Posted by
Billy email MADBillyD@aol.com on Friday, January 02, 2009 12:48:39 PM
From an editorial in Investor's Business Daily comes illuminating commentary on Cuba's 5o years of economic disaster and a careful chronology of just how Fidel Castro and his collectivizing criminals managed to mess things up so badly.
Spare us the fireworks and media-parroted claims of Fidel Castro's dictatorship bringing universal health care and education to Cuba. The real story is that a prosperous Cuba was turned into ruins in just five decades.
Its inflation-adjusted gross domestic product is a mere 5% of what it was in 1958, the year before Castro took over, according to Jorge Salazar-Carillo of Florida International University.
"It's a major failure," Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a University of Pittsburgh economist, told IBD. "Cuba is unable to increase food production to meet its needs and now imports 84% of its food. Cuba produced 7 million tons of sugar in 1952. This year, it's 1.5 million tons. This is the result of economic policy of collectivization, killing of individual incentive, inefficiency, constant changes of policy."
(Cuba is a failure. The one thing Cuba has been successful at is not showing human rights to her people. The rest of this must read editorial, including the and damning record of failure is right here.)