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Would you slash your wrists, or start installing? »
December 07, 2013
Totten's next dispatch -- Havana
This got stomped when I last floated it, so lets try again.
This is but a taste of what Totten wrote, not even a taste really, more of a wafting aroma. Hit the link and savor the whole dish....now it looks like a set on the History Channel’s show Life After People, only it’s still inhabited. Baghdad in the middle of the Iraq war was in better shape physically. I know because I spent months there and wrote a book about it.
Roofs have collapsed. Balcony doors hang not vertically but at angles, allowing passersby to see inside homes where the interior paint is just as peeled as it is on the outside. I could even see inside some people’s homes through gashes in exterior walls. The weight of rain water knocks whole buildings down as if they were dynamited...
Having transcended the evils of capitalism and with all the worldly needs of the citizen provided for, the Cuban govt has no need for such tomfoolery as "minimum wage"; instead the notion of "maximum wage" seems to have taken root.
...Trust me: you would not want to live there, especially not on a ration card and the government’s twenty dollar maximum salary. Not that additional money would do you much good. Where would you spend it? Not even in the slums of Mexico have I seen such pitiful shops...
Viva la Revolucion comrades.
Coming soon to an (ex)Superpower near you.
[UPDATE] Totten has written about a large component of the restraints in Cuba being mental - the prison is essentially in people's minds now.
A similar thing seems to happening in the DPRK:
...Australian Mark Freeman has visited the DPRK four times and is preparing an academic paper on the North Korean propaganda. He doubts the fences in the northeast are live and believes that they are the relics of a more effective and extensive system.
“In North Korea, the electric fence, the barbed wire, is in people’s minds. They have been very effective in making the outside world appear very, very dangerous and unpredictable,” says Freeman.