Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 11:34 pm Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
MrBean wrote:
Starvid wrote:
for those who stll don't get it, Cuba is a horribly unsustainable Communist Hellhole.
Better that Sweden, any case.
Little bit of sour grapes at his argument?
Anyway, the point is "ain't know country that is sustainable." That is the entire problem. We have exchanged sustainability for all of the things that make modern life, well... modern. The moment things shifted into unsustainability will change depending upon who you ask.
As modern life is rolled back by necessity, how should we weather that? There is a lot of low hanging fruit that can be picked, but what then? What Cuba has done to this point is a road map that only takes us so far, it is a guide to picking the low fruit. It is good to have an idea where to start; but it is not the end of the matter by any means.
Soon enough there will not be enough fruit to pick to go around. then we get to decide who goes without. Then we start to run into trouble. _________________ Nature is complete because it does not serve itself.
The sage places himself after and finds himself before,
Ignores his desire and finds himself content.
He is complete because he does not serve himself. -Lao Tze
Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau
Cuba is filled with more than 7,000 urban allotments, or organoponicos, which fill perhaps as many as 81,000 acres. They have been established on tiny plots of land in the center of tower-block estates or between the crumbling colonial homes that fill Havana. One afternoon I visited a small garden of tomatoes and spinach that had been dug just a few hundred yards from the Plaza de la Revolution, a vast concrete square where Castro and his senior regime members annually oversee Cuba's May Day parade. More than 200 gardens in Havana supply its citizens with more than 90 percent of their fruit and vegetables.
You says there are hardships ? Cannot compare them with capitalist and "free" Haiti, the slave owners have been replaced by rich people. Capitalism and international trade is death for third world countries.
Before 1990 in Romania there was not enough meat or milk in the stores, they where almost empty. When meat or milk were brought, people formed giant queues I was a child back then and I did not have to eat dirt.
And now Cuba has left the centralized system that was similar in all communist countries, and I think they are far better than Romania in 1990. And sustainable. Even with no oil, electricity is no needed , I saw they use oxen to plow the fields. Combined with modern knowledge and the lack of medieval lords or capitalist corporations, this ancient way of agriculture can work very well
Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 5:36 am Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
Cuba has done quite well for what they have went thru.
Simple living and high thinking is the answer. Start now and you won't have to suffer such a dramatic lifestyle change that is coming. It is coming to all of the planet. Don't think that because you live in Florida you will be spared. Or Sweden. As far as disgruted people, I can find them anywhere. People are moving around now more than ever thinking the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Paradise is beyond this material world. As bad is Cuba is right now, I would rather be living there right now then Sweden.
Charlene, 16 with a 1-month-old son, has come to rely on a traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs: cookies made of dried yellow dirt from the country's central plateau
Cuba is filled with more than 7,000 urban allotments, or organoponicos, which fill perhaps as many as 81,000 acres. They have been established on tiny plots of land in the center of tower-block estates or between the crumbling colonial homes that fill Havana. One afternoon I visited a small garden of tomatoes and spinach that had been dug just a few hundred yards from the Plaza de la Revolution, a vast concrete square where Castro and his senior regime members annually oversee Cuba's May Day parade. More than 200 gardens in Havana supply its citizens with more than 90 percent of their fruit and vegetables.
You says there are hardships ? Cannot compare them with capitalist and "free" Haiti, the slave owners have been replaced by rich people. Capitalism and international trade is death for third world countries.
Before 1990 in Romania there was not enough meat or milk in the stores, they where almost empty. When meat or milk were brought, people formed giant queues I was a child back then and I did not have to eat dirt.
And now Cuba has left the centralized system that was similar in all communist countries, and I think they are far better than Romania in 1990. And sustainable. Even with no oil, electricity is no needed , I saw they use oxen to plow the fields. Combined with modern knowledge and the lack of medieval lords or capitalist corporations, this ancient way of agriculture can work very well
You have no idea what you are talking about. I was in Cuba when Union Soviet collapsed and during the summer of 1994 the whole country was a time bomb. Lucky for the Cuban government, Clinton administration took those mad Cuban rafters inside American soil.
Those famous organoponicos are a joke.
Cuba have serious problems with no easy fix.
Young Cubans are leaving the countryside behind and moving into the cities as life become harder. No young Cuban wants to to work in agriculture.
Cuba is projected to have Latin America’s oldest population by 2025 with the island’s demographic growth rate now at 0.2%. The elderly are already the most vulnerable as real pensions have declined by 42% and most pensioners survive on the equivalent of $4 per month.
Last edited by Ache on Tue Jul 01, 2008 3:53 pm; edited 1 time in total
Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 2:42 pm Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
Of course young people don't want to work in agriculture.
Cuba has problems with no solution ? But I say they are on the right track. Wait until the entire world will have to copy them or starve
I agree there are no easy or total solutions. And the most important problem will be human behavior
Joined: Sep 11, 2007 Posts: 340 Location: In freefall speed right down to the claws of the devil
Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 10:14 pm Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
Interesting sustainability that from the Cubans ....... although I would call it plain and simple SURVIVORS by the lack of everything and how still they manage to get over those up.
Quote:
HAVANA (AP) - Raul Castro's government opened luxury hotels and resorts to all Cubans Monday, ending a ban despised across the island as "tourist apartheid" and taking another step toward the creation of a consumer economy in the socialist state.
Cuba has made a series of crowd-pleasing announcements in the past few days. Cubans with enough cash will be able to buy computers, DVD players and plasma televisions starting Tuesday, and soon they'll even be able to have their own cell phones - consumer goods only companies and foreigners were previously permitted to buy.
But the latest surprise, allowing ordinary citizens into luxury hotels and resort beaches long reserved for rich foreigners, is a particularly symbolic victory for Cuba's everyman.
"I was born here and live here. I believe, as a Cuban, I have the right to it all," said Elizabeth Quintana, a Havana resident. "It's good. Really good."
While there was no official word from the government, hotel employees said Ministry of Tourism officials told them that as of Monday, Cubans can stay in hotels and resorts across the island, and pay to use gyms, hair salons and other previously off-limit facilities. Cubans can even rent cars for the first time.
For now, few Cubans can afford a night at a hotel on a government salary, but that could change if Castro succeeds in increasing his citizens' spending power.
Meanwhile, the government is creating the kinds of consumer incentives any economy needs to thrive. For many years, Cubans haven't been able to buy certain electronic goods, lounge by the rooftop pool at the Hotel Capri or enjoy a drink at sunset on the grounds of the historic Hotel Nacional, no matter how much money they earned
As with other guests, the hotels will charge Cubans in convertible pesos, or CUCs, worth 24 times the regular pesos most Cubans earn. The four-star Ambos Mundos, a favorite of Ernest Hemingway in Old Havana, charges $173 a night in high season - more than eight times the average monthly state salary of about $20.
Still, at least 60 percent of Cubans have some access to convertible pesos and foreign currency, either through jobs in tourism or foreign firms, or cash sent by U.S. relatives. And these initiatives give them more reason to spend that cash, enabling the government to increase its reserves, said Arch Ritter, an expert on the Cuban economy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada.
"I think this will get rid of many of the CUCs floating around on the street," said Magaly, a 69-year-old retiree who, like many Cubans interviewed, declined to have her full name appear in the foreign press, citing unspecified reprisals.
But the new government also risks increasing class tensions by suddenly making income discrepancies more evident in a society founded on the ideal of promoting social and economic equality.
"Authorization to stay in hotels is fine because it was unfair discrimination of Cubans with respect to foreigners," said Tatiana, a doctor in the capital's Vedado district. "But, I have to ask, 'What Cubans can pay a night in a hotel with a normal salary?'"
Fidel Castro spent decades rallying against any reforms that could promote a new class of rich Cubans, writing as recently as July that Cuba's poor are frustrated that the island is awash in convertible pesos.
But since he succeeded his ailing brother as president in February, Raul Castro has begun to do away with what he called "excessive restrictions" on daily life.
Relaxing the hotel ban eliminates a glaring historical contradiction within the Cuban revolution. When the Castro brothers' rebels took power in 1959, they joyfully overran beach resorts and hotels that had been the playgrounds of high-rolling foreigners, declaring them open to all Cubans.
Hotel restrictions were eventually imposed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's chief economic benefactor, to maintain equality when Cuba embraced tourism to jump-start its economy.
Hotel guards have stopped anyone who looks Cuban, limiting guests' exposure to hustlers and black-market peddlers, and police have turned away Cubans trying to enter the glittering, white-sand tourist resort of Varadero.
On Monday, tourism officials at Varadero said Cubans would now be allowed to walk the beach without restrictions, though none would divulge their names, citing government rules.
In Havana, doormen still guarded hotel entrances, and receptionists reported no immediate run on reservations in the luxurious but slightly shabby lobby of the Nacional.
Despite the restrictions, Cubans have been able to clearly see what they've been missing. The tourism industry now generates $2 billion a year, and while the U.S. travel and economic embargo limits contact with Americans, Cubans mix freely with other foreigners.
Also, unlike North Korea and other closed societies, the overwhelming majority of Cubans have family in the United States, and illegal satellite hookups beam American TV into many homes.
Now some of the gadgets they have seen on TV are finally becoming more available on the island - and not just to the elite few.
An internal memo distributed to Cuba's largest retailer and obtained by The Associated Press describes a long list of previously restricted products that go on sale nationwide Tuesday.
In one store, La Copa, where DVD players were offered for $125 and Dell desktop computers for $540, a cashier said that starting Tuesday, a sign saying "only for companies and foreigners" would be removed.
"This is a dream," gasped Miguel, who joined other shoppers gawking at the shiny red, blue, silver and wine-colored electric bicycles suddenly on display at a shopping center in the upscale Vedado neighborhood. The Chinese-made bikes are charged through a power cord andhadbeenprohibitedforgeneralsalebecausethegovernmentfearedexcessiveuseofelectricity.
Cuba analysts say it's hard to predict where this is going in the long term.
"They're trickling out policy moves one by one, and there's no road map," said Phil Peters of the Lexington Institute, a pro-democracy think tank based outside Washington.
"I would doubt if Raul has a complete model in mind, Chinese, Vietnamese, whatever," added Ritter, the Canadian economist. "I think he's going with things that work in the short run. And where it's going, I don't think he could even say or would want to say."
......... and all of that within 160.000 oil/barrels a day scenario, being provided mostly by the venezuelan copycat of the cuban political regime PLUS the self extracted ones.
I just wonder if those at the WW II barracks had a greater sustainability index than their counterpart from that tropical yet paradisiacal island.
Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 8:56 am Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
Will be interesting to see if Cuba is able to use what oil is available (Venezuela and domestic production) to create (near) sustainable electricity production - big plans on biomass, wind and solar anyhow.
Joined: Apr 09, 2007 Posts: 5915 Location: Alaska (its much bigger than Texas).
Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 9:18 pm Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
AlexdeLarge wrote:
Comrades!! The Cubans are novices in sustainability! Come to the Workers Paradise of North Korea!
We don't have to power down...We never powered up!!
Alex is right.
North Korea is a much more sustainable communist hellhole then Cuba is.
Socialism is so advanced in North Korea that they have famines and the lack of food has stunted the growth of an entire generation of their people, while Cuba's socialist economy has only managed to create grinding poverty for its people.
Cuba was a Spanish colony for more than 400 years, from 1492 when Columbus "discovered" it, to 1898 when the U.S. took over. For the next 35 years, Cuba was in reality, if not on paper, a colony of the U.S.
After the 1934 repeal of the Platt Amendment to the Cuban constitution, which allowed the U.S. to intervene at will, Cuba nevertheless remained subservient to the U.S., to which it was now firmly attached by a complex web of economic, geopolitical and military factors. The U.S. had evolved from naked colonial, to subtler neo-colonial power in Cuba.
The Cuba that Castro found in 1959, when he seized power at the head of a populist revolution was not a Haiti, or even a Guatemala. In fact, Cuba was among the least underdeveloped countries in Latin America. It ranked third in life expectancy at birth, fourth in electricity consumption per capita, and fifth in annual income per capita ($353 in 1958).
However, these crude statistics masked shocking inequalities, particularly between the city and the countryside, and between white Cubans, and black and mulatto Cubans.
There was not just one Cuba, but two, perhaps even three Cubas, as far apart one from the other as the Havana of all-white country clubs and glittering casinos was from the city's slums, and these, in turn, from the often desperate countryside.
While Cuban cities had a lively media, as well as more cars and TV sets per capita than practically any other Latin American country, courtesy of the American-style consumerism of the wealthy and the urban middle-class, hunger was a fact of life in rural areas, where some 1.5 million people (25% of the population) struggled to survive.
Big sugar companies kept hundreds of thousands of acres uncultivated, while landless peasants were forced to plant on the sides of roads, until the brutal, machete-wielding rural police, the Guardia Rural, would drive them out.
Peasants joined Castro's rebel army in droves because they had nothing to lose:
• 75% of rural dwellings were huts made from palm trees.
• More than 50% had no toilets of any kind.
• 85% had no inside running water.
• 91% had no electricity.
• There was only 1 doctor per 2,000 people in rural areas.
• More than one-third of the rural population had intestinal parasites.
• Only 4% of Cuban peasants ate meat regularly; only 1% ate fish, less than 2% eggs, 3% bread, 11% milk; none ate green vegetables.
• The average annual income among peasants was $91 (1956), less than 1/3 of the national income per person.
• 45% of the rural population was illiterate; 44% had never attended a school.
Even for most city dwellers, life was not all that rosy.
• 25% of the labor force was chronically unemployed.
• 1 million people were illiterate ( in a population of about 5.5 million).
• 27% of urban children, not to speak of 61% of rural children, were not attending school.
• Racial discrimination was widespread.
• The public school system had deteriorated badly.
• Corruption was endemic; anyone could be bought, from a Supreme Court judge to a cop.
• Police brutality and torture were common.
None of this, however, would have been enough to launch a revolution. It was as much moral revulsion at what Cuba had become, as any specific socio-economic or political gripe, that did it. An entire nation was repulsed with itself: with its perceived corruption, national impotence, and political and economic subservience to the U.S. Castro, a Jacobin moralist at heart, just seized the opportunity.
Related links:
For more on Cuba's history, go to J.A. Sierra's The Timetable History of Cuba.
Last edited by Ache on Thu Jul 03, 2008 4:29 pm; edited 1 time in total
Joined: Apr 09, 2007 Posts: 5915 Location: Alaska (its much bigger than Texas).
Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2008 3:34 pm Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
Ache wrote:
AlexdeLarge wrote:
Comrades!! The Cubans are novices in sustainability! Come to the Workers Paradise of North Korea!
We don't have to power down...We never powered up!!
North Korea :
Area
- Total 120,540 km˛ (98th)
46,528 sq mi
- Water (%) 4.87
Population
- 2007 estimate 23,301,725 (48th)
- Density 190/km˛ (55th)
492/sq mi
GDP (PPP) 2006[3] estimate
- Total $40.00 billion (91st)
- Per capita $1,900 (147th)
************************************************
Cuba :
Area
- Total 110,861 km˛ (105th)
42,803 sq mi
- Water (%) negligible
Population
- 2007 estimate 11,394,043[1] (73rd)
- 2002 census 11,177,743
- Density 102/km˛(97th)
264/sq mi
GDP (PPP) 2006 estimate
- Total $46.22 billion (2006 est.)[2] (not ranked)
- Per capita $4,500 (2007 est.)[2] (not ranked)
---------------
That proves it.
The Cuban socialists have managed to transform Cuba from the wealthiest nation in Latin America to one of the very poorest in only 50 years, but they still have to reduce their per capita GDP by almost 60% to attain the highly developed level of socialism already reached by their North Korean comrades.
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