It also illustrates the importance of not getting caught on the wrong side of the global hegemon right next door who can choke you out and prevent you from importing energy and integrating with the global economy.
That's definitely part of the equation, but the blockade has been over for a long while. They have suffered not only the brutal effect of US colonization/hegemony but also the brutal effect of the legacy of Castro's brand of economics. If they were just suffering one or the other, they'd be significantly better off.
Edit since I am throttled on posts and cannot reply below: The US briefly blockaded Cuba in the 60s, but they have only embargoed them since then. They are not blocked from international trade by the US, except with the US. There is no meaningful block from Cuba engaging in the greater international non-US "global economy" such as EU,Asia, etc.
For instance, I can buy Malibu rum, no matter that Pernod Ricard does business with Cuba. Or flights in USA with Air France, no matter that they also do business in Havana. Or ZTE phones which are imported into both USA and Cuba from China (carrier limitations but only because USA government won't do business with ZTE associated businesses, not because they can't be sold in USA). Or Sinopec (oil) which does business in USA including a large investment of presence in Texas but also does business with Cuba.
Yes your blanket any is a lot more applicable if you said the truth which is any business that wants to do business with USA federal government which is much closer to the truth (but even then, Sinopec for instance has through its subsidiaries been allowed to bid on strategic oil reserve transactions no matter their ownership is a major trader with Cuba).
Cuba is actively trading with EU, Asian, etc companies that are also trading with USA.
It also illustrates the importance of not wrecking your own economy through pursuing socialist policies and driving the most productive people out of the country.
Or, a prolonged embargo, threats of invasion, actual attempts at invasion, diplomatic pressure to isolate, etc all by the most powerful empire in history on your doorstep destroyed everything.
It is not hard, because you can look at other examples besides Cuba.
Once upon a time, there was COMECON, a huge bloc of socialist countries trading with one another, whose intent was precisely to limit Western pressures. It included some fairly developed countries like Czechoslovakia and GDR. 500 million people in total, similar to the US and Western Europe together back then. A huge market in total, from Leipzig to Vladivostok to Saigon (after it fell).
(BTW Cuba was a member of COMECON and it was a very non-productive member, being heavily subsidised by the Soviet Union all the time. I still remember the Cuban oranges sold in Czechoslovak shops, which were so full of stones/seeds that they were barely edible. No one would voluntarily buy them unless there was no alternative available, but there usually wasn't one. A good metafor for what was going on.)
They still ran their economies into the ground because Marxist-Leninist economy doesn't work in practice. Marxism as a theory is catnip for intellectuals, but neither Marx nor Lenin ever tried to run a corner shop, much less an actual factory. The resulting misalignment of interests throws off almost everybody and a country practicing Marxist-Leninist approaches to economy will end up with just two really functional institutions: the secret police, to keep the comrades in power, and the (very non-Marxist) black market, which is tolerated because otherwise the population would starve. If it is not tolerated, the population will starve, but only a few countries like North Korea were crazy enough to go down that road.
The same happened all over again pretty much everywhere where it has been tried. China only started to economically grow after ditching Marxist economy for market reforms in 1979. India was never totalitarian, but toyed with Marxist approaches until 1991, when the "License Raj" was reformed; since then, it has been following Chinese economic growth along a very similar line.
Heck, even very early idealistic Israel ran into somewhat similar problems, although all the kibbutzniks were there voluntarily and eschewed use of state violence to build their utopias.
Communism doesn't work because its originator (Marx) used Hegel's dialectical method, which was only ever meant to be used in conjunction with an idealist (=reality is derived from the mind) philosophy, and misappropriated it into dialectical materialism. The dialectical method is acceptable when the contradictions are between concepts during the process of gaining knowledge which if completed results in "the truth being the whole".
In materialist philosophy, the real world exists entirely outside the mind and the mind only interprets it. Having dialectical materialism would imply that material reality has a final destination (=communism) that it is striving to achieve and that rather than concepts such as life and death contradicting each other, it's people that are contradicting each other (capitalists vs proletariat). Because forward progress is guaranteed, there is no need to have knowledge/discussions about how to arrive at the final destination. The best way to accelerate the process is to simply destroy the existing order no matter what it is. Reformists (people who demand incremental improvements) are slowing down progress toward utopia while supporting the status quo and should be held in contempt.
What this ultimately means is that Marxist socialism has never been about building a good society for people to live in, but to dismantle the status quo, no matter what it is. This makes Marxist socialism an extremely attractive ideology for ruthless, violent or narcissistic individuals, while simultaneously luring in unsuspecting people who just want a better life and have reasonable grievances with the status quo. These subtractive ideologies fail because they're biting the hand that feeds them.
There is this socialist streamer (Vaush) that summarized all of this in a single sentence. "I don't care about principles, I only care about winning."
This "Marxists can't even run a corner shop" junket is hilarious in a context where the capitalist-democratic hegemon has just finished eviscerating itself and Chinese socialism, however pragmatic, is the winner by default.
That's the thing about change. It gives the lie to cliché
Is it? It's more like "you can't succeed with any political system if your powerful bullies dislike it". What do you think about Vietnam? Everything destroyed as well?
The way things are going it looks like late capitalism is on a way to eventually catch up. And all 2.5 "productive" people left would own the world and the rest will be cattle, potentially culled to keep things in check
That's not enough to keep people fed. I think the primary reason why Cuba remained socialist is that all the "capitalists" (perceived as boogieman for social ills) are voluntarily fleeing Cuba rather than opposing the government.
> One must laud the transparency this administration has introduced.
What transparency? What is transparent about running a meme coin that anyone in the world can bribe- sorry, "invest" in with no trace of who they are while you're President?
As for the topic at hand: Trump truly has no vision for anything we do on the world stage so I don't believe it's a deliberate effort at "transparency"
Transparently corrupt, sure. Who is influencing him still isn't transparent though. Book deals, board positions, and speeches all have organizers, company names, etc.. that can be investigated.
How can you trace a block chain transaction back to someone without some sort of OPSEC slip up?
> Trump truly has no vision for anything we do on the world stage
It confuses me how anyone could look at what's happening in the world and see a lack of a plan. Trump administration seems to actually be unusually focused on foreign policy in this term and using geopolitical statecraft to upend the arrangements that were not working in favor of the US. The tariffs to force countries to choose US or China, putting the fear of Russia in Europe to pump up their defense spending, and the peacemaker strategy in the Middle East to force oil prices down to reduce inflation. It seems to be a very comprehensive strategy.
There is a plan, but it is rather half baked and naive.
>putting the fear of Russia in Europe to pump up their defense spending
At the same time as refusing weapons sales to US allies and restricting intelligence sharing. Thereby forcing those countries to spend on European weapons rather than the US ones they have bought for the last 70 years. Doesn't sound great for the US tbh
> Trump administration seems to actually be unusually focused on foreign policy..
You left out threatening to invade Canada if they did not join the US. And stealing Greenland. And asking Ukraine to give in to Putin's demands. Illegal tariffs that are a tax on common people. Yes, it may come as a shock to you that other countries do not pay the tariffs. We do. And unlike regular taxes, tariffs are not a progressive tax. So rich people love it.
By almost all accounts, the US has lost ground globally. We have lost soft power and respect. Global surveys now show that the rest of world now sees us the baddies.
Tariffing the entire world, changing his position on Ukraine every week, and hinting at invasion of our allies is not coherent. On the Ukraine conflict, he didn't seem to understand that Putin is untrustworthy until recently.
He's got a very comprehensive plan and he knows exactly what he's doing. He's also consolidated his base so he has people who are as committed as he is to carrying out his vision. He's doing everything he said he would do successfully. All his opponents are desperate for him to fail but that simply is not happening, i wonder why? This website runs opposite to his vision of MAGA, it's basically make america criminals, no surprises it's been axed.
One really mustn't. There are plenty of people who work in government that actually care about human rights - this 'tear it down' mentality relies on the fantasy that it will be rebuilt in some better form. And this kind of 'both sides' bullshit from the article highlights it perfectly:
> Blaha had already voiced frustration that despite the HRG passing its pilot phase, the Biden administration had not done enough to publicise it, meaning the provision to "facilitate receipt" of information was still not being fully honoured before the Trump administration deleted the channel entirely.
One side didn't publicize it as much as we would have preferred, and the other one deleted it entirely. Both sides are bad!
> There are plenty of people who work in government that actually care about human rights
Hopefully most do! All should.
However, most employees don’t pick what they work on. So it’s always at the discretion of the boss to determine what’s practically considered, regardless of ideals or desires.
"Didn't publicize it as much as we would have preferred" is very polite speech for killing millions in "wars on terror" and through arming our great friends, the house of Saud, in their campaign against Yemen.
Not going to get into the rich history of overthrowing local rulers and installing puppets through the most gruesome proxies to create "banana republics," the mass murder on a massive scale committed in the previous century, or the genocide that preceded to enable the founding of this state.
This place is built on murder and theft. "Both sides" are guilty. One is less shy.
The ‘tear it down’ mentality is about tearing down the covers and exposing America for what it is. That is how I understood your parent at least.
The USA has been doing human rights abuses for a long time, without any repercussions. The Iraq war and the Patriot Act is but a few of many many many more examples. For a while now the entire political spectrum in Europe has given this impunity to the USA, with the covers gone, maybe it will be harder—at least for the left of center parties—to give this impunity to the USA.
His feed is an archive of war crimes documented under conditions of imposed starvation and an information blackout, in a "conflict" that has had the highest journalist mortality rate by far.
First, he's under no obligation to archive his posts. It's on the world to archive them and prosecute the perpetrators of the documented crimes.
Second, the platform in question has, at the highest levels, intelligence officers from the entity committing those crimes.
Third, humanity has failed in its moral duty yet again, and this sort of "neutral" commentary that ends with a glib remark directed at a murdered non-combatant is shocking to the conscience.
I intentionally chose not to comment on the politics, and I won’t here either. Please respect that.
My comment only addressed the possible failure to understand the importance, and controversy, of this work and publishing exclusively on social media. Important and controversial things should not be entrusted to social media.
I say this as a former AP photo stringer, who has been in handcuffs, forest fires, and shoot outs in that job. My concern is, genuinely, that socially relevant documentary work needs to be held outside of social media for this exact reason.
For what it's worth, my opinion is that there was no a better platform than social media to host that material.
The media companies are virtually all editorially aligned with one side, and they put their thumbs on the scale when it comes to the news about this subject.
The mainstream reporting is so clinically sanitized that it loses all potency and the sense of urgency. They were never going to be conduits for this material.
The best platform is the one that allows you to reach a wide audience so the onus is on them to archive, not on the vulnerable people being hunted with impunity.
He is dead. Any backups he might have made might be long gone, or otherwise, unknown. What we do know is that the IG posts AND the backups done via the Internet Archive are gone.
So, my question to you is: where can you set a backup for no cost, available from Gaza, and that won't be taken down 3rd parties. Note, anything online has the potential to have data removed, and even then, we don't know what other backup locations he might have been using. We just know what was available now to the public.
In addition, let's say he had hardware backups (which are now gone after he was killed), or let's say just a random S3 bucket. We have to know about it. Know how to get access to it. And hope that AWS doesn't nuke it because someone asks them to do it.
It's a big mess, and blaming him for not having more backups than an entire country is incredible.
Google Drive would be good enough (if you can access Meta, you can access Google Drive) or any other cloud storage where you maintain ownership of your data. You can give people anywhere in the world the credentials to access it and upload to any social media. Internet Archive allows takedown requests from content owners, so it's not really a backup. Meta probably automatically sends one when it deletes an Instagram page.
The TOS for Google Drive is nothing like social media. You maintain ownership and do not grant a license to use. Meta's TOS grants them a license to use and delete whenever they want. Instagram isn't a storage product in any sense of the word and Google Drive is. Whatever the details about ownership of the photos are, Internet Archive coppied them from Meta's domain, so Meta can order the takedown. Try knowing something about what you are talking about.
Are you calling a man that was living under a g*nocide documenting the horrific war crimes an idiot because he didn't back up his data, do you hear yourself??
The number one priority was for him to spread the information as fast as possible to as many people as possible. Given the limited bandwidth, limited electricity, limited availability for physical storage devices, and limited everything, do you really think that backing up his data was his priority? Have some empathy...
Given the circumstances, actually yes, I would think that contingencies and backups would be top priority. Google Drive would have been sufficient. Unlike the hell that is social media, you own your data, and your friends can access it and post to Instagram from outside the war zone.
> You seem to think awfully highly of your ability to reason about the world, but I find your claim to be fairly lacking. This all reads like the ramblings of a 19 year old who just discovered Chomsky.
Address the argument rather than engaging in ad hominem.
You have tons of meaningful economic choices everywhere in American life. You can bank with any bank and look for competing offers for credit to do useful things. For example you can buy a home and shop for a better interest rate by taking an offer for a loan from one lender to another and 9 times out of 10 you'll come away with a better offer. But you can easily not take on a loan and choose to preference flexibility and therefore rent. This housing choice involves a myriad of sub choices about lifestyle, commuting preferences, school adjacency, and other elements you may want to balance. Because US state are often quite different in character and economic and social opportunity you have a ton of dimension along which you can exercise choice.
Someone posting here likely has access to remote work and can meaningfully choose to live in a quite mountain town in West Virginia with satellite internet where you never see more than a few people every week, or you could live in a mid sized city like I do and get involved in neighborhood organizations. Similarly you could move to NYC and live in a small apartment an spend all of your time going out to bars and restaurants. These are SUPER meaningful choices on an individual level.
Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights? Can you rent without a four times yearly inspection by the landlord?
> Can you rent without a four times yearly inspection by the landlord?
I've literally never heard of this.
> Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights?
All the banks? There are 3,917 commercial banks and 545 savings and loan associations in the US. It's probably the most banks per-capita of any country. You'd be hard press to not be able to even work with a local credit union.
Show me the Americans stuck in a black hole where nobody processes their payment, banks won't handle their money, they can't vote, they can't travel, etc. because of their deviations?
There are total nutjobs of all walks that are living just fine. There are actual Nazis and commies living just fine.
It's a big country. If our whole society already has dystopian social credit it should be easy to find examples.
Banks talk to each other via ChexSystems/EWS and stick Americans in a black hole where nobody processes their payments and banks won't handle their money. Felons don't have voting rights in 48 states. As far as travel is concerned, being imprisoned makes that hard, but no, we don't (yet) have internal border checks that prevent people from moving from place to place, other than the fact that it's expensive.
That's a lot, about 2025 million people! And while many felons deserve their prison terms, those who have been released have an extremely steep hill to climb to get functional in society again. I feel like there's probably some correlation with recidivism rates.
The "western commentators" were instrumental in enabling this crime by yielding to "authority" and not questioning the claims of the occupying entity.
Decades of propaganda got us here, and the nature of the operation was clear from day 1. The leadership in almost all of our states are accomplices to this crime.
From slavery to the Chinese exclusion act to Jim Crow to the Japanese internment camps to the patriot act. It's hard to make the case we were anything but.
What has changed recently is technology collapsing the world into a single blob of information, and that aspect gets worse every year.
Despite the headline on this article you still have way more freedom and specifically freedom of speech in the US than the rest of us.
The law works differently at the border, especially for non-citizens. Tourists don't have any legal right to get in. You may argue that the guards should be kinder and I would agree.
The historical examples you mention involve racism and slavery that were terrible but also the global standard at the time.
The Patriot Act is scary, but it doesn't seem much better elsewhere in the Anglosphere or in Europe. Say something impolitic loud enough and you'll get in trouble anywhere.
> you still have way more freedom and specifically freedom of speech in the US than the rest of us
Depends on who "you" are.
There some some who are allowed to openly make tangible, if thinly veiled death threats to others without repercussions. Others can have their lives ruined over trivial things.
The "you"s who are not granted as much freedom of speech are aware of it and only express themselves among trusted people.
There is now an absolute fountain of criticism of the current administration, the USA itself, and the entire West coming from every demographic in the USA. This isn't a new thing or restricted to Trump. I don't see any mass arrests, chilling of media, or official propaganda making the rounds.
You are not looking. Law firms are targeted and silenced. Media is subservient. People absolutely do watch what they say for a large number of reasons.
The type of speech being policed is different, but it's absolutely happening.
Fighting crime, for example by spying on a WaPo columnist and then strangling him at a consular mission in Turkey and chopping up his body, to then dissolve it in acid.
That's what this company's software is used for.
Good luck to them shifting focus to the bad actors they choose to do business with.
A lot of food for thought all around.