Way back when, I was working for a community organisation,  I got to know an interesting old guy, who I’ll call ‘Jim’.  Now Jim was a dyed in the wool socialist, but a lovely kind gentle man notwithstanding his views.  He had had a lifetime in trade union, Labour and other Left groups.  We debated politics and we agreed on some things but not on others.

There was one area of politics where we could not agree and which he pushed and pushed, convinced he was correct, and that was Cuba.  ‘Jim’ was a long term member of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign and positively gushed about the achievements of the Castro revolution.  I haven’t seem ‘Jim’ for years and I presume that he has probably passed on, but I hope he managed to see at the end that he had been fooled into supporting and promoting a lie.  This lie is that people have advanced under the socialist regime of the Castros when compared to other nations.  They have not, the Cuban people have been imprisoned by Castro on an island with no meaningful freedoms whatsoever.

If you hang around the Left, especially the middle class Left, you will come across a lauding of Cuba and the Castro regime.  You will be told that it Cuba is a workers paradise, with a health service which is the envy of the world, and where nobody is illiterate.

Such a delusion could not be further from the truth.  Cuba is an economic basket case with those close to the regime doing very well while everyone else suffers.  It appears that the Cubans have exchanged one corrupt debased government for another corrupt debased government but one based on socialism.

Occasionally I read the Yoani Sanchez ‘Generation Y’ blog as it gives the news from Cuba that isn’t featured on the mainstream news and is suppressed by Leftist information sources because it is critical of the Castro regime.

This piece shows how a new socialist nomenklatura has grown up which has become fat in its sense of entitlement and, as Ms Sanchez describes, has no concept of workers rights as we in civilised nations would know them.

Ms Sanchez said:

“My grandmother made a living washing and ironing for others. When she died, in her mid-eighties, she only knew how to write the three letters of her name: Ana. For her whole life, she worked as a maid for a family, even after 1959 when official propaganda boasted of having emancipated all servants. Instead, many women like her continued to work in domestic service but without any legal security. For my sister and me, Ana spent part of her days in “the house on Ayestarán Street,” and we never said out loud that she was paid to clean the floors, wash the dishes and prepare the food there. I never saw her complain, nor did I hear of her being mistreated.

A couple of days ago I heard a conversation that contrasted with the story of my grandmother. A plump lady dressed in expensive clothes was telling her friend — between glasses of white wine — how she behaved with her young domestic. I transcribe here — without adding even a word — a dialog that left me feeling a mixture of revulsion and sadness:

– From what you tell me, you’re lucky.
– Yes, I really can’t complain. Suzy started with us when she was 17 and she just turned 21.
– Now we’ll see if she gets pregnant and you have to throw her out.
– No, she’s very clear on that. I told her that if she gets pregnant she’ll lose her job.
– Yes, but you know, “the fox always returns to its den.” So maybe she’ll run after some man from the village where she was born.
– No way! She won’t even go to that “den” on vacation. Imagine you didn’t have any electricity, the floor of her parents’ house is dirt, and the latrine is shared by four families. – – It’s like the heavens opened up for her since she’s been with us. All she has to do is what I tell her, that’s all I ask”

Read the rest of the piece called ‘Royalty and Servitude’ here:

http://generacionyen.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/royalty-and-servitude/

The attitudes that the pampered matrons of the regime show towards their employees would not be out of place in some description of a callous 19th Century mill owner.  There is nothing wrong with working in domestic service, it is an honourable job, but servants and those in service positions should not be treated as chattels, which is how these representatives of the Cuban elite appear to treat their staff.

After reading Ms Sanchez’s piece could anyone, apart from the idiots of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, have a straight face when they describe Cuba as a workers paradise?

The dire position of the Cuban people isn’t the fault of the US blockade on Cuba, but instead is the result of the failure of Cuban socialism and it’s continuing degeneration into a kind of socialist feudalism.

The situation in Cuba is yet another example of how the Left lies to promote its worldview.  They lie about Cuba, they lie about Islam, they lie about welfare, and they lie about immigration.

Does anybody think that those ‘young Trade Unionists‘ going on sponsored trips to Cuba will be shown anything other than the Potemkin villages that the Castro Regime wants them to see?   Such people will absorb the Castro regimes lies, and then regurgitate them on their return.  If they do that to you then call them out on it.  Tell them the truth that it is Castro that is killing Cuba not the United States.