I like the tin ear joke. Rather like "The potatoes are piled as high as God"

I don't think I use red strawmen. My problem is not with equitable distribution of resources, but with authoritarian social orders, which i think are far more threatening to the human spirit than knowing someone else got a better hand dealt than you did. I don't see Castro as a socialist, I see him as a fascist. ( would you claim
Ceauşescu as a 'socialist' ? )

>>And yes, fifties were the proper time to decide to go with mainstream real-socialism a la Stalin,

I have to believe that is a typo as I would never think you would use Stalin as the standard bearer for any kind of socialism. Aren't we agreed that Stalin was a genocidal thug who was responible for the deaths of more Russians than the Germans were ?

An early mentor of mine was with Stillwell in China in WWII and spent some time in a cave with Ho ( who claimed - to the Americans at least - that he'd been reading George Washington's diary ) He was impressed with him ( and probably hated the French as much as Ho did ) and in the 50s had a rather nasty falling out with Allen Dulles over our policy when we decided in 54 to ignore the Geneva accords and not back Ho who we were quite sure would win a free election. He had no illusions about Ho being a democrat, but he was convinced he was a nationalist, no fan of the Chinese, and someone we could deal with as long as we weren't determined to perpetuate French mistakes. Which, of course, we were. ( He was even more impressed with Giap )

It was a bit tricky after war as the French communist party could lay claim to having been the most prominent resistance and keeping them from taking power after the war was seen as a very very top priority. To the few Americans who knew anything about Indochina this meant we turned a blind eye to many things - including Colonel Trinquier's financing the colony through the heroin trade. ( I later got into the tail end of the legacy of this in Laos )

And remember by 1950 the French communist party had been purged of non-Stalinists and its success would hardly have meant a Free France.

I only denigrated the 'free' health care of Cuba in so much as Castro has used it like bread and circuses. Swapping freedom for free health care still doesn't seem like a good deal, though I believe in both.



>>Other heroes of the revolution (Huber Matos for example) were disturbed by the increasingly authoritarian cult of personality that Castro was creating. To prove them wrong, Castro threw them into prison or shot them (shades of 1917)
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>Nope, in 1917 they were shooting the white ones. Come 1924-1953, they went shooting their own who were tin ears (*).
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>>American policy toward Cuba was a botch from day one (day one being back at the end of the Spanish American War) But Castro had a window of opportunity in 1959 to go in a different direction and chose not to.
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>You're getting me worried here. This is the first message after many months where you are not displaying your willful ignorance of anything regarding socialism. You always had a battalion of strawmen in that closet.
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>And yes, fifties were the proper time to decide to go with mainstream real-socialism a la Stalin, Hrushchev has read his referat at the Congress, Tito was deep in self-management (since 1952 officially), Stalin was dead, socialism had its chance to fulfill its promise of democracy (where people would have policies to choose from and decisions to make, not just to choose which side of the coin), but for the most part they were all politicians and did what seemed easier. Castro too. Ceauşescu was seemingly independent, in a way, but that was just a cover.
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>>I have always had kind of a mirror image of marxism view of the whole thing. Had we backed Ho Chi Minh in 1954 we would have been bottling Coca Cola in Hanoi by 1960.
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>Coca Cola was bottled in Zemun (Belgrade's Coney Island of sorts) since late sixties, FWIW. In a society-owned factory running a franchise under contract.
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>And comrade Ho actually asked for US help, to get rid of the French masters, just like the US once got rid of the Brits. But this cat seemed to be of wrong color.
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>> And I think you are right about Cuba. I think a lot of our schizophrenic policies re Cuba in the earyl sixties were a product of a very powerful organized crime lobby and the very complex history and connections of the Kennedy brothers.
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>And let's not forget that in this country you can get away with anything if only you can somehow paint your opponent as red, or somehow introduce a red-painted straw man (this is re "free health" from few messages ago - nobody said it's free, but you say so only to make a point; see how the technique works).
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>----
>(*) Three academy classmates have lunch. Few drinks after the dessert, one asks the other two: "How come I'm still a captain, and you guys are colonels?". "You are a tin ear. And I can prove it" says one, picks up a boiled egg, puts it to his ear and says, "wow, Chopin!". Gives it to the other colonel, who puts the egg to his ear and says "Amazing - you can really hear Chopin from this" and passes the egg to the major. Mayor puts it to his ear and says "I don't hear a thing."
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>"That's why you're still a major, tin ear."