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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Travis_Bickle who wrote (53337)	3/13/2008 1:52:00 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541598

re: "The Miami Cubans are largely the descendants of the pre-revolutionary criminal elite" So is the idea that being relatively wealth and capitalist a crime, or is the idea supposed to be that the older generation of Cubans in and around Miami really where a bunch of criminals in the more conventional sense of the word? (Not just had some criminals in their midst, just about any decent sized group will, but where criminals) I'd definitely object to the first idea. The 2nd, I'd also object to if it didn't come with a lot of evidence. It's basically slander. As for whether Cuba was better under Batista or Castro, that's hard to say, but the point is that it is worse off, because if it has improved economically, it hasn't improved as much as it would have with a free market economy. Their development didn't continue in the way it had in other places (and yes the embargo played a role, but than Cuba was subsidized by the USSR, and could and did trade with the rest of the world besides the US). --- The hideously depressing thing is that Cuba under Battista--Cuba in 1957--was a developed country. Cuba in 1957 had lower infant mortality than France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had doctors and nurses: as many doctors and nurses per capita as the Netherlands, and more than Britain or Finland. Cuba in 1957 had as many vehicles per capita as Uruguay, Italy, or Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had 45 TVs per 1000 people--fifth highest in the world. Cuba today has fewer telephones per capita than it had TVs in 1957. You take a look at the standard Human Development Indicator variables--GDP per capita, infant mortality, education--and you try to throw together an HDI for Cuba in the late 1950s, and you come out in the range of Japan, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Israel. Today? Today the UN puts Cuba's HDI in the range of Lithuania, Trinidad, and Mexico. (And Carmelo Mesa-Lago thinks the UN's calculations are seriously flawed: that Cuba's right HDI peers today are places like China, Tunisia, Iran, and South Africa.) Thus I don't understand lefties who talk about the achievements of the Cuban Revolution: "...to have better health care, housing, education, and general social relations than virtually all other comparably developed countries." Yes, Cuba today has a GDP per capita level roughly that of--is "comparably developed"--Bolivia or Honduras or Zimbabwe, but given where Cuba was in 1957 we ought to be talking about how it is as developed as Italy or Spain. econ161.berkeley.edu Also see delong.typepad.com and volokh.com for recent comments as opposed to a 2003 post That first page links to two papers about the Cuban economy. They might be too long to be interesting to most people, but for those who might be interested I'll link to them here. Renaissance and Decay: A Comparison of of Socio-Economic Indicators in Pre-Castro and Current Day Cuba lanic.utexas.edu The Cuban Economy In an Unending Special Period lanic.utexas.edu They both have a lot of information, unfortunately neither is really up to date. Things are apparently a bit better in Cuba in 2008 than in the time frame where the data of these papers ends (roughly 1988 to 2000, depending on the study and the specific data point), but even the recent improvement isn't enough to invalidate Somin's and DeLong's points.