...and they are all 100% sure that Cuba is an authoritarian dictatorship, Fidel was the Caribbean Hitler, and that everyone in Cuba despises their government and yearns for freedom, but they are just afraid to speak out about it.
Any of discussion of Cuba I've tried to have with US Americans - online or IRL - has gone the exact same way. It doesn't matter the evidence I show or how I clearly know the most about Cuba by far amongst my friends... I'm wrong. Cubans aren't free and the Communist Party has an iron grip on the country and they rule by fear and intimidation. It's just something every US American knows. And oftentimes I'm talking with people who are normally all "science is so cool" types who allegedly believe in "evidence".
Yes Cuba has elections but obviously they're rigged... so I explain how they have sealed boxes and all sorts of safeguards in place for a clean election. And how there are no legit international orgs that claim Cuba's elections are rigged (not like Cuba has to play by western liberal democracy rules anyway). Doesn't matter. Obviously it's all rigged and how dare I defend an authoritarian regime in the first place?!
It's just weird how quickly US Americans shut down when a country like Cuba is discussed and when they obviously don't have a clue what they're talking about. Like, everyone - left and right - likes to talk about how corrupt the US government is. But their brains can't let them even start to question US propaganda. I guess it's not surprising really, I think most Americans don't really think the government lied about Iraq, for example. Even reasonably intelligent and allegedly open-minded people I know just know that Cubans aren't free and gommunism no food, and they will never consider any evidence to the contrary.
And this is all hilarious to me given how US Americans have a comically bad understanding of countries outside the US.
I don't think the CIA's protests in Cuba are going to achieve much of anything, at least inside Cuba. Aside from reminding the American populace that communism is bad, I don't really see their purpose.
In conversations I've had with left-liberals over the years, they really have a hard time talking shit about Cuba, especially since the corporate media is (as we all know) totally obsessed with Russia and China and, until a few days ago, had spent years pretending that Cuba does not exist, at least since Obama's visit to the country and his supposed moves toward lifting the embargo which I believe Trump reversed almost immediately. I've told several of my liberal friends that the world should be like Cuba—minus the blockade—and they agree. I think figures like Fidel and Che are also fairly popular (and probably the most popular communists in the USA). Cuba is already among the best places to be on Earth and really would be a communist utopia without that fucking embargo, which is why it's still there—Cuba still scares the American bourgeoisie. Honestly I would live there if I could, although I wouldn't want to contribute to gentrification or weigh the Cubans down.
When it comes to political conversations, I'm trying a new kind of PMC approach—using the PMC's obsession with credentials against them. I have liberal friends who are nurses, computer programmers, and who come from other professions. None of them know a tenth as much about politics, theory, and history as I do. Politics is one of my many jobs—it really is my life. I'm going to try to tell my friends that I don't tell them how to be a nurse or how to be a computer programmer, because I honestly know next to nothing about those fields. Likewise, they should probably do more listening than talking when they have political conversations with me.
I don't know about this approach so everyone here should feel free to criticize me. It seems super bourgeois. As Marxists we should always listen to workers. But when American workers betray the workers of the world, I think it's also time for us, as Marxists, to remind American workers that they should be in solidarity—particularly with a truly incredible achievement like the Cuban Revolution.
Gary V told me I just have to work harder to have a better life and communism killed 6,000,000,000.000 people
To hear incorrect views without rebutting them and even to hear counter-revolutionary remarks without reporting them, but instead to take them calmly as if nothing had happened. This is a sixth type.