Calling Cuban workers in the 1950s "slaves" gives people such an easy excuse to ignore whatever else you have to say. You couldn't buy and sell them, you couldn't cut their foot off if they tried to leave, they weren't locked out of key social institutions like marriages. Slavery is more than very poor working conditions.
Killing someone for "trespassing" does not mean that person is a slave.
Where did this meme even come from? You never see Chinese or Russian or Vietnamese workers referred to as "slaves" before their revolutions.
Instinctually I feel like them working on specifically "plantations" probably makes people think of the slavery kind of exploitation over oppressed peasantry.
Probably more that goes into it but I feel like theres an instant association between the two there that there isnt in the same way for China, Russia or Vietnam.
There's also the fact that they were slaves. The plantations that the revolution collectivized are the same plantations that generations of Cubans were enslaved on and after emancipation, their ancestors were tied to by enclosure laws that forbid movement and poor wages.
Even people with ancestors who owned plantations in Cuba would call the workers on their land slaves or at least indentured servants. Because there wasn't really any authority that was gonna do anything about you not paying them or mistreating them.
I didn't say it did. Just responding to your comments abt violence.
Slavery is more than very poor working conditions.
now if you forced me to pay taxes, that is slavery.
they weren’t locked out of key social institutions like marriages
slaves married even in colonial times
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_of_enslaved_people_(United_States)
Tennessee was the only slave state that allowed for marriage among enslaved people with the owner's consent.
now that you've googled that you can start learning about the rest of the world too
It is a bit of an exaggeration but I think there's a firm basis for it. Stay with me. In the United States for example, sharecropping continued after the so-called "end of slavery." Since reconstruction was not radical, there was not a redistribution of the lands of plantation owners to former slaves. Which means former slaves kept working on the same lands they were slaves on (since they qualified for no other jobs, owned no property, and couldn't afford an education). Except now they did it for a very low wage, room/board. This was called "sharecropping." My own grandfather was a black sharecropper in the 1940s. He was born in the 1930s. He was literally a child laborer on a plantation who worked and dropped out of school young because his family had no other choice. He and his mother both were paid according to the yield of cotton they picked in a day. Sharecropping of this style continued until the 1960s, nearly 100 years after the emancipation proclamation. So you have families, in poverty, with no education, and no property, being paid next to nothing, and given room/board on a farm, where they do backbreaking labor all day, for a "boss" who owns the farm. This was so close to slavery it might as well have been slavery. This is to say nothing of the carceral slavery that we have.
It was very similar in Cuba. "Emancipation" came in the 1880s, but the former slaves had so few options economically that many of them stayed on the very same plantations where they had been slaves, as earners of a paltry wage. So these sugar plantation owners still ran Cuba's economy in Batista's time, shortly before Castro took over. They were the people employing under-educated, under-paid, black sharecroppers on their inherited family estates, and exporting sugar to the USA for cheap. So yes, they basically had slaves. Just slaves who earned a "wage" that was never high enough to escape the plantation. This might not be "slavery" in the sense of race-based chattel slavery, but when you see the descendants of slaves working for next to nothing on the inherited property of the descendants of slave owners, I think it is forgivable to point out its similarity to what came before. As for "cutting off feet" that wasn't very common even during chattel slavery, as it would make a slave not very useful for labor. The whole point of slavery is the exploitation of labor and the defense of the racial caste system.
This is what Frederick Douglass meant when he said "Experience demonstrates that there may be a
Slavery of Wagesonly a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that thisSlavery of Wagesmust go down with the other."
Liberals always do this, they always glorify whatever came before a socialist revolution and will always decry the revolution as actually worse somehow. There are three ways to judge how a nation is doing (stealing this from a hexbear comment I liked): Compare it to what surrounds it, compare it to its past, or compare it to fantasy. Liberals always choose the third option.
What came before the USSR? A largely illiterate pogrom filled Tsardom where women weren't allowed to get educated outside of a nunnery. China? A confusing bureaucratic mess of colonizers vying for regional power exploiting the country's frequent famines and that the country had yet to fully recover from its civil war 80 years beforehand, a civil war that killed 30+ million people.
Cuba? Basically a mob-run casino island where the average person lived in a shack with a dirt floor. Democratic People's Republic of Korea? A literal Japanese colony and victim of genocide.
all countries that had socialist revolutions have seen striking increases in quality of life and stability and I don't know of any exceptions. Maybe Romania.
Tibet is one their favorites but they never acknowledge the chatel slavery or theocracy
, a civil war that killed 30+ million people.
i just wanna clarify that you're referring to the Taiping Rebellion specifically, since that usually doesn't get called the Chinese Civil War, even though it was indeed a Chinese Civil War.
that's the one I meant, it left the country decimated and ripe for outside imperial conquest, which is what happened since the second opium war started half-way through the Taiping Rebellion. It was why the Shanghai ports were owned by the UK for so long too.
The current richest man in the world is in the bottom panel. :lord-bezos-amused:
