Nukes vs. Cyberattacks? | Coexisting with Dictators | Missing the Point about Cuba

2. Xi Jinping’s Totalitarian Regime Cannot Coexist with the Democratic World
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes in The Telegraph that

It has long been an article of faith among the Western establishment that Deng’s economic opening would bring political opening in its wake. Bill Clinton presented China’s accession to the World Trade Organization as an instrument of liberal penetration. “The genie of freedom will not go back into the bottle,” he said.

George W. Bush echoed the theme. “Economic freedom creates the habits of liberty, and habits of liberty create expectations of democracy. Trade freely with China and time is on our side,” he said. One winces today.

This is not to criticize Washington for trying. Optimism is America’s great charm (or once was). But it is by now obvious that the US and Europe persisted with this false course for too long.

Cai Xia, in along essay on the CCP’s ideological reflexes published by the Hoover Institution, argues that you cannot engage with the CCP. The party is implacably hostile, because it sees the foreign democratic virus as a threat to its own internal control of China. “The two conflicting systems cannot be reconciled, and they cannot indefinitely coexist,” she says.

Evans-Pritchard writes that Xi’s hostility toward the democratic West notwithstanding, his ambition to achieve a position of global hegemony for China cannot be realized because of the structural weaknesses of the Chinese economy and political system.

“In my view, historians will ultimately conclude that China suffered greater damage from the Lehman shock since the country resorted to promiscuous credit creation and industrial over-investment to avert social protest, clinging to a catch-up development model that was already past its sell-by-date.”

Moreover, China is no longer on the trajectory of previous Asia tigers. “President Xi Jinping and the top cadres think they can overcome the Impossible Dilemma: achieving a vibrant, hi-tech economy under the 24-hour surveillance of an absolutist police dictatorship.”

He concludes:

There may be a sorpasso a few years hence when China’s economy briefly overtakes the US but it will not last long and the process will then go into reverse if the Chinese Communist Party remains in office. The US is likely to be the world’s unchallenged economic superpower again by mid-century.

This does not preclude a dangerous few years of peak hubris before Chinese decline becomes obvious. For the next decade we live in the shadow of the Thucydides trap.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/07/black-lives-matter-mis…

3. Black Lives Matter Misses the Point About Cuba
Two weeks ago, Cubans in a small town 16 miles from Havana filled the streets to demonstrate against the government. On Thursday, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, the leading organization in the Black Lives Matter movement, issued a statement saying that the unrest resulted from the “U.S. federal government’s inhumane treatments of Cubans.” BLM called for lifting the American embargo, which, it says, undermines “Cubans’ right to choose their own government,” and is punishment for Cuba’s “commitment to sovereignty and self-determination.”

Jorge Felipe Gonzalez writes in The Atlantic that

At first glance, the statement might seem to signal solidarity with the protesters, but BLM is actually repeating communist officials when it blames the uprising on the United States. And that misses the point of the protests. To the surprise of the Black community in Cuba and those in exile, the organization is overlooking what has triggered the events—Cuba’s systemic denial of rights to its people, poor material conditions, lack of social mobility, and the inequality that plagues all Cubans but disproportionately Afro-Cubans, who are at the forefront of the widespread demonstrations.

Cuba is not an empty canvas onto which Americans can project their political ideas and not a utopian vehicle to advance some fantasy of socialist equality; neither is it a pawn for opportunistic political debates. In the Cuba where I grew up and that I had to abandon in 2013 in search of freedom, the suffering is not rhetorical.

Gonzales, who left Cuba in 2013 and who is nowan assistant history professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio, writes that the Cuban communist revolution in 1959 resulted in socioeconomic opportunities for Black and mixed-race Cubans, opportunities which were denied to them before 1959. Resources from the former Soviet Union helped bolster the economy and reduce historical disparities. “Cuba under Fidel Castro was a dictatorship, but it’s also true that racial equity in education, life expectancy, and employment improved for a time during his tenure.”

“The sympathy that BLM expresses for Cuba’s communist government is steeped in a sense of Cuba as it was in the 1980s—and that Cuba no longer exists,” Gonzales writes. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 ended Cuba’s access to its main foreign supporter. The major reduction in government subsidies saw the re-emergence of old economic and societal discrepancies along racial and ethnic lines. “The idealized Cuban regime that BLM praises is long gone, if it ever really existed.”

Although the embargo has undoubtedly played a role in the economic woes of Cuba, the main obstacle to Cuban development and prosperity is the government’s model of a state-controlled economy, a system in which Cubans cannot materialize their entrepreneurial energy, in which a policing regime frequently stops Black Cubans, and in which everyday items are hard to find.

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Cubans—and particularly Black Cubans—are suffering. The Cuban judicial system is prosecuting the protesters with sentences of up to 20 years. BLM, of all organizations, should be aware that Cubans can’t breathe either. Black Cuban lives also matter; the freedom of all Cubans should matter. To echo the organization’s stated reason for existing, no one is free until we are all free.