Senate The legacy of Fidel Castro (1926-2016), and the future of Cuba

My impression is that the Japanese are about evenly split on the US's presence there. And the older generations tend to be more positive to it. But their governments on both sides fear its absence due to not having been allowed much of a domestic military force until recently, and North Korea being right next door. The US was able to scare the Japanese into enacting economic policies that sabotaged themselves in the late 80s. Their American economic "advisors", whenever they would hear from the other end that "uh, isn't this measure kind of stupid?" would make sure to kindly remind their interlocutors that the US has a significant trade deficit with Japan, and foreign naval bases cost a lot of money to operate, and it would be an awful shame if the US wasn't able to protect its friends from a bullying neighbour.

In short, the Japanese recession of the 90s didn't happen by itself.

 

Given that Cuba is now, by American standards, majority black, if the Miami Cubans descend on post-communist Cuba, infected with American racial attitudes... it won't end well.

 

according to a Usenet alternate history group that was discussing Fidel falling in 1989.Given that group contained posters who were published scholars, i trusted it. Mind you, post communist Cuba will be forced by the USA to pay up for all those Banana Republic era American holdings that Fidel nationalized. the post-Communist Eastern European countries were forced to pay compensation for Eastern Bloc-era nationalization, too.

 

Are you drunk? High?

Drunk and high?

It's drunk and high isn't it.

 

1989... Perhaps it could have been referring to 'politically black' (in the sense of non-white people as second class citizens). Quite a niche term though, so possibly just drunk on methanol.

 

I'm not sure just how well the Cuban-Americans in Florida and the
Cubans in Cuba will meld. These two populations will have gone through
very different experiences, and will have starkly divergent takes on the
revolution. Cubans in Cuba might not be nearly as prone to reject the
entire Communist project as their American cousins; the regime's real
accomplishments in health care and education aren't likely to be
rejected. Combine this with the property claims likely to be
made, and the attempts of some more extreme Cuban-Americans to get rid
of everything that doesn't date from Batista, and you could conceivably
have a situation where Cubans detest Cuban-Americans as their
overbearing and racist cousins whom they really don't want to see.

 

It's certainly true that throughout Latin America, the proportion of African ancestry in the general populace has been quite under-emphasized. By the American standard of the "one drop rule" almost all those countries are majority black, certainly including Cuba. But this just goes back to the fact that race has always been a sociological construct, not a biological one. The Spanish and Portuguese understanding of race was always different, and that informed the views of the colonial societies they built. I'm not sure how many people would self-identify as Afro-Cuban at this point.