"Castro freed the slaves" is a bad agitprop point for exactly this reason: it's not true on the face of it. Best case, you get into a semantic argument about what "slavery" means, which derails the conversation. Worst case, whoever reads your agitprop googles "when was slavery abolished in Cuba" and thinks you don't know what you're talking about.
I gotta disagree. "Castro freed the slaves" is a great line, precisely because Cuba was awash in these abysmal sugar plantations a century after the Spaniards nominally ended the practice.
Best case, you illuminate how legalist readings of history are hollow. Worst case, you force your debatebro to defend the abhorrent labor practices that created the groundswell of opposition to the Batista regime. Throw in a "Even the CIA couldn't stomach Batista, by the time he was forced off the island" and "When Castro visited New York City in the 50s, he was hailed as a hero." Remind people of their history.
At his absolute worst, you could accuse Castro of being an LBJ-style reformer, ending the Jim Crow conditions of Cuba and liberating the island from a tyrannical military dictatorship. At the best, he positioned the island to move from an oversized agricultural backwater into a modern bio-technology world leader. Cuba in the 21st century is outpacing the US in terms of medical R&D, with none of the Silicon Valley inputs. It is an island of miracles.
The bottom line is "does this persuade anyone to agree with me?" In my experience "Castro freed slaves" does not. It's either dismissed as wrong or derails the conversation.
We should be doing self-crit of our talking points, and our contrarian instinct doesn't allow that often enough.
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.
We should be doing self-crit of our talking points, and our contrarian instinct doesn't allow that often enough.
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".
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.
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.
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".
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.
what happens when you aren't there and they discover/are told about Cuba abolishing slavery in the 1880s?
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.
We want to lead with our strongest points
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.
The abhorrent labor conditions of Cuban plantations are one of the strongest points illustrating the need for the Castro-led revolution.
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?
Abhorrent labor conditions = slavery is a semantic debate.
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.
A skeptical person can easily disagree.
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.
A skeptical person will google "when was slavery abolished in Cuba"
Good! The straight up lead-in line from Google is
Cuba stopped officially participating in the slave trade in 1867 but the institution of slavery was not abolished on the island until 1886. The demand for cheap labor never abated of course, and plantation owners sought other ways of obtaining workers.
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...
They followed the lead of the British and the French by switching to importing contract laborers (indentured servants), called colonos. Free people, either voluntarily or through coercion, signed a work contract that stipulated the term of service and the pay they would receive. In theory, the colonos could leave the employ of their owners at the end of the term of service, but in practice the conditions for the colonos were not much different than those endured by the slave population. The majority of the colonos came from China (Chinese Coolies) but they also imported people from the Canary Islands, Mexico, and Africa. This collection contains official letters, death certificates, birth certificates, legal cases, work contracts, an autopsy report, and inventories relating to the institution of slavery, slaves, and indentured servants in Cuba. Many of the documents refer to the Chinese people brought to Cuba as indentured servants or contract laborers.
At which point you ask how
the conditions for the colonos were not much different than those endured by the slave population
means Castro's overthrow of the plantation system in '59 didn't amount to a liberation of millions of Cuban plantation slaves.
They won't read whatever else you have to say on the matter
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.
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.
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.
Argumentation is one variable that contributes to changing minds, along with material interests, deeply-ingrained priors, etc. How many people here will tell you that had a big impact on their thinking about AES states?
Tbh I always just buttress it with the Frederick Douglas quote about wage slavery still being slavery. Libs never have a response to Frederick Douglas, it's great.
The difference is a wage worker's boss can't cut off your foot if you leave. There are plenty of points of comparison between maximally exploitative wage work and slavery, but to say there's really no difference at all is silly.
And now -- as I mentioned -- the conversation has shifted to the semantics of slavery vs. wage work under terrible conditions. We're not talking about Cuba at all, or we're getting into hyperspecifics about the conditions of Batista-era plantations. It makes far more sense to stick to:
Batista was brutal and repressive even in the eyes of contemporary U.S. politicians
Castro led a popular revolution
Revolutionary Cuba is far better than what came before, despite constant U.S. attacks and sanctions
Plantation owners in Cuba mutilated their workers as well. I'll try to find the excerpt, apparently a favorite punishment of theirs was to put someone in a barrel with spikes on the inside, then roll it down a hill. Or they could just kill you for crossing their land without permission, per Parenti, plus the enforced illiteracy to prevent them from ever getting out of it.
And now -- as I mentioned -- the conversation has shifted to the semantics of slavery vs. wage work under terrible conditions
I contend that there's a threshold where these things become indistinguishable, and that Batista's Cuba crossed it.
Also, that is a situation that only benefits us. If you get into an argument about the semantics of slavery vs. wage work under terrible conditions, congratulations. You have just been handed the opportunity to force your opponent to defend slavery on semantic grounds.
a favorite punishment of theirs was to put someone in a barrel with spikes on the inside, then roll it down a hill. Or they could just kill you for crossing their land without permission, per Parenti, plus the enforced illiteracy to prevent them from ever getting out of it.
those hyperspecifics are effective agitprop
baiting a liberal into saying something like the OP can be effective if the goal is to get to these specifics.
You're talking about arguing with people, baiting them, etc. But you don't want to be in an argument in the first place.
You want to talk about things that can't really be argued; that make someone arguing against them look foolish. Talking about debatable points -- even if you think you have a good argument -- lets people dismiss you.
Kennedy, who disliked Castro enough to invade Cuba, has a speech where he details the crimes of Batista and acknowledges that Castro led a popular revolution. What the hell is the argument against that? But if you talk about slaves you invite a semantic debate about the definition, and if you cite horror stories from plantations you invite a debate about the sourcing. Why bother with any of that when you can go with something that has no meaningful counterargument?
You're doing Lenin's work ITT, this place is so trash at propaganda.
History makers (in any field) don't get to where they are for having correct theories/ideas/opinions, it's cause they could communicate them effectively.
I'm reminded of all those threads on how Zionists have lost the ability to appeal to ordinary people. They get so used to talking to people who mostly agree with them that as soon as they step outside of their group and try out their lines on someone who isn't already invested the response is
But you don't want to be in an argument in the first place.
wut. the point isn't to argue, it's to embarrass. argument is inevitable, some lib interlocutor isn't going to read your JFK take and think to themselves, 'hmm yes I've been convinced by this perfect point I have no way to refute'. they will reply.
unless you're talking about some 1:1 discussion but I don't think agitprop has a place there.
let's look at how this plays out in both scenarios
'Castro freed the slaves':
[from soapbox] gusanos just miss their slaves <- effective
[lib in gallery] well ackshually slavery abolished 18whatever <- nerd shit, maybe persuasive if let go
[from soapbox] [any of the myriad replies in the comments here] <- effective
'JFK details the crimes of Batista':
[from soapbox] JFK had this interesting speech about Batista....[wordy leftist meme] <- nerd shit
[lib in gallery] he said that before the firing squads <- effective
[from soapbox] well akshually, <- you've already lost
Sure, you're always going to get some lib disagreeing with you. You're not going to convince some lib reply guy, but you might convince some skeptical person reading along. And lurkers far outnumber posters.
Here's how these conversations play out for that skeptical person:
Leftist: Castro freed slaves.
Lib: Cuba freed its slaves in 1886, you don't know Basic History.
Skeptical person: [Googles "when did Cuba free its slaves," finds 1886, disregards leftist and whatever else they argue.]
Or,
Leftist: Even the guy who invaded Cuba said Bautista was a monster and the Revolution was a popular uprising, here's a link.
Lib: That was before the firing squads.
Leftist: Shooting the enforcers of a monstrous dictator is good, actually.
Skeptical person: [Clicks on link, "huh Kennedy really did say that, I guess Bautista really was that bad" keeps listening.]
I'm suggesting a skeptical person will do some minimal amount of checking on a claim they don't immediately believe. When they see someone say Cuba had slaves in 1959, they'll google it. When they see someone provide a link to a speech and summarize it, they'll skim the link.
You are never going to convince the redditor brigade of anything that runs contrary to their slop. The goal when arguing publicly with a Batista defender is not to have a good faith exchange of ideas, it's to mock and humiliate so that onlookers will associate that person's politics with being a stammering fascist nerd who well akshually's in all directions trying to defend the plainly indefensible. The correct response to such a person pulling out the "technically it was sparkling servitude" card is to bully them into the ether for it.
"Castro freed the slaves" is a bad agitprop point for exactly this reason: it's not true on the face of it. Best case, you get into a semantic argument about what "slavery" means, which derails the conversation. Worst case, whoever reads your agitprop googles "when was slavery abolished in Cuba" and thinks you don't know what you're talking about.
I gotta disagree. "Castro freed the slaves" is a great line, precisely because Cuba was awash in these abysmal sugar plantations a century after the Spaniards nominally ended the practice.
Best case, you illuminate how legalist readings of history are hollow. Worst case, you force your debatebro to defend the abhorrent labor practices that created the groundswell of opposition to the Batista regime. Throw in a "Even the CIA couldn't stomach Batista, by the time he was forced off the island" and "When Castro visited New York City in the 50s, he was hailed as a hero." Remind people of their history.
At his absolute worst, you could accuse Castro of being an LBJ-style reformer, ending the Jim Crow conditions of Cuba and liberating the island from a tyrannical military dictatorship. At the best, he positioned the island to move from an oversized agricultural backwater into a modern bio-technology world leader. Cuba in the 21st century is outpacing the US in terms of medical R&D, with none of the Silicon Valley inputs. It is an island of miracles.
The bottom line is "does this persuade anyone to agree with me?" In my experience "Castro freed slaves" does not. It's either dismissed as wrong or derails the conversation.
We should be doing self-crit of our talking points, and our contrarian instinct doesn't allow that often enough.
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.
people are not swayed through argumentation in the first place. If they were, liberalism would be sufficient
Argumentation is one variable that contributes to changing minds, along with material interests, deeply-ingrained priors, etc. How many people here will tell you that
had a big impact on their thinking about AES states?
Tbh I always just buttress it with the Frederick Douglas quote about wage slavery still being slavery. Libs never have a response to Frederick Douglas, it's great.
The difference is a wage worker's boss can't cut off your foot if you leave. There are plenty of points of comparison between maximally exploitative wage work and slavery, but to say there's really no difference at all is silly.
And now -- as I mentioned -- the conversation has shifted to the semantics of slavery vs. wage work under terrible conditions. We're not talking about Cuba at all, or we're getting into hyperspecifics about the conditions of Batista-era plantations. It makes far more sense to stick to:
Plantation owners in Cuba mutilated their workers as well. I'll try to find the excerpt, apparently a favorite punishment of theirs was to put someone in a barrel with spikes on the inside, then roll it down a hill. Or they could just kill you for crossing their land without permission, per Parenti, plus the enforced illiteracy to prevent them from ever getting out of it.
I contend that there's a threshold where these things become indistinguishable, and that Batista's Cuba crossed it.
Also, that is a situation that only benefits us. If you get into an argument about the semantics of slavery vs. wage work under terrible conditions, congratulations. You have just been handed the opportunity to force your opponent to defend slavery on semantic grounds.
See what I mean?
those hyperspecifics are effective agitprop
baiting a liberal into saying something like the OP can be effective if the goal is to get to these specifics.
You're talking about arguing with people, baiting them, etc. But you don't want to be in an argument in the first place.
You want to talk about things that can't really be argued; that make someone arguing against them look foolish. Talking about debatable points -- even if you think you have a good argument -- lets people dismiss you.
Kennedy, who disliked Castro enough to invade Cuba, has a speech where he details the crimes of Batista and acknowledges that Castro led a popular revolution. What the hell is the argument against that? But if you talk about slaves you invite a semantic debate about the definition, and if you cite horror stories from plantations you invite a debate about the sourcing. Why bother with any of that when you can go with something that has no meaningful counterargument?
You're doing Lenin's work ITT, this place is so trash at propaganda.
History makers (in any field) don't get to where they are for having correct theories/ideas/opinions, it's cause they could communicate them effectively.
I'm reminded of all those threads on how Zionists have lost the ability to appeal to ordinary people. They get so used to talking to people who mostly agree with them that as soon as they step outside of their group and try out their lines on someone who isn't already invested the response is
We don't want to get to that point ourselves.
wat? OP's the one arguing about being technically correct and failing to consider the comms angle
wut. the point isn't to argue, it's to embarrass. argument is inevitable, some lib interlocutor isn't going to read your JFK take and think to themselves, 'hmm yes I've been convinced by this perfect point I have no way to refute'. they will reply.
unless you're talking about some 1:1 discussion but I don't think agitprop has a place there.
let's look at how this plays out in both scenarios
'Castro freed the slaves':
'JFK details the crimes of Batista':
Sure, you're always going to get some lib disagreeing with you. You're not going to convince some lib reply guy, but you might convince some skeptical person reading along. And lurkers far outnumber posters.
Here's how these conversations play out for that skeptical person:
Or,
look if we're going to apply the uncharitable jump to conclusion you're doing in the first you've gotta apply it to the second
Here's how these conversations play out for that skeptical person:
Or,
I'm suggesting a skeptical person will do some minimal amount of checking on a claim they don't immediately believe. When they see someone say Cuba had slaves in 1959, they'll google it. When they see someone provide a link to a speech and summarize it, they'll skim the link.
Hell yeah, I agree with this
that is my useless contribution to this exchange.
Dude, why are you so worried about crafting the perfect speech to successfully persuade libs without arguing with them?
Just relax a bit.
You asked me a question, I answered