>
> > Lambasting Cuba for lack of media expression and elections is just butt
> > stupid. Is anybody so moronic as to think that, if Cuba had free
>elections,
> > the US would not buy them. Just plain idiotic.
>
>If the US bought them, they really wouldn't be "free elections", would
>they?
You can't have free elections when a hugely powerful external body is trying to manipulate the outcome. Expecting Castro to endorse them is, well, like expecting Putin to control the oligarchs without using authoritarian methods, maybe employing his magic Putin Powers on behalf of democracy. If pigs could fly.
>
>I agree that would happen, but lots of my fellow Americans don't. So to
>them Castro is an evil dictator who just likes being in charge (and the
>part
>about just liking to be the boss may very well be true); but I don't think
>the vast majority of my fellow Americans are moronic.
>Ignorant, maybe willfully so sometimes, but not idiots.
It's a no-brainer if you think about it for more than 5 minutes. I go with willful idiocy.
>But still, the fact remains that Cuba is a society in many respects on
>lockdown (not entirely by it's own choice...see the embargo) which is
>totally incompatible with the practice of democracy. You can look at US
>society and say the same thing!
It is impossible for Cuba to survive as a liberal democracy given the wider geopolitical and economic forces at work, in my opinion. Yeah, it would be great, but it's not possible. Countries under siege cannot be democracies. Who knows what Castro would do sans siege, but relaxing centralization that much in today's Cuba would probably be disastrous (maybe I have a different view on this because I live in the FSU).
>
>I was listening to an interview with yesterday, and the statement was made
>that in "The End Of History" he discussed the battle between socialism and
>"liberal democracy". I thought the battle was between socialism and
>capitalism, as they are both economic systems.
Sssh. You're not supposed to say that.
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