For underneath her borders, the devil draws no lines...
I want to say something about Scott Horton's work on the Siegelman case, but Balko's stuff is probably more important, because while people could maybe theoretically muster some outrage against a politically-motivated hollow case against a former governor, basically nobody except their families, the Innocence Project, and Balko gives two fucks about black guys down south convicted of serious crimes. I don't. These stories show up and horrify me and then I go back to work, whereas Balko has been working on getting the Cory Maye travesty rectified for three years now.
I should buy an Agitator shirt or something, since I can't think of any other way to subsidize Balko's work (except for subscribing to Reason, which I don't want to do, no offense intended to Julian Sanchez).
Like it wouldn't suck enough to be convicted of a crime you didn't commit. Add in "raping and murdering your girlfriend's baby." Jesus.
looks like a skinhead who should be stomping on someone's face with his boots
And is from Indiana!
I'm kind of tickled by the discovery that I can support his site by purchasing everything from a BBQ apron to thong underware.
You can donate right on his site.
Indeed, as I just discovered (and did).
The Castro stuff is odd. I don't have the knowledge I need to actually support my opinions, but my vague sense of Cuba under Fidel is that there's some very unusual good stuff about it, which doesn't at all excuse all of the awful political oppression and so forth, but is worth talking about except that it's hard to talk about without sounding uncomplicatedly approving.
Karon's piece addresses the social mobility; I've read some things about race relations that make it sound very decent; the whole exporting health care to other poor countries -- except on the political freedom front, it seems like any awfully well run very very poor country. But I haven't got enough of a basis to talk about how much Cuba's status as a very very poor country is related to its government (aside from our embargo).
Eh. It's one of the very many topics where I'd like to see better educated people than I talk about it a lot more.
I don't have the knowledge I need to actually support my opinions
Me either, but my sense is that Castro was not particularly bad by Latin American strongman standards, and certainly no worse than some of our former best buddies down in that region.
Yeah. That one's a hard argument to make, though. True as it is, saying "Sure, he's an oppressive dictator who locks people up arbitrarily for political reasons. So's your guy," is a bad sounding sentence.
I'm kind of tickled by the discovery that I can support his site by purchasing everything from a BBQ apron to thong underware.
Do you get to keep it?
I didn't realize that you could do that.
I am a big fan of Balko. I regularly read www.theagitator.com.
From Balko's slate article:
Hayne isn't board-certified in forensic pathology, though he often testifies that he is.Surely that is, like, an actual crime?
7
"Eh. It's one of the very many topics where I'd like to see better educated people than I talk about it a lot more."
Brad DeLong is very negative on Castro. See here or here .
Not a lot of people who testify for the prosecution get prosecuted for perjury. It's one of those conflict of interest thingies.
Me either, but my sense is that Castro was not particularly bad by Latin American strongman standards, and certainly no worse than some of our former best buddies down in that region.
Gawd only knows. But I do think that people who cannot imagine why anyone would be conflicted on Castro--per Karon--either assumes the best case scenario for the development of Cuba or only considers the Cuban population in gross, and doesn't account for cane-cutter to art curator sorts of movement. (My further idle speculation, based on little more than a few conversations with a few immigrants (back when I didn't support detention and deportation for the pure fun of it), is that, for all the problems with social mobility in the US, we (esp., maybe, Blue State types) can't really begin to imagine the locked-in, very hierarchical life that much of the world experiences. (USA! USA! USA!))
14: Yeah, that was my sense of the DeLong posts -- that he wasn't even considering the social mobility/reduced inequality gains. Not that he wasn't weighing them enough, but that they hadn't made it into his consideration at all.
7: Agreed. And I didn't like DeLong's pieces (though I like DeLong). My own opinions about Fidel and Cuba are admittedly sentimental, but they're informed primarily by anecdotes like the one Karon tells about "Antonio"--stuff I've been told by friends who *do* know about LA and have been there.
I hope that Cuba manages to transition to a wealthier and more politically open country without losing its really impressive social equality. And that the US isn't so fucking assholish that it insists on ruining the good things Cuba's accomplished before we agree to lift the fucking embargo and stop being assholes.
DeLong is probably a really nice guy, but the bottom line is, he's an orthodox economist, and that gives you a lot of baggage when it comes to considering things like that.
How long can one coast on the credit for past actions? Right - Batista was a supreme asshole who ran a horrible government. Castro was a hero for kicking him out. In 1959. He also stood up to the Kennedy administrations attempts to assassinate him and the various attempts of unpleasant ex-Batista types to reinstate the old government.
But man, it's fifty years later, and at some point the continuing oppressive dictatorship slash sex-trade paradise slash has unpleasant enemies has to outweigh a few years long ago.
Well, to the extent it's real, the social equality stuff is ongoing. Karon's anecdote, and other's I've heard, is current.
that he wasn't even considering the social mobility/reduced inequality gains.
I think a lot of this stuff--like most stuff; that our models suck is not really the fault of our modelers--is really hard to quantify. What is a secular Iraqi society that allows for some sort of public equality worth to an Iraqi woman today? Broad, significant, and violent political repression and a non-trivial chance that someone in Ba'athist party will rape you without fear of consequences? Don't know. But the choice isn't clear to me.
But man, it's fifty years later, and at some point the continuing oppressive dictatorship slash sex-trade paradise slash has unpleasant enemies has to outweigh a few years long ago.
I don't think anyone disagrees with you. The question is, if your choices are (a) Batista, and whatever you could have, at the time, reasonably assumed would have followed, or (b) Castro, and what did follow, inc. exactly all of the things that you note, which would choose? And I take Karon's point to be that a lot Cubans recognize all the evils of Castro, eagerly await change, and still pick (b).
19 is exactly right. And the social equality staff is pretty fucking important, enough so to have strongly sustained Castro's popularity and cult of personality.
It's intriguing how well "Chalabi" works as adjective.
The stuff about the Mississippi ME in Balko's piece reinforces the idea that the Deep South is a strange realm in which basic laws of criminal justice don't apply. By contrast, I remember that when my mom was chief ME in Vermont, her counterpart in Connecticut lost her job for having her dog in the morgue.
What is a secular Iraqi society that allows for some sort of public equality worth to an Iraqi woman today? Broad, significant, and violent political repression and a non-trivial chance that someone in Ba'athist party will rape you without fear of consequences? Don't know. But the choice isn't clear to me.
Geez, if what I've been reading (say, Riverbend among others) is even close to accurate, the choice there isn't even close -- pre-war Iraq was much better for the woman on the street in terms of safety, personal freedom, and economic opportunity. That's not saying that some women might not have supported, and still support, the war in retrospect, but I'd think you'd have to argue that any Iraqi woman who did would have to either be religious enough that she thought of the increased imposition of religious control over women as a good thing, or would be supporting it selflessly -- worse for her, but in her eyes enough better for other people that the tradeoff was worth it.
Yeah, I read the anecdote. Really bad prior government followed by a cult-of-personality dictatorship for fifty years is going to cause some serious loyalty. So Batista was so bad that as long as Castro remains better than that, it doesn't matter?
So Batista was so bad that as long as Castro remains better than that, it doesn't matter?
The life of a black sharecropper under a racist social regime is, perhaps, not entirely a picnic.
(Which is not to say that Castro's crimes "don't matter." But if Castro would have to have many times worse than he was to make going back to the social system of Batista's regime look good.)
Delong may be exagerrating the wealth of pre-Castro Cuba--certainly it was unequal as all hell--but it was never Haiti. Latin America does have richer & poorer countries, & those differences have tended to persist through a lot of changes in gov't.
Cuba scores pretty well on the UN human development index, but Mexico almost ties it, & Chile, Argentina, Uruguay & Costa Rica do better.
On the other hand, a lot of countries in the region do a lot worse.
We tend to discuss this as if it's Castro v. Pinochet, not Castro v. Bachelet. But the # of right wing U.S. client military dictators in Latin America has actually declined quite a lot in recent years.
Not that our Cuba policy isn't fucked (the Chalabi analogy is apt) & I guess it's hard NOT to see it through that lens.
DeLong is probably a really nice guy, but the bottom line is, he's an orthodox economist, and that gives you a lot of baggage when it comes to considering things like that.
Yeah. Sometimes we forget how right-wing the average economist is.
11: as suggested by the sentence that follows (and confirmed here), he is apparently certified by organizations other than the standard one. So presumably he's not actually lying, just relying on ambiguity (to the extent that's a valid distinction, and in the perjury context, it is).
I dealt with a case involving a bogus bite-mark specialist a couple years ago, just appalling. A bunch of counties finally caught on, documented his complete incompetence, and stopped using him, but the state (of course) dug in its heels against unwinding convictions based largely on his testimony.
But the # of right wing U.S. client military dictators in Latin America has actually declined quite a lot in recent years.
But there are a lot of reasons for that, including, I think, the dissolution of the USSR. I'm not sure that was foreseeable in the late 1950s.
So Batista was so bad that as long as Castro remains better than that, it doesn't matter?
Again, I don't have good firsthand information here, so I'm not claiming to have the facts to solidly establish this, just pointing at what I've heard about Cuba. And that's, for example, that on race relations, Cuba now isn't just better than Cuba under Batista, it's better than Miami -- not just 'not terrible', but in some limited areas of measurement 'extraordinarily good'.
15
"Yeah, that was my sense of the DeLong posts -- that he wasn't even considering the social mobility/reduced inequality gains. Not that he wasn't weighing them enough, but that they hadn't made it into his consideration at all. "
If you reduce inequality by making everybody poor is that really a gain?
Yeah, but if you look hard enough you can always find some area of improvement. Mussolini made the trains run on time! The mujahadeen kicked out the Soviet invaders! Doesn't mean that either were good things for their country, and coddling dictators because they have a few useful attributes has usually (and rightly!) been held up as reprehensible behavior.
By making everyone as poor as the poorest people beforehand? No. Bringing down average wealth while bringing the bottom up, like from cane worker to art historian? Maybe, depending on the circumstances, and probably in the eyes of people who would have been the poorest beforehand.
34: My understanding is that Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time. But if he had, wouldn't you think that, Fascist or no, other railroaders might do well to look at the Italian trains and how they were managed, and try to figure out if anything about the railroading depended on the evils of Fascism, or if the improvements could be morally exported?
Bringing down average wealth while bringing the bottom up, like from cane worker to art historian?
Art historian who drinks sugar water for breakfast, doesn't eat lunch, and goes to bed when it gets dark because there's no power and nothing to do.
I preemptively analogy-ban myself by saying this is like the guys who say "what poor third-worlders need is super-cheap laptops!" What they need is to not be poor third-worlders.
" What they need is to not be poor third-worlders.
I don't think that anyone disagrees. But, as I understand it, it turns out to be a tougher problem to solve than you seem to think. That is, I think the third-world extends beyond Cuba.
Let's also keep in mind that the poverty problem in Cuba isn't entirely Castro's fault.
Yeah, there's no dispute that Cuba is terribly, terribly, terribly poor, and that poverty is bad for the people who have to be poor. Wealth is good, poverty is bad. But for someone who would have been a terribly, terribly poor cane worker otherwise, the chance to be a terribly, terribly poor art historian is something, no?
(And of course the US embargo has to fit into some explanation of why Cuba's so terribly poor, no? If not, and this is a real question that I'm hoping someone knows the answer to, how is Cuba's poverty attributable to Castro's economic policies on some level more specific than Socialism Will Make You Poor?)
but my sense is that Castro was not particularly bad by Latin American strongman standards
As dictators go, you could do a lot worse than Fidel Castro, yes. And that's about the best you can say for the man, IMO.
I used to know an old record-seller who was a big Castro fan. You could count on hearing all the latest about Fidel whenever you went in the store. I could never tell if he really was that fond of Castro, or if it was just a put-on that he never got tired of putting-on.
Art historian who drinks sugar water for breakfast, doesn't eat lunch, and goes to bed when it gets dark because there's no power and nothing to do.
As opposed to cane worker who drinks sugar water for breakfast, doesn't eat lunch, goes to bed when it gets dark, and works like a donkey all day in the cane fields rather than doing interesting work that he enjoys.
but my sense is that Castro was not particularly bad by Latin American strongman standards
As dictators go, you could do a lot worse than Fidel Castro, yes. And that's about the best you can say for the man, IMO.
I used to know an old record-seller who was a big Castro fan. You could count on hearing all the latest about Fidel whenever you went in the store. I could never tell if he really was that fond of Castro, or if it was just a put-on that he never got tired of putting-on.
35
"... Bringing down average wealth while bringing the bottom up, like from cane worker to art historian? ..."
As pointed on in 37 it doesn't seem this made a big material difference. So it depends on how much value you put on "art historian" vrs "cane worker". Philistine that I am, I put very little.
But the # of right wing U.S. client military dictators in Latin America has actually declined quite a lot in recent years.
Wow, but that says a lot.
I read the second of the two links to DeLong in Tony Karon's comment thread, and it was depressing. Both DeLong himself -- he compares Cuba's potential development with "northern Mexico?" I'd expect a misleading comparison like that from Glenn Reynolds -- and the comments. Probably the best example:
Slavador Allende, a legally elected Marxist president of a liberal democratic republic, was overthrown, with American support, by right-wing dictatorial thug Augusto Pinochet in 1973.
...
No American has the right to criticize how Castro went about achieving his goals when we eradicated those who tried to achieve similar goals using "our" way. Castro, like Ho Chi Minh before him, came to us FIRST! They wanted our way to be their way, they wanted our system to make their nations better for their people, but we preferred our pet criminal dictators. To now say Castro should have used our methods is disingenuous, two-faced bullshit of the highest order.
Posted by: Sarcastro
But I guess quoting that means I support Castro and agree with everything he's done, so never mind.
44: You, apparently, were not raised to aspire to a job that's "indoors, with no heavy lifting." Even on a purely material level, someone with a safe, not-physically strenuous job is better off on a restricted diet than a manual laborer.
So it depends on how much value you put on "art historian" vrs "cane worker". Philistine that I am Having never cut cane for a living, I put very little.
("Indoors, with no heavy lifting," as a description of a desirable job, is a quote from my father, just in case the quotes confused anyone. Or maybe he got it from somewhere else.)
(And of course the US embargo has to fit into some explanation of why Cuba's so terribly poor, no? If not, and this is a real question that I'm hoping someone knows the answer to, how is Cuba's poverty attributable to Castro's economic policies on some level more specific than Socialism Will Make You Poor?)
I will quote from the article:
But what was Cuba going to do to keep its economy going in the mean time? "You mark my words, they will sit down with Fidel..." Okay. But what are you guys thinking about how to proceed now that the Soviet subsidy has gone. Will you follow the Chinese route? "We will never buckle before the imperialists. Fidel will find a way..." And so it went on.
Cuba was about keeping Castro in power. You think a European coalition couldn't have negotiated a "Castro leaves, embargo lifted, rich Miami fuckers don't get their land back" settlement?
That doesn't address the question, though. If the only reason Cuba was poorer than comparable countries (and whether it is seems to depend on what the comparable countries should be) is that we're punishing them for their political system, the fact that they could obey us and stop the punishment still doesn't make Cuban poverty attributable to Castro's policies. (It might be, I don't know. But I haven't seem it spelled out what Castro's done to make Cuba poor.)
So it depends on how much value you put on "art historian" vrs "cane worker". Philistine that I am, I put very little.
No. It depends how much value you put on the testimony of someone who has actually made that leap, as opposed to on your own armchair theorizing.
49: See the other thing Karon says:
what Fidel represented to South Africa's new leaders was a symbol of independence, of casting off colonial and neo-colonial overlords and defending your sovereignty, against Quixotic odds, from an arrogant power.
I am guessing that there are still cane workers or the equivalent in Cuba, doing the hard work & sugar water thing. Everyone did not become an art historian. General upward mobility, a Rawlsian "is the worst off better off" is the question, and possibly the question DeLong is posing when he opposes Castro.
Having just written 53, I would assume that with the medical system and education etc, that the lowest of Cubans is better off than the worst off in Guatemala or Brazil.
And I thought DeLong was a Rawlsian. In a Rawlsian system, if for structural reasons there are a million millionaires and one starving person, is violent revolution justified? I think it is.
Economists
a) look too much at mean or median conditions, and I think we should have gotten past that with ToJ
b) Are really, justifiably or not, always staring at the edge of the precipice of societal breakdown or Malthusian nightmare. Not necessarily pessimistic, just really aware there are tipping points with no certainty of where those tp's are.
The Dow can hit zero tomorrow. Believe it.
51
"No. It depends how much value you put on the testimony of someone who has actually made that leap, as opposed to on your own armchair theorizing."
What is the testimony of some handpicked regime lackey worth? And I expect you could find the occasional son of cane workers who did well under Batista too.
56: Sure, once you get into "maybe none of the anecdotes are true", the conversation is over. If they aren't, there's nothing to talk about, and I don't have firsthand knowledge of conditions in Cuba.
How about those Red Sox?
I don't get it. UHC, albeit at the level a poor country can afford, good education system. True. Yay. That should only inspire mixed feelings if you believe that that's the only way of getting those things. Or let's look at it another way - Cuba is easily the most successful of the Third World countries which took the left wing authoritarian development model. Let's compare them to their right wing counterparts - South Korea and Taiwan - started off poorer, dealt with embargoes, and ended up with great educational systems and universal health care, plus prosperity. They've also been democratic for close to two decades now - Your arguments for Castro taken logically imply that what progressives should really want is right wing, US client state dictatorships in all poor countries. Chiang and Park, heroes to all leftwingers who reject namby-pamby liberalism.
. Let's compare them to their right wing counterparts - South Korea and Taiwan - started off poorer, dealt with embargoes, and ended up with great educational systems and universal health care, plus prosperity.
Wouldn't it make more sense to pick the right wing counterparts in the region? Monroe doctrine, etc. And, again, I don't think anyone is defending communism or support for Castro as a good idea going forward.
dealt with embargoes
Like, from China? I don't know that you can really argue that the starting points and conditions since those points are comparable. (Maybe you can, but it's not obvious to me, you'd have to do it at length.)
What you need to keep in mind when judging Castro is that the man has stayed in power for almost fifty years and is only giving it up because his health has detoriated. This dispite enormous odds against him, what with a certain superpower not a hundred miles away not liking him much. Unlike the Eastern European socalled socialist countries, his regime did not crumble once Soviet support was withdrawn, nor did Cuba go the chinese or Vietnamese way of economic but not political freedom. At the same time his regime has been repressive, but it hasn't engaged in mass murdering opponents in the same way US backed dictatorships in central America have done, or even (afaik) in the kind of repression that China went through.
That suggests to me that the reason Castro has survived so long in the face of so much difficulty is because the Cuban people want him to and believe he is their legitamite leader, despite some of the nastier features of the system he built.
What might help with this acceptance is the example of neighbouring countries like Haiti, with its history of brutal dictatorships, short periods of democracy undermined by Uncle Sam and civil wars/chaos...
Cuba is poor, but doesn't have the extreme inequality of many Latin American countries, has free healthcare and school system for all its citizens annd has been able to go its own way despite superpower pressure. Would Cubans want to give up these hardwon achievements in return for the often dubious freedoms of liberal democracy as defined by US foreign policy?
What is the testimony of some handpicked regime lackey worth?
Worth more than the combined value of all the opinions here, certainly.
57
"Sure, once you get into "maybe none of the anecdotes are true", the conversation is over. If they aren't, there's nothing to talk about, and I don't have firsthand knowledge of conditions in Cuba."
Well, you can talk about statistical evidence as opposed to anecdotal evidence. And I am not suggesting that Karon made the guy up, I am just doubting how much weight to give his affection for Castro. If you tell people lies their entire lives some of them will believe.
At the same time his regime has been repressive, but it hasn't engaged in mass murdering opponents in the same way US backed dictatorships in central America have done, or even (afaik) in the kind of repression that China went through.
About the same level of repression, murder, and torture as Pinochet, less than the CA states - though he faced far less armed opposition as well, and far less than China. So what? The fact that the US right has supported worse and their depictions of him are way over the top isn't an endorsement - less bad than Mao or Monte is not a reason to have mixed feelings about Castro.
The rest - obviously he has more support than the EE socialist states. That is largely because he overthrew a dictatorship supported by the local imperialist power rather than the reverse. Again, so what? If the EE 'people's democracies' had been replaced by soft fascist regimes with mediocre economic policies, significant popular support, and staunch US backing would you be taking the same line?
On South Korea and Taiwan - arguably less significant embargo, on the other hand the former was a bombed out impoverished wasteland, and being cut off from China and N. Korea did matter.
shorter Martin Wisse - Dick Cheney and John Yoo would be my heroes if only they supported UHC and weren't such damn bleeding heart liberals on civil liberties.
62 - same applies to the folks down in Miami.
That suggests to me that the reason Castro has survived so long in the face of so much difficulty is because the Cuban people want him to and believe he is their legitamite leader, despite some of the nastier features of the system he built.
Even to the extent which this is true, it is sort of empty. Living in a completely closed society, people in Cuba have no idea what the relevant alternatives are. Via the apparatus of a one-party state, control of the media, and neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, Castro has defined what political reality is for them for three generations.
("Indoors, with no heavy lifting," as a description of a desirable job, is a quote from my father, just in case the quotes confused anyone. Or maybe he got it from somewhere else.)
Specifically from Bob Dole, in history's best ever response (in 1976) to the question "Why do you want to be vice president?"
Living in a completely closed society, people in Cuba have no idea what the relevant alternatives are.
What? Cuba isn't North Korea, you know.
Living in a completely closed society
my high school friend married a Cuban, when they were students in Russia, then they lived in our country teaching Spanish, doing a restaurant business
i heard they immigrated to Peru now with their two children and i thought isn't it dangerous, they abduct people! may be no more than elsewhere
69: I'd guess there's a common source, rather than that Dad was quoting Dole.