The problem is thinking you can have fair elections under extreme duress from sanctions. The whole purpose of those sanctions is to destroy as much as possible the democratic aspect, as the US itself admits.

From the official Office of the Historian US Gvt website, a key document regarding the logic behind the embargo in Cuba:

The majority of Cubans support Castro (the lowest estimate I have seen is 50 percent). […]

Communist influence is pervading the Government and the body politic at an amazingly fast rate.

Militant opposition to Castro from without Cuba would only serve his and the communist cause.

The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.

If the above are accepted or cannot be successfully countered, it follows that every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba. If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

The entire point of the blockade in Cuba, and by extension Venezuela, is that the people DO support their government, and the ONLY way to make them waver in their support is to make them literally starve.

You jest but this is genuinely what libs believe

If it were illegal, that would be a huge infraction to FREEDOM®🦅🦅

My implication was simply that they are allowed to exist because they happen to align with geopolitical US interests in the region, and otherwise would have likely disappeared.

You didn’t respond to my comments on the Machnovschina

Would you say the same about the Zapatistas?

Not sure, to be honest, I would have to read more about the Zapatistas. They absolutely are a micronation with no geopolitical power whatsoever, though.

Or the Makhnovshchina. They fought against the Bolsheviks so in your black white thinking, they are evil, right?

I never called Rojava evil, and I don’t think they’re evil, so don’t put those words in my mouth. Regarding Makhnovshchina: if they weren’t capable of enduring a civil war-destroyed red army, how were they supposed to survive Nazi genocide? How is a loose set of preindustrial farmers going to stand a chance against total extermination by an industrial power? And no, Vietnam isn’t an example because Vietnam was well funded and armed by the Soviets. No Soviet weapons, no Vietnam.

Take [irrelevant microstate with same interests in the region as the USA] as an example:

The 400 citations in question:

[1] Victims of Communism Memorial Association

[2] Burger Eagle Freedom Institute

[3] China Freedom NGO (Washington DC)

[4-399] Western State Television Station (retrieved in 2020)

[400] Literally the CIA

The article editors in question:

u/USA_STEM_Edgelord_USA_1990

u/TotallyNotAFed69

u/WhiteCisManInHis30s

You Americans are experts at outsourcing any homegrown problem, aren’t you? Drug problems? Venezuela. Radical right wing in the core of the imperial west winning the elections? Russia’s fault.

Mother of God, your international propaganda apparatus is so pervasive that I needed to exchange euros to dollars the other day and I could recognize the faces of your fucking 200 year old founding fathers on the bills by name and surname, and you STILL believe that propaganda problems in the USA are due to Russia?!

I feel you. I’m a Spaniard, and for 10ish critical years in the 2000s-2010s, we had a so-called “sun tax” that made people pay taxes for solar energy their home installations output to the electric grid. This essentially killed the solar industry in the largest country in the super sunny southern Europe. We have no fossil fuel deposits, no intention of opening up nuclear plants, and no geothermal energy possibilities, and we killed our best chance at solar.

Goes to show how China’s socialist government model blows anything in Europe and America out of the water.

Regarding solar, you’re forgetting one thing: not only is China the highest installer of solar power, they manufacture 93% of the total world production of photovoltaic panels. Every solar power installation in the west relies on Chinese solar panels.

You’re coping by lying about Chinese infrastructure

You could measure life outcomes instead of economic measures. The economy is the tool to improve life, not the metric itself. Let’s compare the evolution of key quality of life indices like education level attainment, alphabetization, life expectancy, access to healthcare, nutritional values of diets, or even things like government satisfaction.

Your sources do be like:

-Freedom Eagle Burger Institute report on China Badness 1990

-Austrian Painter Legacy Institution report 1984

-Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America, Propaganda Department report 2024

-Victims of Communism Memorial Association compilation of Top 10 China Bad arguments

Cope harder. China has the most vast high speed rail network in the planet and it works, for all intents and purposes, flawlessly, as do the immense metro rail systems in big cities.

All of those countries are capitalist, though, how do they invalidate my point about post-Soviet countries?

Famously feminist paradises like modern Russia, Poland or Ukraine you mean? Don’t make me laugh, the drops in fertility rates in such countries aren’t due to feminism, women now have less rights than 35 years ago in said countries.

A good example would be the astonishing drop in birth rates in post-Soviet countries. Capitalism, by providing no safety nets, no childcare and no community, makes it very difficult and undesirable to have children.

Yes, our society makes lots of bullshit jobs. That’s because capitalism can only keep people employed by creating bullshit jobs, and unemployed people are six missed meals away from revolution

Couldn’t be further from reality. Capitalist firms actively hire the least amount of people possible, because if they can get away with equal production and lower number of employees, that means higher profit.

Capitalism is actually the only system in human history with unemployment: it wasn’t a thing in hunter-gatherer society, it wasn’t a thing in early agricultural societies, it wasn’t a thing during the times of slavery, it wasn’t a thing during feudalism, and it hasn’t been a thing in any communist nation such as Cuba or the USSR (both guaranteeing jobs to every citizen as a right, and the latter having 10% of all positions vacant from 1970 onward).

Capitalism maintains an unemployed sector of the population because:

1. Employing more workers costs more money to firms

2. Having high unemployment decreases wages, improving profits of firms

3. Having a pool of unemployed people allows firms to spawn, grow and mutate without difficulty of finding workers to do so.

An approval rating is given for Russia too, with much stricter “criminal dissent” laws than China. Do you suspect that the western institution which made this graph is evil CPC propaganda? This data is literally portrayed in Statista, it doesn’t get more western capitalist than that.

Now, don’t forget I’m waiting for your condemnation of the capitalist atrocities against the Ukrainian population since 1990. Otherwise, to other commenters, you may appear as a dishonest propagandist leveraging Ukrainian suffering only to condemn things you already stood against.

It was not a dictatorship because it did not produce the material results you would expect from a dictatorship.

If it had been a system in power of a few people against the vast majority, as was for example monarchic feudalism (the state immediately before the USSR, the Russian Empire, being a good example of it), you would expect vast inequality leading to a two-class system with vastly different life metrics, wealth, and a degradation of the rights of the working people.

However, the Soviet Union had the lowest wealth inequality the region has ever seen, the highest earners were the highly trained professionals (not policitians as you may have been led to believe) and the salary difference were perhaps at most tenfold; access to healthcare was universal and free, as was education to the highest level, pensions for retirement were universal with men retiring at 60 and women at 55, homelessness was abolished and everyone had access to affordable housing (3% of monthly income on average), and everyone had the right to a job making unemployment nonexistant.

A system producing these outcomes is not the result of 4 generations of “benevolent dictators” from 1917 to 1991, it’s outrageous making such claims.