Santo Culto writes:
But the USSR could live without the West for most of its years. There are no excuses for creativity and wisdom.
Cuba for example has great territory, good natural resources, not to mention they could manage population growth. There are so many things they could do. The only explanation for not doing is that the Communists are too stupid to think of it. It is very psychopathic to think about the well-being ‘of the people’ and scare away the most creative people (specially the problem-solvers) when they take power in a nation.
Zbigniew Brzezinski is right in saying that communism eliminated the creative classes via exile or extermination from the former Soviet Union.
The USSR’s innovations in weaponry were legendary.
I know someone who owned Soviet products, and he told me that they were very well made. He still had an excellent radio that lasted 40 years. They often produced good products that lasted a very long time.
Cuba has made tremendous innovations in agronomy and biotechnology. Cuba has more agronomists per capita than any other nation. They have also made some dramatic innovations or organic farming lately. Cuba is now a world leader in biotech. Also Cuba made dramatic innovations in the mining and manufacture of nickel. I believe they also made some major innovations in the planting, harvest and manufacture of sugar cane. It has the best educated population in Latin America.
Cuban medicine is some of the best in Latin America. In fact it is so good that very rightwing rich people from all over the continent have been flying there for years to have sensitive operations done that they did not trust their own native doctors to do.
Few Cubans were exiled. Some writers and maybe artists and musicians were.
Cuban art, cinema and literature are now very good. Cuba has always had some of the most fantastic musicians on the continent.
Very few dissidents have been killed, and none have been killed since 1970. Even now dissidents are mostly left alone. Last time I checked there were 250 dissident groups on the island. Most are very small.
At the moment, some of the most prominent dissidents are openly funded form abroad and go to the US to give anti-government speeches. They run their own blogs that publish every day and have a large following, mostly off the island.
The most famous one is a young woman with her own blog who gets written up a lot in the media. She is a drama queen. Recently she was carrying on and on about how horrible the system was because it was impossible to get Blu-Ray disks on the island. This is the sort of thing that she bitches about. She gets arrested from time to time, and they typically put her in jail for one or two days and then release her. What a monstrous dictatorship they have in Cuba!
The dissidents are very unpopular in the island and have almost no support. Most people want change but support the present government, especially after recent reforms.
