> And, I'm still annoyed at you changing the subject after my post w/
>the photo spread of the dilapidated Havanna housing and
>transportation, as if I don't know what poor neighborhoods in
>Washington, D.C., Philly, East St. Louis, the Mission district or the
>Tenderloin in S.F. where I lived.
I changed the subject because it was a cheap point, marginally relevant in the first place. Cuba is a poor country that still hasn't recovered from the collapse of the USSR. The US is a very rich country, and both you & I live here. Given its material constraints, Cuba has done a very good job on a lot of things, and we could learn from it. Getting on a high horse and pointing to all its failings isn't very enlightening, especially at a moment when the US has done a far worse job than Cuba at responding to a natural disaster.
Another thing that annoys me is the inability that so many "anti-authoritarians" show in understanding how hard it is to run any kind of progressive, much less revolutionary, regime. You've got opposition coming from your own domestic elite and from the US - not to mention intense economic challenges, like the need for foreign exchange - and no one has ever given me a satisfactory answer on how to deal with it. As far as I know - having just read Richard Gott's book and interviewed him - Chavez is doing a pretty masterful job of juggling the contradictions in Venezuela. He's been elected and re-elected several times, passed a constitutional referendum, survived a recall election, and kept a hostile press open. Yet you piss on him too. Can anyone in the real world live up to your standards?
Doug