this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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I guess it depends on who you're talking to. Lower info people who only know "Cuba bad because Communism" are - at least in my experience - more receptive to "Well, I think I can understand his appeal. After all, he liberated millions of enslaved Cubans from the sugar plantations". If you're talking to a neoliberal debatebro with a mile of jibberish copypasta, or you've got folks on Twitter who will just scream at you for saying Castro wasn't a baby eating monster, I guess maybe not.
In my experience, doubling down is an effective rhetorical strategy, particularly when you've got the weight of history on your side. "Castro freed the slaves" with a pithy "just like Lincoln" tacked on, can very quickly and easily put Twitter Libs on the defensive and reframe the debate from "Planned Economies never work!" to "Um, aktuly, it was only sparkling caste-based indentured servitude".
If you want to be even spicier you can say "unlike Lincoln".
The goal isn't to be spicy, the goal is to get people to agree with you.
Bringing this up is far more effective than whatever the hell it is you're suggesting considering it is impossible to argue against the fact that the Cuban revolution did free the slaves and that Abraham Lincoln's contributions towards abolition were milquetoast at best.
Try this out on someone who isn't already a leftist and see the response for yourself. I have.
You need to remember that liberals choose things to believe based not on facts, but on vibes. You have to lean on their vibe based worldview and slowly push them away from it. If liberals changed their minds based on facts, there would be no liberals.
Maybe they agree with you in the moment, but what happens when you aren't there and they discover/are told about Cuba abolishing slavery in the 1880s? They discount what you said as not entirely reliable, and whatever progress you've made is compromised or undone.
We want to lead with our strongest points, the stuff that there isn't any credible argument against. You don't lead with stuff that invites an argument, even if you think you can win it.
Idk, man. What happens when I'm not around and they hear
insist North Koreans pull their own trains by hand?
If they're curious enough to dig deeper, that's not a problem on its face. I have no doubt they'll find a ton of right-wing propaganda suggesting that Cuba was a paradise pre-Castro. But I can't do much about that. All I can do is seed doubt on my own end and point them towards guys like Noah Kulwin and Brendan James if they have their doubts.
The abhorrent labor conditions of Cuban plantations are one of the strongest points illustrating the need for the Castro-led revolution. They explain the zealous adoption of left wing political and economic theory as well as the enduring state of revolutionary ideology in an island that has been under constant propaganda bombardment for over 60 years.
This is an example of a strong point, with no credible counterargument, where a curious person can investigate further and find you to be more correct with everything they read.
Abhorrent labor conditions = slavery is a semantic debate. A skeptical person can easily disagree. See the difference I'm talking about?
I'm happy enough to let my counterpart muck around with the semantics, while I lay out the crimes of the Batista government and the plantation cartels.
Skeptics will dig deeper. You're describing a contrarian, and I'm not invested in convincing them of anything.
A skeptical person will google "when was slavery abolished in Cuba" and conclude you don't know what you're talking about. They won't read whatever else you have to say on the matter because you seem wrong or exaggerating right off the bat.
Good! The straight up lead-in line from Google is
At which point, the Libs are back to explaining why the conditions on Cuban sugar plantations after 1867 didn't count as slavery.
Directly under that link...
At which point you ask how
means Castro's overthrow of the plantation system in '59 didn't amount to a liberation of millions of Cuban plantation slaves.
Again, if you want to line up folks who will "lalala I can't hear you" through a conversation about the history of Cuban labor practices, then you're right. But they were adversarial to begin with.
For folks genuinely curious in the history of Cuba, even this shallow dive operates in your favor.
You really don't see how this presents a problem?
Seems that by truncating the comment further, I can get it to once again agree with my point of view.
You know that's ridiculous.
Gotta agree with you here.
Communist propaganda and is so strong because it's true. To say that Castro freed the slaves stretches the definition of slave beyond the point of usefulness.
We often liken modern day proletarians to peasants for rhetorical reasons, but we recognize that they are distinctly different things despite the fact that many of their class dynamics are similar. The people of Cuba were facing slave like conditions, and we, as Marxists, acknowledge that there's not a huge gap between slavery and wage labor (unlike liberals). But the fact remains, they were not slaves.
You can still say Castro liberated his people and greatly increased their quality of living, which is why he is so adored. These things are inarguably true.
In fact, by saying the cuban people were facing slave-like conditions, I think you have a better case in convincing people that modern wage labor and especially the conditions of migrant workers are unjust even though they exist outside the framework of slavery.
What about saying serfs instead of slaves? It’s a term people are more willing to loosely define, but still makes a powerful statement I think
I think that's less arguable, but something like "Castro liberated his people and greatly increased their quality of living" is still concise but avoids any semantic distractions altogether.
I think this is an interesting point of discussion. Someone who is wholly ignorant about communism and just thinks it is a vague "bad thing" is often much, much easier to educate than someone actively steeped in anti-communist arguments and umm acktually style rhetoric.