I dunno about Yeltsin and the Houston store, but I do know this:
I went on a student tour of the USSR as a college student in 1991, arranged through my University (U of Alabama). I was getting a minor in Russian language, and it seemed like a fun trip. It actually got MORE fun because in the run-up to the trip (in spring, 91) there was some dissent in the USSR and many parents wouldn't let their kids go. In order to create a large enough trip, the University opened registration up to university-area retirees, so we ended up with a cohort of probably 30 folks. Half of us were under 25, and the other half over 65. It was the first time I'd ever really hung out with older people who weren't relatives, and that's really something we don't do enough of. Listen, if you have a chance to drink with WWII Hellcat pilots, do it.
Anyway.
Back then, you took certain American commodities with you to trade -- Levi's, Marlboros, etc. We met a pair of enterprising young black marketeers -- our age -- in Moscow, and hit off so well with them that they met us in (what was then) Leningrad for our last port of call. It was very cool, trying to converse in broken Russian and English, and generally being over the moon to have "friends" from the other side of the Cold War that defined both our countries up to then.
It went so well with Andrei and Volodya that, somehow, they finagled visas, and the next fall came to Tuscaloosa to visit us. Andrei immediately took up with my girlfriend's pal, but Volodya was shyer and stayed with Cassie and I for several weeks. And during that time -- and this would've been fall 91 into winter 92 -- obviously we did some shopping.
I remember vividly taking Volodya to the local supermarket, where we bought the sorts of cheap things students buy. Except obviously our budgets as upper-middle-class college kids allowed us things absurdly beyond the reach of anybody Volodya knew in Moscow -- like fresh fruit and vegetables in January. He was stunned, and we were kind of shamed by the plenty we had access to.
Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas. He wouldn't ask for bananas. So I grabbed a bunch and put them in the basket.
"Are you rich?" No. I have a good student job. "Are your parents in government?" No. My dad's dead; Cassie's dad is a doctor in another state. "Anyone can shop here?" Absolutely.
I don't pretend for a moment the US was then, or is now, some kind of paradise. We fail our poor in material and constant ways. But those moments in the Bruno's with Volodya are something I'll never forget.
I grew up with a guy that had a similar experience escorting Russian people in Florida? Alabama? Somewhere in the south where we hid defectors until everything was straight. He was driving some guy around who thought it was a guided tour to Potemkin villages, so he pulled out a map and said pick a place.
They drove to whatever that town was and he said, pick a store. After a couple of hours, I think his mind was blown.
This was a fairly rural, poor part of the state. Later they went to Atlanta and the guy was gaga over... everything.
There was a Russian group that made a stop at Cumberland Mall in suburban Atlanta. On that particular day, there was a shooting in the food court, so they got much more of the American experience than they expected. No one in their group was harmed but I'm sure it made an impression.
There's also the reverse. Cuba is a strange place to see.. with shops selling 10 items total (spread on a wall), when they can afford to open. The pace of economy dictates life, it's so weird when it's so slow.
Cuban rulers would rather its citizens starve than implement democracy. They have fake elections to trick their people, each seat has only one candidate selected by the communist party so it is all a sham.
-> “Cuban rulers would rather its citizens starve than implement democracy.”
cuban here. please dont pretend america care about democracy. america have interests. when they need new regime they suppress democracy as needed or push for democracy. main idea to get some regime subservient to american economic interest.
why america has so many migrants at border but america do nothing or even talk about what crisis happening in central or south america country? instead they fighting proxy war in ukraine. why? more lucrative and profit opportunity in ukraine. south america not have resources or proxy war opportunity.
and given state of American government..race issues..economic issue..growing gap..unaffordable housing..America last country to dictate how other country should run.
i not favor cuban government, but your post bullshit. you idea that you know more about cuba like you on some pedestal.watch as you infrastructure crumble you homeless and drug population rise
> The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States has informed the US Government that such activities violate international law and has requested that the US take immediate steps to exempt food and medicine from the embargo.
> In approving the FY2001 agriculture appropriations act, Congress codified the lifting of unilateral sanctions on commercial sales of food, agricultural commodities, medicine, and medical products to Iran, Libya, North Korea, and Sudan, and extended this policy to apply to Cuba (Title IX of H.R. 5426, as enacted by P.L. 106-387; Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000, or TSRA). Other provisions place financing and licensing conditions on sales to these countries. Those that apply to Cuba, though, are permanent and more restrictive. TSRA also gives Congress the authority in the future to veto a President’s proposal to impose a sanction on the sale of agricultural or medical products.
This is true, but with a catch. Other companies and individuals in other countries can trade with Cuba... provided they can keep their operation separate with the operation that interacts with us customers/companies. And even if they manage to do so, they still are at risk to be flagged or to cause their costumers to be flagged as non compliant by the us banking systems. So to burden this risk to trade with a small and poor island might not be as attractive even to people not directly subject to the US embargo.
I'm from Sweden, not USA. I think there are many problems with USA, but it isn't capitalism at least, I'd say the major problem is that their democracy doesn't properly represent the will of the people. Sweden isn't perfect, but I don't see many countries that does a better job, and Sweden is very capitalist, we voted about going towards communist but people didn't want to. Instead we have a strong capitalism, but with relatively high taxes and high government benefits, but other than that governments doesn't meddle much with companies, so freedom to do business is very high.
If Cuba was a democracy then I would disagree with the sanctions, but I don't think it is wrong to pressure a government into giving proper voting rights to its people. If Cuba actually implemented democracy and USA still sanctioned them then that would be bad, but that isn't the situation we are in.
The issue with Sweden is that it taxes work, not wealth.
You easily hit the 56% rate on income tax and even the poorest workers pay 25% VAT, meanwhile wealthy landowners and shareholders pay no inheritance tax and minimal capital gains and property tax.
So it impedes social mobility and encourages hard workers to move abroad - this has been made much worse with the refugee crisis too, as they're practically discouraged to work hard. And now look at the healthcare crisis, etc. as wages are a pittance compared to the USA, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, etc.
Taxing work instead of wealth greatly encourages Swedes to start companies. I think that is a big reason why we have so many successful start-ups from Sweden. Sweden discourages the corporate climbers, it is a very bad way to make money here, I don't think that is bad in itself, it means that smart people will try to do something outside of existing companies, either by moving abroad or by starting a company.
But I am not stupid, I too moved to Switzerland to work since it netted me many times more money per hour worked. That is why I said that Sweden isn't perfect, I'm not sure what the perfect system is, but Sweden is still pretty good.
Capital gains tax in Sweden is 30% and property tax is around 0.75% IIRC. I don't think they are that low - they're higher than most of Europe in fact.
And VAT is a double-edged sword... It's the only tax that essentially nobody can avoid, and thus the only tax that also applies to people who are already wealthy and could otherwise live their life without paying any tax.
Similar story in Fall of '92. I was a freshman in college and this dude, Nikolai, down the hall in the dorm was one of two guys from Vladivostok on a program. Most of us in the hall bonded very quickly including Nikolai. One day, a smaller group among us were talking and somehow the topic of his cologne came up. It smelled literally like ammonia.
We wanted to give him something else, but how do you do that without being offensive? One guy had a plan. When Nikolai was showering in the hall showers, this guy went in and stole Nikolai's cologne and tossed it. The next day, he was puzzled as to who stole his cologne. We said, "it's alright, we'll get you a replacement" and took him to the mall to one of those booths with knockoff designer perfume and cologne.
The guy was just in awe of the whole place. Eyes wide open, looking at every store. At the cologne place, first sample he smelled, he lit up, smiled, and said, "Yes, this is much better than my old cologne."
The guy that tossed his old one paid like the $20 for the bottle.
Later, it turned out the guy got his girlfriend pregnant on the night he left for the US, and had to go back to marry her after the semester. Such a bummer. Hope he's doing well with a nice family because he was such a friendly and fun guy.
My dad moved to the US in 99 (he grew up in a town of about 50k people at the time). He said he was shocked people would stop for him when crossing the street, and he was amazed he could by a 1/2 gallon of ice cream for a couple bucks. Previously, he might have had ice cream once a year. He was also impressed and made happy by the abundance of meat and milk.
Funnily he was quite disappointed at the fruit situation coming from a tropical country, but that was more about freshness than quantity.
There's also the issue that people from tropical countries are used to a variety of fruit we simply don't have. There are various things that are either rare in the US or completely absent because they can't survive being shipped. Even subtropical--my wife loves dragon fruit but is unwilling to pay through the nose for the very inferior stuff in the market here.
While I do not have a taste for tropical fruit there are the bananas we encountered in Africa that ruined me. Since encountering those I have pretty much zero interest in US bananas, what we had there can't be bought in the US because they don't ship well.
Damn, that was a good read. Thanks for sharing. It's rare to reevaluate ourselves and to see ourselves in a new light, and it sounds like you got a solid, grounded experience that has since anchored your perspective towards one of appreciation for what you/we have. Pretty cool gift.
The older I get the more astounded I am that our friendship with Andrei and Volodya happened at all, and the more regret I have that none of us retained any way to contact each other later. It was 1991. I was the only one of us to have an email address at the time.
The difference is that there was a dozen of scientific institutes and that was it. I.e. there was no Internet connectivity in my city (12th by population in Russia at the time) until 1994.
Oddly, one of the sites I did actually correspond with online at the time was a university in Moscow. I had a job working for a grant in cross-cultural communication that used a sort of online model UN simulation with teams spread all over. It was pretty neat.
In 1995 I had the pleasure to be part of a State Department sponsored "cultural exchange" with our then new friends in the Russian Federation.
Basically it amounted to myself and about a dozen others, organized into a small chamber orchestra going to Russia for a summer, and in exchange a group of Russians formed into folk/pop entertainment group visiting and staying with us for a while during the school year.
I can't say that 1995 in post-USSR Ekaterinburg was incredibly different than 1991's pre-Russia Sverdlovsk. There were a few bits of free market showing up, but the general economic situation there was pretty dire. Even for me, who grew up in a very rural area and quite poor, felt like I came from nearly unimaginable wealth.
A couple years later the State Department and Russia repeated the exchange and I had a chance to show my host mother around the local shopping malls and such. The "change" from communism had already happened, the Russians by then were by and large waiting for America to arrive.
It was an amazing experience, once in a lifetime, and it has given me lots of both wanderlust and perspective that I've carried with me for the rest of my life. I was very happy to see the improvement in standard of living in many parts of Russia over the years, but I'm very sad to see what they're wasting it on at the moment in Ukraine.
I don't recall making it to an electronics store at the time. But I do remember talking a lot about the state of consumer tech. Most of what we talked about or showed them in our homes was familiar even if they didn't have this or that device at home. My host family for example had a color TV, a Dendy NES clone, and a boom box that my host brother endlessly played Metallica mix tapes on. I saw a few desktop computers in passing, but have no idea what they were. They shared a single phone with the entire apartment building. It sat outside and was red. I think it looks almost exactly like the phones in Half Life Alyx.
The Internet was very nascent at the time and they all seemed nonplussed by the BBS scene.
I played violin. We played a mix of classical music and pop film scores. A local composer in one of the areas we visited composed a song for our group that we also played a few times.
The Russians played half late 80s early 90s synth pop and half Russian folk music complete with wardrobe changes. They were really cool.
> Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas. He wouldn't ask for bananas. So I grabbed a bunch and put them in the basket.
> "Are you rich?" No. I have a good student job. "Are your parents in government?" No. My dad's dead; Cassie's dad is a doctor in another state. "Anyone can shop here?" Absolutely.
In multiple communist countries in Eastern Europe, bananas were special because they only came ~once a year from Cuba. Anyone having access to them outside that time and/or getting more than a few would fit the profiles he described.
By contrast, some people in Eastern Europe had fancy ski huts available to them. You or I might have asked the same questions if you'd gone skiing with them in the 80s only to find out that his father is a draftsman. "Don't all of you have ski houses?"
For worker class in Russia, it is super common to own (as opposed to rent) your own apartment and also own a country house ("dacha").
You may be otherwise piss-poor, wage wise.
The supermarkets has improved greatly though - not quite the USA level, but on par with Western Europe or sometimes slightly better (more chains, easier to eat healthy)
Today, sure. In USSR, no apartment was privately owned, though. You were assigned one "according to your needs" - e.g. when I was a kid, my extended family of 5 (me, my parents, and my mom's parents) had a two-bedroom apartment of 48.5 m^2 total, 27.2 m^2 of which was the two bedrooms. To give an idea of the size, here's the floor layout of that exact series of apartment buildings:
(Note that there are multiple apartments shown here - every "3K", "2K", or "1K" corresponds to one apartment with that many bedrooms. The "fraction" after that shows the total area and the combined bedroom area of each apartment in m^2.)
I think the best way to describe that arrangement was a "no-cost rent". You only had to pay utilities, and you couldn't have it taken away from you arbitrarily. But e.g. selling it or even renting it out would be impossible (legally; the black market existed regardless), nor could it be inherited.
There was a thing called building cooperatives which gave out the rights to gift or sell the apartment after the mortgage was paid. The private ownership on real estate was legalized in 1990 through that system.
Yes, although you still had to have a "need to improve living conditions", as measured in square meters currently allotted per family member, to get an apartment that way.
There was also the "build it to live in it" condominium programs that opened more opportunities specifically to those just starting their adult lives, who would otherwise qualify at most for a room in a communal apartment, and couldn't possibly afford a downpayment on that mortgage (15-20 monthly salaries). But those came late - many weren't even completed by 1991 - and they had considerable pushback from many local authorities, partly on the basis that such luxury was "undeserved" and unfair to older people who were in the line for regular apartments, and partly because some of their member-elected governance councils were starting to get political ambitions and push for more local self-administration in the 80s.
This was late USSR, all the way up to its dissolution and privatization of housing in 1991. I was a small kid at the time, but I don't recall the standard being different depending on age.
The allotment of living space (counted as bedroom area per person) varied depending on the city, and sometimes there was a difference between the nominal and the actual number. In Moscow and Leningrad the designated minimum was around 7 m^2 per person, but in practice applying for a new apartment would be unlikely to succeed if you had more than 5 m^2. In some of the provinces, it could go as low as 3 m^2 per person.
And keep in mind that this is the minimum that entitled you to apply for a new apartment. Which means that you'd be put in a line to wait your turn to actually get one when one is available, say, 10 years later.
How do you explain the success of the capitalist zones in China relative to the rest of the country with this worldview that the benefits of capitalism must come from exploiting others?
certainly in a marxist analysis wage-laboring banana pickers are being exploited because they're alienated from the fruits of their labor (which are in this case literal fruits)
nevertheless, 01992 was a long time after democracy was restored in honduras in 01981 and the civil war began in guatemala in 01960, and bananas are still cheap today, including here in argentina, so evidently cheap bananas don't require the particular much more severe kind of exploitation the term 'banana republic' was invented to describe
Banana republics are exploitative in literally every definition of exploitation, because there was literal military violence involved. And even nowadays, Marxist analysis is far from the only framework in which workers in the global south are exploited. In fact almost any theory of exploitation except for the most radical libertarian/neoliberal would see an element of exploitation.
It turns out that since 1980 there has been economic growth, making the production and shipping of various commodities more affordable.
If banana republics weren't necessary to keep bananas affordable and profitable they would never have existed in the first place.
you are reasoning from the implied functionalist premise that forms of domination exist because they are necessary
this is a false premise
forms of domination exist not because they are necessary but because they are achievable—because those who support them are better organized and resourced than those who oppose them
those of us here in the 'global south' are generally not a fan of the term, lumping together as it does botswana, myanmar, the philippines, and argentina under a single rubric; it reflects a cartoonishly shallow analysis of the real social relations in the world system
Bananas are a photogenic edge case, not a staple food. Far more representative of America's food-wealth are grains and meat -- which it produces in enormous amounts, and exports to the rest of the world. That doesn't happen by exploiting other countries, because no other countries are involved; it happens because of technology, because of mechanized agriculture and high-yield seeds and synthetic fertilizer and many other under-appreciated pillars of the modern world. And those technologies have been spreading through the world, lifting people out of poverty in vast numbers.
I won't ask you to show appreciation for heroes like Haber and Bosch and Borlaug and all the rest, but they have my thanks.
I can only go "???" to this. America has only gotten more "opulent" since the 90s. The US has not seen any sort of decline since the 90s in fact we've seen the boom of one of the biggest industries in the world, that allows us to even discuss this on our computers.
> The US has not seen any sort of decline since the 90s in fact we’ve seen the boom of one of the biggest industries in the world, that allows us to even discuss this on our computers.
Actually, that happened in not since the 1990s, and we were discussing issues like this on our computers then, too. I know, I was there.
But the opulence of the 1990s wasn’t because it was the height of technology, or average earnings, it was in large part driven by fashion and attitudes and their effect on lifestyle and the marketplace, driven in part by the lingering visible-status-oriented attitudes of the 1980s, in part by the perception of geopolitical and economic invincibility (both the–at that point–longest economic expansion in the modern period plus the fall of the Soviet Union, lopsided military engagements like Panama and the First Gulf War, etc.)
Greater aggregate and even median wealth looks and feels different in the shadow of the Great Recession and the Afghan and Iraq Wars.
“lifting out of poverty” is defined in terms of consumption.
A family living on a farm and providing most of their own needs, living sustainably for generations, is by most definitions “living in poverty” because they consume very little.
Now if you strip that family of their land and force them to work in factories their consumption goes way up since they no longer are able to support themselves.
That family has now been “lifted out of poverty”.
But yes, you are correct, no system has made people more depended on exploitation then Capitialism.
Lifting out of poverty is also defined in terms of "not starving to death because the winter was too long or cold", "not losing a half a years labor and food because a tornado hit your field", "not having to do manual labor 12 hours a day" and yes "access to material wealth" like indoor plumbing, labor saving devices like washing machines, and the ability to send your children to be educated instead of needing them as additional physical labor when they're old enough. Access to modern medical care and medications. I know some people enjoy farming, and enjoy the rough life. Me personally I'm glad that I don't have to plan months in advance to heat my house for the winter, can obtain literally any food I can imagine within 30 minutes and obtain enough food to feed a family for a month with little more than 40 hours of labor and a 1 hour shipping trip.
I would point out that under capitalism there have been famines even when there has been plenty of surplus food. A lack of famine either acute nor chronic is surely not a defining characteristic of capitalism.
You don't need a famine to starve to death when you're a subsistence farmer, you just need your local area to suffer an unexpected weather event. Too much winter, too much heat, too much rain, too many storms, too many insects. Take your pick of natural disaster. When you and your entire country are subsistence farmers, there's not exactly a lot of surplus or distribution networks to get you replacement food when your local area suffers.
I don’t know… my grandparents were literally sharecroppers and my grandmother said it was ducking miserable. When she was a child most people lost children to disease and still in 1920, sometimes to hunger. But the economy changed and improved and they eventually owned an air conditioned home and two cars. She said the improvement in her life from childhood until I was born were almost unimaginable.
The poorest countries account for the least amount of trade globally. They don't have factories, but I imagine you would contrive that owning next to nothing and teetering on the edge of extreme poverty is preferable to working in a factory. That type of work is what created the 4 Asian Tigers, seems ridiculous to knock it.
You realize “consumption” includes things like medical care, nutritious food, quality education, better housing? It actually makes up a very large part of consumption in developed nations.
You’re idealizing the crushing poverty of sustenance farming.
Have you ever been to a developing country? Talked to the families who choose to abandon their farming and work in a factory so their kids can get proper healthcare, better schooling and living in a house without a toilet that feeds into the river?
Plenty of them could continue to work as farmers and choose not too. Who are you to claim their choice is wrong?
I’m guessing you’ve lived a comfy life and take all of these things for granted and then sneer at those who want the same.
Prey tell, how do you live? How would you in practice have your children and other family members live? If you're even moderately well off, very little if nothing stops you from seeking exactly the life you idealize in your comment. Resources for learning all its hard tricks and labors abound (largely due to the very same capitalist-fed internet of commodified information sharing that you disdain). But by all means, decide for hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers that their lives of toil were preferable to the things generations of them strove for despite "having to" consume more.
>Communism, or any other system, can’t make that same claim.
I don't really think communism is a viable economic system, because of, you know, people. However, a couple of points should be made:
- Communism has always had to deal with enmity of world's richest and most influential nations (USA and UK in particular). Possibly because communism has had this inbuilt idea that it needs to spread to everywhere, whether they like it or not (kind of like some religions). Could this have been otherwise? I don't know.
- Between 1922 and 1962, USSR's economy grew at an average of about 9% real per annum, despite having to deal with the massive trauma of World War 2. Also, income inequality decreased. Population went from ~140 million in poverty to ~240 million living, um, not in poverty.
So... it is not quite as simple as you make it out to be.
China was friendly with the USSR only briefly, like in the 1950s. It was desperately poor at the time, and received a lot of aid from the USSR.
I don't know what other friendlies you mean. USSR installed communist/socialist governments in the countries it liberated from German occupation after WW2, but those relationships were... complicated.
> Possibly because communism has had this inbuilt idea that it needs to spread to everywhere
Communist countries wanted to export communism, maybe for all the good and bad reasons democratic countries want to export democracy. However there were plenty of people in the west that wanted their country to become communist, especially up to the 80s. So the enmity against all the communist world was also a matter of internal affairs, to contain internal opposition.
On reflection, whether communism holds extra appeal in poor countries, or whether it was an accident of history that *rich* capitalist countries faced off against poor communist countries, communism's chances were kind of hamstrung by this enmity. The playing field was uneven.
So which system is truly better at lifting people out of poverty, all other things being equal, remains uncertain.
That's actually not what it shows. It shows that the free market focused development model which was popular across the entire rest of the world did not, in aggregate, reduce abject poverty.
> It’s pretty clear even “state capitalism” leads to wealth and the elimination of abject poverty.
What even is the difference between such heavy state capitalism and socialism? Socialist economies existed with various level of market involvement and economic freedom, see Lenin's NEP - was the USSR initially a champion of free market reform?
You are mixing up democracy and capitalism. All democracies happens to be capitalist today since people quickly vote away communist leaders when they can, but that doesn't mean that democracy and capitalism are the same thing. China can be capitalist without democratic elections, I'd argue that is where they are today and where they have been since the "Chinese miracle" started.
China is capitalist, they just aren't democratic. They kept the authoritarian regime with sham elections from their communism days but changed everything else into capitalist systems, they are as capitalist as a typical western country today.
Authoritarian regime, control of society, control of economy are basically the definition of fascism. For obvious reasons the only clear difference with canon is the lack of anti-communism.
By the way, elections in China are only at very local levels. Most of what we do elections for in western countries are indirect elections there. The Congress is not directly elected by people.
I've lived in the US my entire life, so I don't really know much else - but I am and always have been blown away by fresh fruit in January (the whole year!). Sometimes I turn over a fresh apple or pear in my hands and the sticker has "product of Chile" or some other South American country - blows me away every time I stop and think about it....
Yeah. I realized that it's a near certainty that all the retirees I traveled with 32 years ago are now dead, especially the Hellcat pilot. He was I think 75 at the time.
Sitting in a hotel bar in Kiev with him, drinking vodka, and listening to tales of the Pacific theater -- mostly just antics with his buddies, but some flight stories -- was pretty amazing. I wish I had kept a journal back then, because I've mostly forgotten any specific anecdotes.
What gets me is how pivotal information is. Back in the days your reality was defined by a few, and as a social species.. we follow suit. Today it's not.. China tries to censor reality but even they fail to an extent.
1986, my (China born) girlfriend-now-wife was over the moon to discover she could have as much milk as she wanted. In her experience it was reserved for kids and not something available to adults.
Russia's poor are still not very well taken care of under capitalism. Witness all the Russian soldiers in Ukraine being impressed with washing machines and stealing them.
Please don’t take everything you read on the internet at face value. Every decently sized city there has at least one DNS, Eldorado and MVideo electronics chain:
I visited Russia in 2013 and 2014, and there were a lot of gritty places, but availability of modern retail shops, goods, etc. was basically the same as places in Europe at that time. My kid travelled there last summer and said the sanctions are having an impact, but a lot of it is on the order of, for example, McDonald's changing the sign outside to some knockoff brand and sourcing their ground beef and packaging from somewhere else.
Cities all over the country as small as 50k have these stores and their competitors where you can buy fresh Mexican avocados and sparkling new Korean appliances.
Or, if you don’t want to go in store you can buy any item under the sun on Wildberries, Ozon and have it delivered to your front door.
The fact that inventory in stores, or delivery apps exist does not help when a lot of people in rural Russia can't afford it, as one of the sibling comments points out.
I've also heard (from Russians) that water access in rural Russia is poor.
To use a washing machine you need access to running water, sewage and electricity. The first two of those are still not available in large parts of the country.
And large portions of the population still cannot afford one.
The intersection of those two frequently ends up in the army, as that is the only social mobility they know.
> Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas.
My friend's high school physics teacher had many memorable lines, one of them being:
"Bananas! I saw my first banana when I was already in college!"
My father hosted a few Americans in (back then) communist Poland. To them it was like time travel to some bizarro world bygone era. They really wanted to drive his car, which was also a "classic" tech and design wise.
Anyway all this spilled over to the 90s, making the weirdest things to be considered premium goods, like Vans shoes, vacation in Malta/Greece or McDonald's.
Eventually this all ended and I remember the exact moment I realized it: I saw a somewhat overweight teenager in a mall holding a pizza slice.
Every part of this sight would be out of place in the mid 90s, not to mention the previous system.
Do you mean the importance of not having entire industries bombed to craters? The "leftist clowns" in Europe today get most of their products from Europe, and they seem pretty content about it. Speaking for myself,the variety of cheeses in western Europe is flabbergasting.
So, yes. I think it might just happen that buying banana from somewhere keeps them poor. These are so well known cases that I somewhat suspect you asked the question as a softball.
Then they don’t get masacred to force others to labour on the banana plantations, and their democraticaly elected leaders don’t get overthrown by the CIA.
Maybe they find other ways to thrive, maybe not. Banan is not the only thing they could grow, and growing things is not the only way to make an economy work.
This is not an abstract economy problem from a econ 101 textbook. History cannot be rolled like that back and “what-if” is not a question we can answer.
What we know is that violence has been commited with the direct goal of securing said banana supply.
It depends. In ideal conditions it wouldnt, but there's all sorts of ways that a large country like the USA (or its corporations) can keep a smaller country (and/or its poorer citizens) in poverty while trading with them, to their own advantage. e.g. Banana Replublics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic), third world debt in the 80s/90s, poor people being pushed into growing cash crops instead of food ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/behind-africas-famin...)
> It's like, if you complained about the lack of consumer products in Cuba, how could you discuss that without bringing up the sanctions the US has placed on them for decades?
Keep in mind Cuba is free to trade with 192+ countries all around the world. Easy to blame everything on the embargo, harder to take a long hard look at the systemic corruption, incompetence, generalized theft and human rights violations plaguing the country.
> Keep in mind Cuba is free to trade with 192+ countries all around the world.
Is that the case? I don't know a lot about how the blocade works but Wikipedia says "the United States has threatened to stop financial aid to other countries if they trade non-food items with Cuba" and "US-based companies, and companies that do business with the US, which trade in Cuba do so at the risk of US sanctions."
Just looking at Cuba-EU trade (so more for the second category):
> Cuba’s main export goods are agricultural products, beverages, tobacco and mineral fuels, for which there is no preferential trade regime.
> The main export goods from the EU to Cuba are food, chemicals products, plastics, basic metals and their manufactures, machinery, household appliances and transport equipment.
Yes, absolutely. Cuba not only trades with the EU, but also regularly with Canada, another major US ally and does so without legal or political consequences for either Cuba or Canada. The embargo was a shameful disaster of U.S political policy in how it was applied, but also in its PR damage, because it let a grossly corrupt, authoritarian regime spend several decades justifying its nearly every failure on this one U.S political measure with the help of useful idiot supporters in the U.S and elsewhere. The embargo never stopped Cuba from being much better off. It's own rigid, backwards ideology and self serving leaders did.
This is incorrect. Cuba is under secondary sanctions by the US. Any entity that trades with Cuba is liable under US Federal law to get it's assets seized. Granted it doesn't happen as often as it used to, but it's still the law on the books.
Since most countries ask for US dollars in order to trade and that these have to be held by US entities, you're basically guaranteed to have assets that can be seized.
US dollars don't have to be held by US entities. There are US dollars held on balance sheets around the world by non-US entities. During the cold war, the Soviet Union held USD in non-US accounts.
Countries don't ask for US dollars in order to trade. Although it is common for some goods to be priced in US dollars, companies (rather than countries) will price and trade in whatever currency suits them, often with assistance from banks providing foreign exchange services. The banks don't need to be US banks, and goods priced in USD do not need to be paid for in USD if you go through an intermediary, which is common practice.
US dollars can only be held in proper by US entities. All US dollars are either actually held by a bank, which has a US entity responsible for those US dollars, or as an IOU for another US entity. Despite them being on the balance sheet of a non-US entity, they are ultimately in custody of some entity under US law, unless we're talking about literal cash.
> Countries don't ask for US dollars in order to trade. Although it is common for some goods to be priced in US dollars, companies (rather than countries) will price and trade in whatever currency suits them, often with assistance from banks providing foreign exchange services. The banks don't need to be US banks, and goods priced in USD do not need to be paid for in USD if you go through an intermediary, which is common practice.
Countries do ask for US dollars in order to trade. You can notionally trade in another currency, but the value of this currency is related to the number of US dollars it can buy, and eventually that is what ends up happening. Some countries will set up currency swap mechanisms in order to allow for trade without relying on the dollar, but these are few and far between. It is generally not possible to do such trade without at some level going through the US dollar. This is a natural consequences of the fact that the US dollar is the only dominant reserve currency, meaning that it is by far the currency with the largest trade surplus. The structural reasons for this trade surplus, which I won't get into, are the reason why international trade ends up with the US dollar. For these reasons, the threat if being banned from using the US dollar, if your assets aren't seized, is sufficient to greatly dissuade trade.
Cuba is not the only example of this. American secondary sanctions on Iran led to the cancellation of contracts between European companies and Iranian companies en masse, and were cited as the reason why it happened.
> The parent comment stands up. The embargo is not a reasonable explanation for the poor circumstances of the Cubans.
Cuba has a GDP per capita of 9500$ USD nominal (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...) - which is above the average for Latin America and the Cardibbean. We can look at Iran for an example of a country under an identical sanctions regime, which suffered a 50% fall in GDP. The thesis that most of its economic problems come from the sanctions regime seems strong, as the closest analog suffered a halving of GDP and because it is nonetheless economically a strong performer for the region.
If you look at a microscopic level, the lack of access to specific products is a common theme in Cuban economic problems, and this is certainly attributable to the sanctions regime.
I went on a student tour of the USSR as a college student in 1991, arranged through my University (U of Alabama). I was getting a minor in Russian language, and it seemed like a fun trip. It actually got MORE fun because in the run-up to the trip (in spring, 91) there was some dissent in the USSR and many parents wouldn't let their kids go. In order to create a large enough trip, the University opened registration up to university-area retirees, so we ended up with a cohort of probably 30 folks. Half of us were under 25, and the other half over 65. It was the first time I'd ever really hung out with older people who weren't relatives, and that's really something we don't do enough of. Listen, if you have a chance to drink with WWII Hellcat pilots, do it.
Anyway.
Back then, you took certain American commodities with you to trade -- Levi's, Marlboros, etc. We met a pair of enterprising young black marketeers -- our age -- in Moscow, and hit off so well with them that they met us in (what was then) Leningrad for our last port of call. It was very cool, trying to converse in broken Russian and English, and generally being over the moon to have "friends" from the other side of the Cold War that defined both our countries up to then.
It went so well with Andrei and Volodya that, somehow, they finagled visas, and the next fall came to Tuscaloosa to visit us. Andrei immediately took up with my girlfriend's pal, but Volodya was shyer and stayed with Cassie and I for several weeks. And during that time -- and this would've been fall 91 into winter 92 -- obviously we did some shopping.
I remember vividly taking Volodya to the local supermarket, where we bought the sorts of cheap things students buy. Except obviously our budgets as upper-middle-class college kids allowed us things absurdly beyond the reach of anybody Volodya knew in Moscow -- like fresh fruit and vegetables in January. He was stunned, and we were kind of shamed by the plenty we had access to.
Then he saw the bananas. He really wanted bananas. He wouldn't ask for bananas. So I grabbed a bunch and put them in the basket.
"Are you rich?" No. I have a good student job. "Are your parents in government?" No. My dad's dead; Cassie's dad is a doctor in another state. "Anyone can shop here?" Absolutely.
I don't pretend for a moment the US was then, or is now, some kind of paradise. We fail our poor in material and constant ways. But those moments in the Bruno's with Volodya are something I'll never forget.