Fidel is dead

I'm old enough to remember when Fidel was viewed as a democratic rebel fighting against a corrupt dictatorship.  Of course there is a story there about how he became a communist and I don't know enough about it to tell it here.

I should point out that America was no angel at that time in the way we dealt with our Latin neighbors, in some ways treating them as our protectorates and interfering in their Governments.

Many Cubans, upper to middle class fled Cuba as their assets were seized and in some cases they feared for their lives.  Our attempts to dislodge him failed and the conflict almost led to WW3 over the missile crisis.

I think Cuba highlights the greatest problem of our time in some ways.  It was a country where a relatively small number of people did very well, but most of the population lived in poverty.  This is not an unusual state in the world we live in.  Now the people in poverty can aspire to be one of the fortunate ones in that type of society and for simplicities sake let me call that the Republican model.

Certain people succeed very well and those people create economic opportunities and jobs.  Those opportunities and jobs allow others to climb the ladder of success and become one of the fortunate people.  If you don't grasp the opportunities and succeed, it is your own fault and the fortunate people are not responsible.  If it is truly something beyond your control, they may help you some, but if you are just too lazy to work or gain skills you remain poor as an incentive.

Now this model has some appeal in that it allows those who are doing well to ease their conscience and the mass of poor people don't hate them, they only envy them, and hope to become them.  Of course there are no pure meritocracies and many of the successful people got a tremendous head start being the children of successful people.  The success of this type of system would have to be measured by how upwardly mobile the population is and how new wealth is distributed.  The result of free markets normally leads to wealthy people becoming even more wealthy and while there is some trickle down it doesn't reduce the gaps between rich and poor,

Now this was a simplistic explanation and there are other variations but fundamentally this is pretty much along the lines of wealthy people deserve to be wealthy because they earned it.

The other end of that spectrum is effectively communism where the group shares in the benefits each according to their abilities and needs.  The net result of this in a country such as Cuba is that equalizing the wealth means no one lives all that well, but in some ways since everyone is in the same boat there is a sense of camaraderie and togetherness.  During the great depression in this country, by many accounts there was a greater sense of community and willingness to help each other because of how much everyone was facing the same problems.

I'm not maintaining that Cuba is by any means a great example, I really don't know enough.  I do know that in general certain things are guaranteed to all, like health care and basic sustenance.  However, it is still effectively a third world country and when the overall level of wealth is not very high spreading it around is not the greatest lifestyle.

But individualism versus group is the bottom line and in this country we generally go with individualism.