Alex Bove wrote:
I'm sorry, but if you're going to play semantic games, at least have the rhetorical skill to make a strong argument of your own:
At 12:31 AM 4/3/2005 -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
The revolutionaries in this country, despite flaws and lapses, succeeded in founding something better than what it replaced.
You're begging the question. How can we possibly disagree with you, since of course it is an irrefutable "fact" that America is the greatest country in the history of the world.
Can't say this is a decent argument, either; it's leaden sarcasm more than anything else.
But Eric's point is pretty simplistic, too. He makes a good point-- that we can't equate the Cuban and American revolutuions-- but he does so on an extremely simplistic basis. He asserts that the American revolutionaries "despite flaws and lapses, succeeded in founding something better than what it replaced." Well, the phrase "despite flaws and lapses" is a pre-emptive dodge, just in case someone cites an issue that puts the American revolution in a bad light.
Take, for example, slavery. Briatin abolished the slave trade in 1807, and the 1830s saw the emancipation of all British slaves and the abolition of slavery as an institution. It took America another thirty years, plus a bloody Civil War, to accomplish this on our own shores. There is some research showing that the American revolution was, in part, a reaction to the growing abolitionist movement, and the possibility that Britain might abolish the institution--- but this is debatable. On that point alone we can say that many Americans (or rather, those kept as property until 1865) were _worse_ off after independence. And given the profundity of slavery, I can't quite class it along "flaws and lapses."
And we can't compare the subsequent history of America with that of Cuba. For one thing, the United States has had 240-odd years of history, during which we expanded into and colonized a full continent, with almost no serious competition for its resources. (Native Americans didn't fare well against the U.S.) For most of that history, we've been isolated by two oceans from the political torments of the rest of civilization. Cuba, on the other hand, is a large island, with limited natural resources. It was dependent upon imports and exports, and its history prior to the revolution was one where its economy had been dominated by only a few such item (tobacco, sugar). Its revolution occurred with the context of the Cold War, where the governments of Third World nations were subverted and replaced according to the interests of the nuclear superpowers.
So, while Eric is correct in saying that one can't draw equalities between the two revolutions, he does so for the wrong reasons.
Do you have factual evidence that Cuba's hospitals are "cockroach-infested filth pits"? Are you so naive as to think that U.S. inner cities aren't also "full" of underaged prostitutes peddling sex for drugs or money? Am I suggesting moral equivalence here? No. However, you ought to know that to argue broad generalities from a few individual examples is not logically sound. I might say, for example, that Cuba is better than the U.S. because every Cuban child is entitled to free health care and public education while American children have no such guarantee from their government. Do you want to send your child to Cuba? Maybe not, but if you based your decision on my manipulation of statistics you'd be making a mistake.
This is one of the problems with making such sweeping generalizations. For one thing, we have to acknowledge that, for many years, Cuba was, in many important ways, a more humane state than many of the U.S. client states in the same region-- such as El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, and we can include Guatemala and Nicaragua as similar examples further away. But Cuba's had a pretty severe decline in the past two decades, partly due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and partly due to Fidel's leadership. (God, I wish he'd retire and let Cubans run things.) And Central American nations have enjoyed some improvement in recent decades, mainly because of the demise and decline of their dictators, but because of expanded trade.
But we have hindsight posing as wisdom. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that we have two workers sharing the same awful, soul-deading, poorly-paying job. Let's say one quits, and he goes through a long period of living hand-to-mouth, and his lot doesn't improve for years. And let's say that the other one stays-- but, ten years in, he gets a new boss, and the new guy turns out to be great, and he gets a raise and the job's more tolerable. Does this mean that the second guy was _wiser_? Nope: he had no idea what was coming in ten years, and it could just as easily have been David Brents until his retirement. Does this mean that the former guy was stupid? Nope: he took a risk, and it didn't pan out. (If we applied Eric's earlier "ideas have consequences" argument to this situation, we'd have to say that because Worker A's life didn't pan out, the _idea_ of finding a better job is discredited.)
Does this mean that the Cuban revolution was, in toto, a mistake, and that they should have been happy under Fulgencio Batista? Obviously not. (I'd enjoy the spectacle of seeing someone tell an average Cuban that all they had to do was live under Batistia, because in forty years, NAFTA'd get them access to a new Cadillac.) The assumption here is that, without the revolution, Cuba'd be as prosperous as Miami Beach. And it's based on selective data, as Alex pointed out.
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