this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
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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.