GreNME
Philosopher
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2007
- Messages
- 8,276
And how does the Soviet system translate to the Cuban system? You seem to be implying some level of inevitability-- and there was, but for a reason you seem to be avoiding or ignoring-- of the Soviet dominance of influence over the Cuban economic governance. You bring your narrative right up to it, but then avoid addressing how the embargo and subsequent economic sanctions against Cuba by the United States gave Cuba no other choice but to rely more heavily on Soviet influence.
There's by no means some simple equation of events that made the situation clean and clear-cut-- this is the mistake that those who are trying to demonize the United States often make when addressing the subject-- but to ignore the fact that pretty much all of the US policy toward Cuba was geared toward forcing it to fail under its own weight sells the US role in this Cold War 'battleground' far too short from a historical perspective. The long and short of it, though, is that Cuba's economy isn't failing because of some as-yet-undefined inherent nature of communism. Cuba could have chosen any number of economic models and still be in a similar or the same predicament. Cuba's failure was in setting itself up as an immediate and hostile enemy to a huge nation that it relied on immensely for its economic prosperity (the US). From the point where Eisenhower cut diplomatic ties (Castro's fault) to the embargoes that followed under Kennedy to the acceptance of refugees from Cuba into the US if they could manage to touch ground on US soil (under Reagan), Castro repeatedly positioned himself as the enemy of his country's best source of revenue-- and each US administration has known that, which is why the embargoes were continued (which I disagree with, but that's another argument). That is what has led to the failure of Cuba's economy, not some inherent property of communism.
Your mistake is assuming the implied threat matched the real threat. Yes, the USSR had technology but to call the nation advanced is a bit of a stretch-- the majority of people in the nation had little or no access to the technology, quite the opposite of the West. It sure did have the ability to get to space and manufacture nuclear weapons-- but you seem to forget just how intricately those two things are tied together, since the whole purpose for the space program in both the US and USSR was to develop more and more effective ICBMs. Haha, no, the USSR military didn't have quite the power to threaten the West as is commonly attributed to it. The Soviets could no more mount an offensive on the continental US than the US could mount an offensive into Russia; Poland and East Germany were about as far as the Soviet arm could reach without losing grip due to the European resistance to its totalitarian structure (they'd had enough with the Nazis, thankyouverymuch); and had the USSR not had the resources of China to go along with its own resources, Eastern Asian influence would have suffered even more problems than it did in influence. By the late 1970's the USSR was mostly running on fumes, and surely Reagan knew this as he out-spent the USSR into the ground militarily while simultaneously shaking hands and helping to usher Mickey-Dees into Moscow.
Basically, the USSR was more a threat in the couple of decades following WWII and that period of actual threat carried the rhetoric of the implied danger for nearly three decades after. The degree of actual threat is somewhat debatable depending on your sources and how you wish to define "threat," but by the end of the 1960's the USSR had pretty much hit a plateau and by the late 1970's they were already close to breaking bank. If anything, the remnants of the USSR-- who are running many of the former Soviet Bloc states currently-- are now more imminently dangerous than the USSR was as a single entity in the 1980's, if only because they're more fractured, less focused, and yet still nuclear armed (even if those arms are technically Russia's).
