None of those things should be illegal. It is really annoying to see how a leader class kills people of hunger and make everything illegal so that now everyone is a criminal for trying to survive.
What I've seen is this: Those who have access to tourists or to the government are rich. Corruption is rampant as I've seen people bribing police right at the airport to have their things sorted out.
The mainstream corruption in society revolves around casa particulars and taxis. Essentially, you have right to rent a room and you have right to ride a taxi but there are strict limits on how much you can do it. So what more entrepreneurial people do? Simply distribute the business ownership to their friends and relatives on paper and keep growing and running their enterprises.
Also, there are two different types of shops and businesses: Locals only shops, locals only restaurants, locals only buses that are at very poor quality and I believe they are free or heavily subsidised and there are better quality versions that have prices similar to the European countries(prices way beyond a person with a salary can afford). So who do you think eats at these expensive restaurants? Yes, tourists - but also people who have access to tourists and people who work for the government.
One day a wandered around my casa particular in Havana and ended up in a place with very nice houses quite close to governmental buildings. I took some photos, enjoyed the place and ate at a restaurant. Then I noticed that the restaurant got very busy with military personel and well dressed people. Those were definitely not tourists, those were people from the nearby governmental buildings having a dinner after work.
Very interesting experience overall. Almost completely positive, full of life lessons about so many things including classes in the society where they are not supposed to exists. I'm also convinced that consumerism is not the only way to a happy life and abundance and excess are not necessarily the answer. The first week was hard, the second week I was completely happy to have only 2 options for beer and 1 option for chocolate.
Meanwhile, in the US, the richest country in the world, people are dying because they can't afford life-saving insulin. [2]
Life expectancy is higher in Cuba than the US! [3]
It's not all black and white. Every country does good things and bad things. You just choose to ignore the bad things one country does and solely focus on them for another one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELAM_(Latin_American_School_of... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/rise-patients... [3] https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/cuba/usa?sc=XE2...
I think you do not have basic notions of economy. How can something be free? If it is free, it is because someone is doing the work (the doctors). If the doctors do not get paid a market price they are being exploited (forced to work for less). So that is where it is paid. You get it for free, yes, at the expense of those people that could have a better life and in the name of the good for everyone else they are converted into a simple tool for the propaganda of their leaders.
I wonder if that is ethical. I mean: forcing others to do a work that you consider good for the rest without giving them a chance for alternatives. Are those people worse than the people that deserve that health care? Should they be a means to a goal? There are two kinds of humans? The ones that are a means (doctors, rich people, etc.) and the ones that get benefits from them (the users or receivers of those things). No, I say no. Noone should be the means of anyone else. If we want something we ask for permission or cooperate. The rest is just propaganda.
There's no two kinds of humans - from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. The doctors will get free healthcare too, if they need it. Trying to put market value on medical care is inhumane and prioritizes an economic system over human life.
I'm not sure why you're talking about rich people here, but because you brought it up - the accumulation of capital is what's truly exploitative.
Value doesn't come from speculative markets, but from the sum of labor put into it. Rich people realized that if they use some of their capital to provide the means of production, they can skim off surplus value from the workers putting in the labor.
In other words, even though they don't do anything productive to create the value, they still take value that others created. That is exploitation.
1. if a doctor spends time to provide free healthcare because a regime says they must, they are exploited. This is one option. 2. if a doctor does it and is paid, someone has to pay that bill for the doctor. If the doctor is free for you, someone else is paying. 3. you can pay yourself.
Those are essentially the three options. None of those are free. In 1. the doctor pays, in 2. a third person pays and in 3. you pay directly. No matter how hard you try, in every option you come up with someone will pay the bill. With time or with money or with any other exchange or will be pointed with a gun to do it.
I agree. Comparing two countries in an unbiased way is very difficult.
>people are dying because they can't afford life-saving insulin
If I develop type 2 diabetes, do you think my life expectancy would be longer in Cuba? Who can I trust for relevant statistics and information?
When I think of "accumulation of capital" in modern society, semiconductor fabs are the ultimate example.
I can't imagine disagreeing that the building of such factories encompasses most of the world via supply chains and most of the exploitation in it.
But I feel like there's an ambiguity and I don't understand what is to be our goal.
Should we not have "accumulations of capital"? That is, should we tear down (and hopefully recycle) all of the incredibly expensive factories?
Or should we have accumulations of capital that are not owned by specific people? What is ownership?
I don't know about the real Mafia, but in fiction, there is the trope of the wealthy mob boss who owns nothing on paper, in order to avoid the law, but relies on relationships to define what he has.
On the other hand, many large companies are presently not majority owned by any human being, but mainly by collective entities like index funds. Is that good enough? Or is that irrelevant to an economic system because some people own more index funds than others?
For many people, cinnamon is a good temporary treatment for type-2 diabetes. But some people have a bad reaction to enough cinnamon, so start light.
Type 1 diabetes is much bigger trouble: you need to inject insulin, because your pancreas is damaged, probably forever.
Probably few Cubans have type-2 diabetes. It is a 1st-world problem; another name is Processed Food disease.
I think that depends on your socioeconomic class and your insurance in the US. I'd say for the median citizen, life expectancy in Cuba with diabetes is probably higher as insulin cost isn't an issue and they do very frequent health check-ins that would be prohibitively expensive for a lot of Americans.
But seeing how you post on HN, chances are you have better healthcare available to you than the median American...
Then again, it seems like Cuba has some pretty cool homegrown diabetes treatments available: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Let-s-open-the-d...
> Who can I trust for relevant statistics and information?
That's a good question and I don't have a good answer. Consensus internationally seems to be that the Cuban healthcare system is legit, but I must admit i haven't dug all that deep.
Corporations are also "collective entities" (of shareholders). The real question in this case is who effectively controls the entity. If the entity represents thousands of people, but is controlled by a few, you still get oligopolies and concentration of power. Something like a co-op is another story, although even there it all depends on how its governance is structured.
In this case, this could either be through a coop (e.g. those factories are directly owned by the workers working in them, decisions are made democratically) or through a worker's state (the factories are owned by the state as a representation of the workers - this is what the USSR tried to do, but failed miserably at).
I think any other scenario has people leeching off the work of the folks actually producing those semiconductors - e.g. exploitation.
Index funds don't do anything to help this - just cause it's a bigger group of strangers stealing the products of the worker's labor doesn't make it any less exploitative.
And nobody's saying we should tear down the factory, we just shouldn't let it be owned by people who have nothing to do with the work being done so they can make money from nothing but the fact they had money already.
A family member with the condition relied on Medicare. That seems like the most likely scenario.
>Consensus internationally seems to be that the Cuban healthcare system is legit, but I must admit i haven't dug all that deep.
Neither have I. But this is interesting. A little over ten years ago, there were reports of "mass deaths" of patients of a mental hospital in Cuba due to the cold.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-trial/cuba-tries-doc...
I guess it's due to my imagination, and the things I read when I was younger, but the more something is understated, the more it's downplayed, and the more details that are left out, the more horrifying it can be. Sometimes I have the impression that other people don't ask questions, either out loud, or in their mind. That they know where to stop, as if there were a nice neat line that separated us from what's beyond the pale.
How can you die of cold in Cuba is one question I think of. Well, it was down to about 38F, and reportedly the glass from the windows and doors was missing. Also the blankets.
Next question would be why was that stuff missing? Perhaps it was taken and sold?
Why would it be sold? Perhaps because it was worth vastly more on the open market than the staff were paid in salaries?
All rhetorical questions in my head, not questions for you particularly.
This story plants in my mind the idea of doctors to whom blankets and pieces of glass are such wealth.
Whenever I read a comment about the Cuban health care system, I will think of it.
Developing type-2 diabetes will be a process that happens over several decades. So which few weeks is it that I need to stop eating sugar? I need to know because I was going to make cookies.
>there is never a good reason to give yourself type-2 diabetes
I've taken medication that progressively leads to type 2 diabetes for about 17 years. You don't think I have a good reason? Or you just never imagined one?
>Probably few Cubans have type-2 diabetes. It is a 1st-world problem; another name is Processed Food disease.
Being able to get medication that causes type 2 diabetes as a side effect might be a first world thing too. I would be concerned about that.
>Type 1 diabetes is much bigger trouble: you need to inject insulin
People inject insulin for type 2 diabetes; I'm not sure what you are referring to.
Robert Lustig has been curing fatty-liver-disease-induced type 2 diabetes in children by eliminating sugar from their diet. Of course kids get better faster than adults.
I would expect someone who knows he has induced type-2 diabetes to already be pretty damn careful about sugar intake...
But: I am not a physician. None of the above is competent medical advice.
That said, Robert Lustig says most physicians are woefully uninformed about liver pathology.
I had a hard time understanding this, but I think I got it.
You are saying that if I work for, say, Xerox, I should own a portion of Xerox, because their capital belongs to me, because I use it to create value.
This is better, you are saying, than me owning an index fund that has a little of every company. Because if I do that, then I am exploiting all the workers in all the other companies.
As a self-contained system of belief, I guess it has a certain logic to it.
But if Xerox goes down the tubes then I don't want to lose my job and all my retirement savings!
I also think I see an inconsistency. If owning part of another company is exploiting their workers, then I should also be concerned that any form of ownership by workers at my company could involve exploitation.
Simply because we do different jobs using different amounts and types of capital. Averaging things out must be exploitation of workers by workers in the same way as owning mutual funds and such.
I believe in the ballpark of 5 to 6 million patients take this kind of medication in the US. If they all eventually got diabetes, it might be up to 15% of cases. However, not everybody lives long enough.