
~McQ