re: #88 Unshaken Defiance

I just personally think his motives at the time cynical enough that I don’t really buy that either. Pretensions of justice. But correct of course for you to say so I can’t disagree there.

I’m not celebrating his end, but his country would have been better off without him long long ago. And that counterproductive embargo. Empowered him and hurt the people needlessly.

Castro was a tyrannical piece of shit, but the system he helped overthrow was both corrupt and structurally racist as all fuck. There was a massive racial disparity between the Cubans who own property before the revolution and those who didn’t. That disparity was reflected in those who fled vs. who tended to stay. There’s a reason the Cuban expat population overwhelmingly trends white / light skinned, those are the people whose standards of living were disrupted the most under Castro. I’m not saying Cuba under Castro became a paradise for Black Cubans or some paragon of racial equality, but opposing apartheid was an entirely natural and organic policy in line with contemporary Communist ideology.

The Soviets viewed Western structural racism as a winning propaganda issue for them, a way of publicly distinguishing their own utopian ideas from what they presented as a decadent, unprincipled and most importantly an intrinsically exploitative West. Yes the motivation was almost certainly in large part cynical, so what? Half the damn time that’s how progress occurs, those in power never just wake up en masse one day and decide out of the goodness of their hearts to stop treating those different from themselves like garbage.