Antiyanquismo

You'll recall that Jeremy Corbyn's eulogy to Fidel Castro talked about his contribution to ending apartheid. Of course, Fidel didn't send his troops to South Africa but rather to Mozambique and Angola. The official story was that these troops were there for advising and training the local troops that faced opposition from nasty "right wing" insurgents. This - filched from Tim Newman's blog - is what those troops were like:

Among the dead were two very young Cuban conscripts, some of the tens of thousands of troops sent by Fidel Castro to prop up the brutal pro-Communist regime in Angola. They were probably well under 20 years old. They hadn’t even finished growing; they still had that gangling, slightly disjointed look of late adolescence. Both looked as if they didn’t yet need to shave every day. They never would, now. Their AK-47’s were still half-slung. They hadn’t even managed to raise them to a firing position before the RPD bullets found them.

A grizzled NCO looked down at them, and an odd look came over his face. He spat to one side, very expressively, and murmured, “Just one more. That’s all I ask. Just one more.”

I looked at him, and my eyebrows rose. He caught my expression, and nodded. “I want the bastard who sends kids like this over here to die.”

The cause of antiyanquismo required not only that Fidel destroy the hopes and futures of the Cuban population but that this population could be used to promote this childish creed everywhere. It's for this reason that a part of me wishes it were the Castro brothers dead in that Angolan field not two blameless young Cuban lads.
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Socialism. A glimpse of its evil.

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From an article about that socialist paradise, Cuba:

Look, part of me gets it. I appreciate good art direction just as much as anyone else, and I see that Cuba looks like a beautifully destroyed photo op. But it’s not your photo op. The old cars are not kitschy; they are not a choice. It’s all they have. The old buildings are not preserved; their balconies are falling and killing people all the time. The very, very young girls prostituting themselves are not doing it because they can’t get enough of old Canadian men, but because it pays more than being a doctor does. Hospitals for regular Cuban citizens are not what Michael Moore showed you in Sicko. (That was a Communist hospital for members of the Party and for tourists, and I, for one, think Moore fell for their North Korea–like propaganda show pretty hard.) There are no janitors in the hospitals because it pays more money to steal janitorial supplies and sell them on the street than it does to actually have a job there. Therefore, the halls and rooms are covered in blood, urine, and feces, and you need to bring your own sheets, blankets, pillows, towels, and mattresses when you are admitted. Doctors have to reuse needles on patients. My mom’s aunt had a stroke and the doctor’s course of treatment was to “put her feet up and let the blood rush back to her head.” That was it.

This is a country where you can earn more money driving tourists from the airport to their hotels than you can as a doctor, where no-one can afford to live on the wages from their 'official' jobs, where the illegal black market dominates lives, and where to stay alive you have to break the law dozens of times a day. It's just like every other socialist place except with good looking people and plenty of sunshine.

I make no apologies for saying socialism is evil. Atheists are wont to point at religions, to describe the murder and destruction done in the name of those religions. But, for sheer murderous impact, for utter brutalism, for pillage and murder, for bringing out the very worse in humanity there are two texts that have, in a blink of an eye besides the Qu'ran and the Bible, visited more death and sorrow on the world - The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.

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Plain packaging is anti-capitalist complains Cuba...

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Odd bedfellows! But I guess that when one of Cuba's top export industries is threatened all those socialist principles get dumped sharpish:

Cuba’s letter to the WTO’s Committee to Technical Barriers on Trade concluded: “Cuba expresses great concern over the UK Parliament’s decision to move ahead with the process of implementation of plain packaging of tobacco products, without waiting for a settlement of the complaint against Australia before the WTO Dispute Settlement Body.”

Still it made me smile.

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