The USSR went from having the breadbasket of the world to going into debt to buy wheat from America. Venezuela used to export gasoline, now it’s having to pay others to refine its crude. Cuba used to be the hub for sugar, now it’s rationing it. Socialism works. Sometimes it works so well there’s nothing left.
“In 1894, one year before Cuba’s third war of independence, the island was producing close to a million tons of sugar a year. By 1959, there were 156 sugar mills operating in the country, with a total annual production of 5.6 million tons. In the eighties, Cuba was producing an average of eight million tons per year. But this year, we’ll be lucky if we get 400,000 tons. It’s a national disaster,” he told me. Lázaro said that last year’s harvest was the worst on record, with a total of just 480,000 tons – the lowest in the last century and a half.
The dismantling of Cuba’s sugar industry began in 2002 under orders from Fidel Castro, and was aimed at restructuring the sector to make it more efficient. To this end, more than half of the 156 mills operating in the country, which employed around half a million people, were shuttered, and all remaining resources were concentrated in the 70 plants that remained, with a focus on achieving smaller but more productive harvests. “The experiment was a failure: tens of thousands of people lost their jobs, most of the mills disappeared, and production plummeted,” Lázaro told me. “Last year there were only 36 mills still in operation, and this year, that number has dropped to 23. The forecast for the 2022-2023 harvest was 400,000 tons of processed sugar, which is barely enough to satisfy national consumption, but at this rate they won’t even manage that much,”
In between the five-hour speeches and chats with Hollywood celebs, turns out Fidel didn’t know anything about running a country or much of anything else.
Lefties blame most of Cuba’s problems on the U.S. embargo, as if it doesn’t have a world full of trading partners, but how do you blame Cuba’s inability to produce its own cash crop?
Lázaro was outraged. He said that this month, in his neighborhood, “they only gave out” one pound of sugar, when the normal ration stipulated by the government’s “supplies booklet” is four pounds per person. “In the bodega, at subsidized prices, a pound of sugar costs eight Cuban pesos, but since there’s no sugar anywhere, people have to buy it on the black market for 100 or 150 pesos. Just imagine! A pension in Cuba is between 1,000 and 1,500 pesos!” Then Lázaro took a turn for the philosophical, quoting the famous Criollo landowner who once remarked: “without sugar, there is no country.” “Well,” said Lázaro, “we’ve reached the point where in the country of sugar, there is no sugar.”
!Viva la revolucion!
Engineered crisis, or should I say, the latest engineered crisis. There are currently salad and tomato shortages in the UK nobody seems to know why the socialist EU can’t grow tomatoes anymore.
Egg shortage due to killing chickens to protect them from bird flu. Beautiful logical reasoning.
Sunflower oil shortage due to Ukraine along with oil shortage wheat shortage and Scots porridge oats shortage.
We need a shortage of government officials.
Winter season fresh veggies in part come from green houses which are a big deal in the UK with green houses covering dozens of acres, but with the skyrocketing cost of methane and electricity they are no longer economical to operate so no UK grown winter veggies. Brexit has thrown a monkey wrench into the importing of fresh veggies from southern Europe and North Africa/Israel as alternative sources.
North Africa and Israel are not part of brexit.
The Pimp Imperative Principle resolves itself into two components:
#1. It is job of the Pimp to be the Pimp, and, as corollary,
#2. To keep any other motherfucker from being the Pimp.
According to this metric, Cuba’s governance has been perfect. The leadership are men of principle.
MF is quite common. !
All married men who produce infant with spouse
and then make love with spouse become MF !
Eddie
“Production is the application of reason to the problem of survival.” – Ayn Rand
Prosperity depends on individual free minds having the freedom to think, the right to act upon their thinking, and having the right to keep the product of their efforts. But those political rights can only emerge and be sacredly respected in a society that recognizes that every individual is an end in himself and not the means for the ends of others. A society where the dominant moral code is not altruism and sacrifice but rational selfishness and profit.
I know that religious conservatives who are thoroughly invested in altruism and sacrifice are tired of hearing this from me but it is the inescapable, factual, reality here on earth.
I’ll probably be told, please go away, selfishness is evil, just go away, you’re not changing any minds, you will never change any minds, selfishness is evil, period. I can go away, but the fact of reality will still remain, capitalism depends on the acceptance and intransigent defense of rational selfishness.
Today’s religious conservatives are on your side but you are too anti Christian to believe me.
A study was once done that showed conservatives donate more to charity than so called liberals. Of course liberals did not like this study and my liberal friend cited some or other counter study that showed how the original study was flawed. I don’t remember the specifics and I don’t care to.
The fact is that there is no pot of gold at end of your rainbow. America only gets more socialist as church attendance declines an in the end you will go away because you are not the sort of person that holds out in an untenable situation, Only true believers do that.
Bravo ! Work hard to get your children well educated and hopefully
they will not join the three thumbs down, uneducated clowns, below article !
My spouse worked hard and got me educated by reading Ayn Rand !
I’ve got a long way to go !
Eddie
He, like Rand, has no children and therefore has no idea how stupid it is to see the word selfish as a positive value.
Thanks Mo. Like the blue jays (scrub jays) I watch around here. If they didn’t feed their kids they would become extinct shortly thereafter.
No one reads Ayn Rand any more .
Great article!
Tragically hilarious.
Reminded me of Rhodesia also, once the breadbasket of Africa.
Shows the failure of top-down planning by government.
It seems like a joke, or farcical exaggeration, but really, what I have seen in the SF Bay Area is, while there are a good number of people who understand business, they generally are driven out of politics if they try to enter. I only knew one good politician who was in office for a long time that understood business. All the other good people who tried to get elected were eventually driven out, by Progressives mainly, who really can’t do anything right when it comes to business or practical matters, like clearing drains or fixing potholes, when all they have to do is order city workers who are already employed to do those jobs, clear the drains or fix the potholes.
That was Trump’s big advantage, he was a businessman, understood business.
He understands business, he doesn’t understand Capitalism. Some of Capitalism’s greatest enemies are businessmen (Jeff Bezos, Bil Gates, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg).
Herbert Hoover, an alleged defender of Capitalism, did more to discredit Capitalism in the eyes of the public than Karl Marx or an AOC ever could.
That’s why it’s so detrimental to the cause of freedom and Capitalism to put a man in the White House who proclaims himself a champion of freedom and Capitalism, doesn’t have a clue to what they really are, and proceeds with a mixed-economy, grab bag, of contradictions and calls it Freedom and Capitalism. Freedom and Capitalism end up getting blamed for the catastrophes of government interventions and controls, the interventions and controls get praised for stopping the catastrophes by the Leftists, and then the public demands more interventions and controls.
Sadly big pharma and big government understood him better.
Thanks Una, good point.
I’d rather have a practical businessman than a theoretical academic who understands capitalism.
Thanks Mo, me too.
Officially 8 pesos a lb, but they’re paying 150, lol, when they can get it. How typical. Price controls, don’t work? Who knew? Zero sugar production is the commies’ idea of sustainable. My dog gets more beef in a day than the average Cuban does in a month (though the dems are busy ‘fixing’ that particular ‘problem’ of prosperity.
The commies couldn’t put “a chicken in every pot,” and we upped them with every kind of meat, fruit, and vegetable, cheap, refrigerators, microwaves, washers, dryers, multiple TVs, heat and AC in every home, and two+ cars in every driveway.. The soviets didn’t believe we cold do it. The dems are embarrassed by it, and are determined to make most of it beyond the means of the average American. “Climate change,” (a self fulfilling prophecy) is just the excuse.
Thanks Cowboy! I remember when Yeltsin visited USA and Lesley Stahl (I think) took him to an American supermarket, he was shocked by how much stuff there was, and asked why we didn’t help the Russians do something similar.
Trying to explain to you that the largest group of people in America who believe in individual rights are what you call “religious conservatives” and that you cannot win the struggle against the Left without them is like playing football without a helmet, and I refuse to undertake the job without compensation (as an objectivist, you should approve of that!). However, I will point out where you, following in Rand’s footsteps, are making your central error in the hope you may eventually recognize the truth.
Rand thought that those she called “conservatives” (she mistakenly included a lot of the reactionaries of her day or as we would call them today, “RINOs/Establishment-men” in that category) were not defenders of individual rights because they were religious. Indeed, she made the same mistake about America’s founders, which was a more serious error because it is refuted by actual American history, namely the successful founding of this nation. (continued below)
(continued)
Neither the Founders nor today’s true conservatives are adherents of altruism; rather, they believed that our rights are inherent in us. While they believed in a supreme Deity as the Creator, the unalienable nature of our rights does not depend on that belief but only on the fact of our creation, by God or nature as you prefer, as human beings.
Of course Leonard Peikoff, Rand’s heir, took her errors and magnified them a hundredfold, waging a pointless and futile war against religion, and you would be wise not to repeat his mistakes.
The moral code of rational selfishness did not exist in explicit, unequivocal, logically, demonstrably, this-reality-on-earth, irrefutable formulation until Ayn Rand formulated it.
The Founders would have had no idea what rational selfishness is and neither does any religious conservative who hasn’t read Ayn Rand.
In any case if Judeo-Christian conservatives on the Right are on board and in agreement with Ayn Rand’s historic, paradigm-shift, formulation of rational selfishness (and that’s a big if) that’s wonderful. But what you seem to miss is that on the point of rational selfishness (that every man is and end himself and not the means to the ends of others), your enemies are not us the Objectivists. Your enemies are the Judeo-Christians on the Left who are intransigent in their belief that the TRUE interpretation of Holy Scripture demands altruism and self-sacrifice for neighbor, stranger, and even enemies.
(continued)…
There is no Objectivist organization anywhere receiving tax-payer dollars to aid and abet the open borders, illegal alien invasion and destruction of America in the name of altruism and sacrifice for neighbor, stranger, and even enemies. But the Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, churches and Jewish organizations on the Left, your fellow Judeo-Christians on the Left are fully dedicated to doing just that as we speak.
You need to convince your fellow Jews and Christians on the Left that rational selfishness and not altruism is the truly noble and moral ideal, not us Objectivists.
Not trying to begin debate, but
sounds Jewish to me !
Eddie
PS…………..we thrive if left alone
Reasons we need to keep depending upon the 50th State(Hawaii for our Sugar as well as C&H
On the upside, no one’s obese!