Capitalism, Cuba, and Castro: A Report from Recent Travels

0:00Dr. Yuri Maltsev received his MA in history and social sciences at Moscow State University and his PhD in economics at the Institute for Labor Research in Moscow. Dr. Maltsev has authored five monographs, contributions to 16 books and 73 articles in American, Russian, Turkish, Japanese and Taiwanese journals, magazines and newspapers. He is currently a professor of economics at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Today he will lecture on capitalism, Cuba and Castro, a report from recent travels. Travels. Thank you, most of you. Well, thank you, Jeff, really my kind of bizarre background being a defector from the Soviet Union.

0:56I was all time thinking when I will have a nostalgia, nostalgia about the Soviet Union, about socialism, Socialism and maybe four or five years ago, I decided to go to Cuba to have a look what's going on there to satisfy my need to be back into the time when I was a young person. and and sure enough all my expectations came absolutely were absolutely fulfilled because a good old friend stopped by said probably will be a funny funny presentation it would be funny if it wouldn't be so gruesome what's going on in Cuba today it's really really a disaster of immense proportions immense I'm so sorry for Cuban people who are experiencing way more in their 50 years of their revolution.

1:51They got the full dose of it. I mean, they got as much probably as Soviets did in their 80 years of their disaster. Their socialist deconstructionist, Mr. Castor, he said, I'm a dreamer who has seen some of his dreams become reality and if you will go and have a look at the cube right now then you would think that this kind of dreams can come only to a completely schizophrenic mind. Well, travel because it looks like it should be a travel story more than an academic report and rightly so there's not much of academic study to be done about Cuban economy because If we would apply a vision of Mises and his characteristic of socialism, it's not an economy at all.

2:42It's not an economy at all. If we would say that Soviet economy or economy of other socialist countries is just a simple system of management, then if we would apply that to Cuban economy, it's not even simple of management, it's just some kind of a devious plot to destroy everything. not, it doesn't manage anything. So Cuban economy with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuban economy went into a free fall, into a free fall from 1990 to 1994, the foreign payments receipts, received by Cuba, dropped by, plummeted by 85 percent.

3:29Why am I saying that? What's very important about foreign payments? There are plenty of books produced by the U.S. academia and by a very numerous cohort of Cuban lovers in the United States. Some of them are published by Princeton University Press or Columbia University Press. These are monographs pretending to provide us with some scientific wisdom on, for example, exchanges between Cuban economy and Soviet economy, that some of them would research why would Soviets, for example, buy Cuban sugar seven times the price of the world market. They would pay seven times more than the world market for sugar, than the world price for and why would they sell oil to Cuba for the price about two times lower than the world market price for oil at that very time?

4:32And they would come up with a lot of interesting ideas and they would kind of try to figure out that maybe there's something wrong with the economic mentality and what not But without realizing that that was not trade, that was not trade at all. That was a direct payment for the blood of Cuban soldiers who would be killed in the battlefields of Angola or Syria or for the blood of Cuban so-called instructors who would train terrorists in Guatemala or Colombia or Peru or Bolivia. It was nothing to do with economy, but even for the Soviet leaders at that time, leaders like Mr. Khrushchev, who organized, you remember, the first Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, that, well, together with President Kennedy, they did it in tandem, but even for him, to say this is just a payment for issues for each academic mind from the United States captured by Fidel, then that would sound a little bit cynical.

5:48So because of that, the Soviets designed in the beginning of 1960s this very devious but primitive scheme of how to pump the liquidity into the Cuban economy, which otherwise would not survive. would not survive. And today is a good example that without this liquidity, the Cuban economy is not surviving at all. So I mentioned that I had this desire to have a look at this last relic of socialism, maybe short of North Korea, on this planet and to take my students to inoculate them against this There's deadly disease, which really is like AIDS, I think, like mental AIDS. So we went to, then I realized that to do that, you need to comply with the Helms-Burton Act, which promises 10 years of jail and $10,000 fine or both for going to Cuba.

6:52to Cuba. You know that embargo is still in place, which is, I would say, the most funny kind of travesty. It came straight, I think, out of Graham Greenberg, our man in Havana, because embargo is something like Soviet taxation, when the taxes would be very high, but on In the good side, nobody would pay it. So embargo is a thing like that. I went through this paperwork of getting a license. You need a government license. So I have a kind of profiteering from the little government monopoly I have.

7:38It's a five-year-long license to go to Cuba. And as President Bush, last year, he made a speech about travel to Cuba. I was so surprised. About 15 minutes, he was talking, one of the press conferences, that some people, that some people would use this travel instead of studying, probably studying communism and socialism seriously in Cuba. They would spend time on the beach and they would scuba dive and swim and snorkel. And I thought that sounds like a good plan. So, it's not my first trip, I've been in Cuba two times before, and all the time I see this, it kind of all the time reminds me of the phrase of Ludwig von Mises that we are all historians of decline.

8:30Well, if you would like to see decline in accelerated pace, I mean, we are in decline here, But the decline with a capital D, then Cuba is a good place as you'll get a bargain for your buck for watching decline. Well, the decline in Cuban economy, it wasn't many Cuban lovers or fidelites in our academia. They would think that Cuban collapse was artificial kind of because the Soviet Union pulled out. The Soviet Union pulled out, that Cuba otherwise would be viable, and its economy in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s were doing very well and only because the Soviet Union collapsed, because socialism is no more in the Soviet Union, so that inflicted great problems for Cuban people as well as for people in the United States.

9:30So this is not true at all. Cuban economy was in a free fall in 1980s. It was not doing well in 1960s and 1970s. If you would recollect who was the first minister of economics of Cuba, you would shiver. That was Che Guevara. Che Guevara was not just a terrorist in straight form. He was not just murdering people through shooting them from his rifle. He did that a lot in his life, but he was also murdering people through central planning, of which he was a grandmaster in the beginning of 1960s. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, they belong, both of them, and Raul as well, they belong to another branch of Communists which we don't hear much, and they were kind of closet Trotskyites.

10:26Why close it? Because Trotsky was condemned by the Soviet elite, and so that's why Fidel would not admit, and Che Guevara would not admit that they are Trotskyites. However, right now they do admit, because the masters in Kremlin are gone, and today Fidel openly said that he likes what Leo Trotsky, that it's a romantic version of communism, of which he and his great friend Che Guevara, before his death, and he was implementing until 1967, his death, the Trotskyite version of Marxism. What is the difference between Trotskyism and Leninism? Because still there are plenty of Trotskyists, more Trotskyists right now I think, In the US Marxist movement, Trotsky is still extremely popular, as well as Che Guevara.

11:25These people believe that you can only have the world communist revolution. You cannot build socialism, you cannot have socialist country by itself. If the social is one in one single country, then this country should be performing a role of something called small motor, small engine, and then it should jumpstart the big engine, the world, through the transmission belt, which would be professional revolutionaries like Che Guevara, like Fidel, like other people, who would consider, say, Cuba or Soviet Union, just as all the other countries in the world. of the Soviet Union, just as a kind of a starter for the communist revolution. So from this perspective, and Che wrote and spoke a lot about it, I visited his museum in Santa Clara and definitely all the stuff is right there.

12:24So his point is that Cuban people can probably endure a lot of hardships and a lot of losses and Mises, knowing about the historic mission to liberate the whole continent of Latin America because that was division of labor between Soviets and Cubans. Cubans were in charge of Latin America. So his point was that we should endure a lot. We should suffer maybe for a while, but then we'll have this glorious future. The whole continent will be liberated and the soft underbelly of the United States would be hit by this Cuban developments.

13:12How to implement it? You need to militarize everything. Leo Trotsky was saying that the only way to do it is because Leo Trotsky was quite a bright but evil individual. He would write poetry in French, and he was also an artist, so he wasn't stupid at least, like his followers in U.S. academia. His point was he realized that the only way to make socialism work is to shoot people, to shoot people and to militarize economy. Economy. So his point was that every enterprise is a battalion. Every agricultural farm is a company in the great army, in the great army of socialist change, in the great army of socialist change.

14:02These are the ideas which Cubans, especially people like Fidel and Che Guevara, or many of them, would profess in the 1960s and 1970s. The whole Cuba was mobilized to do exactly that. What they did, they nationalized everything in 1959, 1960. That's the pretext for our embargo on Cuba, which is also, I would say, travesty, not only because it's limiting our own rights, it doesn't limit Fidel Castro's rights on anything, it doesn't impact, I think, even Cuban, what's left of the Cuban economy.

14:54It's just prohibiting your rights, your choices, whether you can go to Cuba or not. Otherwise, it's... The most amazing thing is what our government is doing. That we have embargo from one hand, the people like ourselves can be jailed, can get a ticket for $10,000. From one hand, from another hand, United States government is providing something called humanitarian aid to Castro regime in the tune of six billion dollars during the last five years. Six billion dollars, that's about twice higher than Cuban annual export revenue. So can you imagine that we're practically feeding this socialist parasite.

15:42And the only thing you can eat in Cuba right now is the thighs and chicken, nothing else. I mean, there's no other sources of protein. Cuban government prohibited Cuban citizens to eat beef. Beef is considered to be bad for you. And so that's the combination of political and health arguments, so you can only... Their choices, choices what the Cubans have are extremely, extremely, this is a Cuban store, Peso store, so you can see that, not much you can buy in a Peso store, and they know what is this, this, this, white and red boxes, this is starch, starch, so, so it's a, It's very difficult, I think, to feed your family or to satisfy your needs with starch.

16:43They, however, however I would be definitely just engaged in anti-communist slander again if I wouldn't tell you the whole story that besides starch, which is not rationed, I mean you can't have as much starch as you wish. So everything else, however, is rationed. Not much else, you can see that this is a list of what is provided to you by a Cuban government. Interestingly enough, you cannot take pictures in these kind of stores, but fortunately for me, I have a good friend who was trained in Soviet Union as a wonderful group of people people who were trained in Soviet Union, and so I can go to Cuba and speak Russian to them, and they would be like exactly like Russians, like really like black Russians, they would sit around and drink vodka until the crack of dawn and speak Russian, and many of them do professors without even visiting Russians, just by themselves, they have a Russian club and whatnot. So this is a, so he took these pictures for me, we just visited.

17:59And you can see that a Cuban citizen living in Havana, in provinces that's an unobtained ideal, can get four pounds of rice per month, three pounds of beans per month, five boxes of Matches, one tube of dental paste, of toothpaste, then 150 grams of coffee, that would be just one third of a pound of coffee, and the one, I think one glass, I saw people receiving I think that glass of vegetable oil, which looked like old motor oil here, because it was extremely unclear and smelled very badly, but that's about it.

18:57Leche, for example, which is milk. Milk is only for children under seven. And for adults who are smart enough to be members of the Communist Party. So everybody else can only ask children how this leche tastes like. So that's the Cuban, not many people realize also what an immense humanitarian disaster Cuba is, because average wage in Cuba is $10 a month, it's 270 pesos, 275 pesos a month. Right now, official exchange rate is 1 to 27, so $1 buys 27 pesos. However, in the streets, people would be happy to exchange 50 pesos for $1. That would reduce their monthly wage to $5 already instead of $10, instead of $10.

19:54So they have the economy, or whatever it is, where people are surviving on $10 a month. I'm not saying, I will tell you a little bit later about haves also, that's not only have-nots, but also people who do have, who lead a privileged lifestyle in that society. But those people who do not have, say, dollar remittances from Miami, that people who are not members of the Communist Party elite, not members of propaganda, huge propaganda machine, but ordinary workers, peasants, doctors, they have the same salary.

20:39What's great about Cuba that the wage differentials are really, I mean, they are following Leotrotsky and Vladimir Lenin, both in spirit and literally. Because wage differentials are like between $9.50 and $10.50. So if you are a doctor, if you are, for example, a cardiologist or a surgeon or whatever, then maybe you will get $10.50. And if you are a manual laborer in the fields, then you will get $9.50. So wage differentials are not very, very huge. Not very huge. Then, what's interesting, that it's a great class you can have in Cuba. Why a great class? Because even the last student, I mean the least achiever, I would say, or person with learning disabilities, as they're called right now.

21:35So even the last person with learning disability, being in Cuba, would say, what kind of society is that? And they would say slavery, and that's it. Because it is slavery, it's a socialized slavery, yes. And Hans Hoppe wrote about that, about private slavery and socialized government slavery. And that's exactly what all Cuba is. It's a government slavery, it's a collective ownership of slaves. slaves, collective ownership by a very small, very small elite, and that's what, what do they have, because if you, I visited a couple of times, agricultural enterprises in Cuba, and they, and they would tell you a success story, that, for example, when they were not as good as they are right now, right now they're the first on the whole island, their salary was 220 pesos a month, so that would be about $8 a month, and now it's already at 290 pesos a month, so it's just already at $10.50, so if you will divide it by 30, that means people are working from anywhere from 32 to 45 cents a day, then another thing which not many people do understand in the United States, especially not Cuban lovers, because the whole island is still infested with

23:01for people who are looking for wisdom there, coming from places ranging from California, Montana or Finland, just amazing, that you cannot change jobs in Cuba, you cannot move around the island in Cuba, that means that if you are getting your 32 cents a day, maybe not in such advanced enterprise where you could get 45 cents a day, that you cannot change this enterprise, a place of employment, because the chairwoman of the collective farm, she, which I'm thinking is just used for tourists because she spoke perfect English and whatnot, she said, well, you came from a communist country yourself, you should realize that if I would let my people go, then they would just increase an output quota for me. The plan target, then they would say, well, if you have extra people that you don't need in your entourage, that for letting them go, because she can actually not let them go, but she can sign a petition to some upper bureaucrat who would decide if this person can go, say, to Havana or to

24:12Santiago de Cuba and be reunited with his wife or other members of the family and whatnot. And she said that she cannot sign this kind of petition. She cannot sign with people trying I would like to leave this wonderful slave plantation she's running and move to some other slave plantation just because then the hercipiters would say, well, you have too many people. That means that you should have your output quota should go up. All labor in Cuba, which I saw, was manual labor. The enterprises which were built by Soviets, numerous enterprises, right now are completely gone, there is nothing there, just empty walls usually, rusting equipment, no employment there at all, because there were no, there were artificial creations there, there was no need for them, there was no market for their goods, they were sending these goods from the other side of the world back to the Soviet Union, just to keep some Cubans happy.

25:21I'm happy about that and show this enterprise as a great achievement of socialism on the American continent. So now they are all gone. All tractors, I've seen only tractors which in Havana are pulling this huge, they call it camel buses. CamelBus would be just a huge covered platform pulled by, I will show you the picture, pulled by a tractor and that's the only mean of public transportation which most people can enjoy. So this is the state of real estate here. I will return back to the previous one.

26:15Havana was probably one of the most beautiful places on earth before this disaster descended on Havana. Now many areas, I'm not saying all areas, you will see some beautiful looking ones, which are still being supported by tourist dollars, by tourist dollars, but many of them like that. That's the typical, the Chevy 1954 typical way of people going around. Interestingly enough, they have a lot of Soviet cars, which are way younger than what they had. And most Soviet cars are already over the road, so it looks like socialist cars, unlike what Khrushchev was saying, are much worse than capitalist cars.

27:03And he was saying, our socialist bulls and cars and planes are much better than capitalist cars. So he was, it looks like, lying again. Yeah, this is this cooperative. It's cooperative, because cooperative, that means co-owned by somebody. I don't know, maybe it's co-owned by Fidel and Raoul, because these people basically don't have any stake in anything. And for them to keep themselves busy, and that probably you can get another peso too, if you will do this wonderful visual propaganda displays on your workplace. or Workplace. All these plants are being planted and harvested manually to please human lovers in the United States. They call it organic agriculture, because it's really organic because they don't have any fertilizers or pesticides or anything else. Well, here is various slogans This is condemning US imperialism and gross human rights abuses in the United States and things like that.

28:20Yeah, this is this travel thing and it's pulled by this. Usually it's at night, so it's not crowded. But I was thinking that they probably can fit a thousand people in one of this. Yeah, this line is, sure enough, it's not for rice, interestingly enough, not for beans, it's a line to get out of Cuba, it's a line to U.S. Embassy, which is disguised as U.S. Interest Section Bureau, it's called the United States Interest Section Office in Havana.

29:07That's the biggest building in Havana, interestingly enough. It's the biggest building, with all these antennas and radars and whatnot, a lot of marine guards everywhere, so the presence of Yankee imperialism is still. The next one is the Spanish Embassy, because Spain is taking Cubans as well, and the places look like an old besieged Spanish fortress, because here the people are organized, probably Marine Guards are doing that. But around the Spanish Embassy, it's just people trying to get in. Now, these are workers. The good thing about socialism is that this is a resort. The interesting thing is that Cuba has a dual economy. I told you about it. They have notes about the suffering The majority of Cubans, 95% of people in Cuba, but there is a 5% minority, maybe 4 even, because I talked to some economists also, Soviet-trained economists, and they were coming up with numbers completely different from what the CIA is feeding us with.

30:33According to CIA, human GDP per capita is $2,100, $2,100. And being once with a CIA officer, doing seminars for the United States Army, just came from Baltimore here. Can you imagine? Aberdeen Proving Grounds, that's the, as you know, that's the National Center for Sexual Harassment of the United States Army. and so maybe they are so depressed by that so they asked me to talk about about decline of liberty from Moscow to Manhattan so that was quite interesting for me too but what I'm saying is that that US government is playing into this hands into Castro's hands through again the same thing like with the Soviet with fake statistics. $2,100 in Cuba. It's practically like in Mexico, and Mexico looks like a superpower in comparison to Cuba.

31:41There are plenty of rich, arrogant Mexicans in Cuba who are enjoying themselves, who are buying the major commodity there. I mean, people cannot sell anything except themselves, so prostitution is rampant. and so these Mexicans are coming as they told me on this sex safari trip to Cuba and being on this sex safari trip so in Cuba it's definitely not 2100 because if you will multiply $10 on 12 months so that doesn't look like 2100 even if you would throw in pre-health care, pre-education, pre-medical care, pre-medical care, pre-medical care, pre-medical care, pre-medical care, pre-medical care, pre-medical care, pre-medical care, pre-medical care, and Practically Free Rice and Beans, because they provided very low price.

32:33The issue of healthcare in Cuba is amazing. I mean, that's the best kept lie, I would say, the best kept lie. Because if you talk to your colleagues or other people in the US academy, they would say, okay, we understand that, because Soviet Union betrayed Cuba. trade Cuba, by collapsing, because of that Cubans are suffering, they are suffering, but they still have the best healthcare in the world, and they cite these fantastic numbers like 5.4, that's the infant mortality rate in the United States, 6.1, Cuba is 5.4, isn't It's wonderful. However, sure enough, Cuban people, they know better. They say that they register newborns only after half a year.

33:30When they're six months, then you can go and register a person. So those ones who would die before, they're just outside of statistics. Why to count them? I mean, to count these dead people. The people are reacting to this awful living conditions, mostly by reducing their fertility. Cuba right now is practically, unlike other parts of South America, they have declining population. It's amazing what the government can do to people. They would even be depressed to the point that they would not have families. This is a beautiful place, that's for haves. And the health care is everywhere you go in Cuba, the people are told to tell foreigners that their health care is very good.

34:29So, I asked my, I would say, Cuban-Russians to visit, and so we visited Dr. Zouathis. The doctor had aspirin and he had iodine. That's just to, if you have something external, then he would apply this solution of spirit and iodine. Yeah, it's kind of an ugly looking and terribly smelling solution, presumably which kills germs, probably it kills anything. And so they would apply that if that's external and aspirin if it's internal.

35:15And then also I was told that there is a black market for medicine, mostly for herbal medicine, which people are making themselves. A friend of mine who, when asked him in the presence of students, he said, well, yes, we have very good health care. He said, especially if we would keep in mind that we don't have medicines or ambulances. So that would be his way to tell the truth, right. Otherwise he'd say it's a fantastic system. So statistics on mortality, infant mortality, fertility, I think it's just not available.

36:02I mean that it's not that some people know, CIA is usually busy in recalculating statistics Statistics of rogue nations. They have something called Office of Foreign Economic Assessment, employing 7200 people in Virginia, and they're trying to recalculate, thinking that, say, Cubans are coming up with 5.4, but we would know that this is a lie, so we would count with 7.3, because we think that they're just faking statistics. They're not faking, they're making statistics up. I mean, there's no primary reporting, for most of statistics, because there's no primary reporting. Then the final number is just taken from the ceiling for propaganda purposes.

36:48Now, they can be very generous. I mean, I was even surprised. Why 5.4? Why not 3.1? So that is the people. You can see people literally starving. You can see children who are trying to snatch, for example, So bones from your plate, when you're sitting outside. At first, when I came to Cuba, first time, three years ago, I didn't know about that. So I was, and they have this remnants of capitalism. They have the sitting out kind of restaurants in Havana. So sitting out, whatever. And then I was talking to my companion. And then I saw a little black hand just snatching this bones, Chicken balls from my plate. So you can see that people are not making it up, it's not that they are not taking it as a souvenir, they're not, they're just desperately, some of them are desperately hungry.

37:48The good thing, I think, one of the greatest achievements of communism and true achievements is complete absence of overweight or obese people. That, I think, that New York Times bestseller authors would be very pleased if they would go there. I haven't seen, I haven't seen, these people, with overweight people, it's a little bit, they have some, they have some, and there's my friend Roberto, he said that we can actually identify who is the secret agent of Fidel's police. So if you have some accumulations, that means that you are getting something from the government.

38:34So the same thing as in Cuba. In Cuba, I would say that the story would not be corrective. I would say that there was a freedom of movement in Cuba, relative freedom of movement. In 1997, Fidel signed a law that this freedom of movement is the last freedom we need. And that was, interestingly enough, against Blacks. Why against Blacks? in the world of economics, because Western Cuba is populated mostly by Afro-Cubans, by Afro-Cubans, and they were hit by this economic disaster completely, people were starving to death, so they were trying to get to Havana, the same in every communist country, everybody wants to get closer to the kitchen, so that where the government is, because government will look at all the starving people around their big buildings We'll do something about that. Give them organized soup kitchen or something.

39:48So these people were attracted by Havana. Also, these rationing norms, that Havana would be the only place where they would be more or less enforced. I mean, everywhere else, like if you go in the provinces, then you can have this rationing card, but they wouldn't have rice. So that's why your rationing card is something like a socialist constitution. I mean, that provides you with all rights, but no rice. And that's why the people are trying to get to Havana. So they prohibited that, prohibited that movement completely. So everybody is staying where they are. They're not creating all kind of visual harassment for government officials when they drive around in their Soviet limos.

40:35So that's why I'm saying about Afro-Cubans, about blacks in Cuba, because the greatest supporters of Fidel Castro, he actually has a caucus in the United States Congress. He has about 35 members of Congress who are openly supporting Fidel Castro and his great friend Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was ousted from Haiti recently. I'm talking about Black Caucus, the Black Caucus of the United States Congress, and leaders of Black Caucus like Congressman Wrangel, Congresswoman Waters, they are very frequent visitors to that island, to this island. Fidel Castro, he is, I would say he kind of reminded me a little bit of Yeltsin, he is He is funny, I mean, in his own murderous way, but he is funny, because what he did, he opened something called Fidel Castro School of Medicine, and he invites people from all over Latin America to indoctrinate them, because I cannot say it's a school of political propaganda, you can, you should disguise it for something decent. So, medical, he offered 500 minority

41:54students in the U.S., free training in this school. He also offered members of our Black Caucus that he will send 2,000 doctors from Cuba to Mississippi, Alabama and other places in desperate need for health care providers. So that's, and we hear that all the time again and it's written on walls. He even suggested in the year 2000 when the people in Florida When we had this gridlock in Florida, he offered to send 500 Cuban observers to look what's going on there and qualify our elections as free or not.

42:44And interestingly, now that in Cuba they had any kind of elections which resemble like elections only about 60 years ago, even before Fulgencio Battista. And Fulgencio Battista, who is also demonized by the left in the United States, so I was all the time suspicious that he probably was doing something right, Because he's such an evil person in the eyes of the... And sure enough, everything worth of looking at was built under him. I would say we should blame him very much for deserting Cuban people in the time of the crisis. He just took off and went somewhere else.

43:31He was definitely a tyrant. But overall his death toll, as proudly would be told by every Cuban boy, was about 5,000 people he killed. According to estimates of Cuban dissidents, Fidel murdered 270,000 people and also squeezed out of the country 2.5 million Cubans. So Cubans right now are like Armenians all over. You would be surprised that there are more Cubans not even in Havana, but say in Spain and in Europe. There are plenty of Cubans over there, plenty of Cubans in Mexico and Venezuela, plenty of Cubans in Argentina. So Cuban diaspora is all over the world. Two and a half million of best people, well, it's good for them, but it's bad for the future of Cuba. I mean, maybe after Fidel would die, then hopefully some of them would return with their expenses and Money, and fix the place. But that's, I would say, crimes of Fidel are just fantastic.

44:42He is also known to like this kind of tortures and whatnot, himself personally. Like Stalin Saddam Hussein. He would watch his enemies being tortured and killed. So that's from, I would say that he is probably a psychopath and compulsive killer himself. I know he is 77 years old, and pessimists in Cuba are counting years, and optimists are counting minutes and hours, so we would not know when he would... Because his successor, Raul Castro, Minister of Defense, he is 74 years old, and I would think that he probably will be lost in transition, Because I think that in Cuba, transition to those normalcy, those markets, would be probably very fast, because people in that police state, they would come to you and would say, he's a devil, he's a devil internet.

46:00And for me that would be amazing because they risk everything for almost nothing. I mean it just that means that they had enough of it to the point that they just speak out I mean what would be the benefits I would say yes he is and or or in many cases if you would come to Castro Lover he would call a police officer and and would say this person doesn't like there are plenty of Americans were engaged in this in this type of activities Plenty of my Cuban Russian friends told me the chilling stories about about professors of sociology, English, history, coming to Cuba, talking to Cuban dissidents, and then reporting them to Cuban authorities.

46:46So that's the reality of today's Cuba. Well, I see that I have a little bit of time left, and I would like at first to kind of I love to wish Cuban people, because they still extremely, they couldn't kill their love of life, they couldn't kill their, they would say, entrepreneurship, which takes the strangest things, the strangest kind of ways. In Santa Clara, for example, we met a gentleman who said that he loves United States, and he suffered for that. And we said, well, what are the circumstances? He spoke English. He tattooed the stars and stripes on his shoulder and then there are at least kind of the signs of the cigarette butts that meant that he was saying that he was tortured by Cuban police when they discovered that and they were just putting their cigar butts on the flag of the United States.

47:47and so my students definitely they were literally crying and he was completely washed with with US dollars with your dollars getting for just one expose like that more than other Cubans would get on their plantations for a couple of months you never know I mean whether he did that himself or or Cuban police did that whatever but people are trying to survive people are trying to survive the sad One thing, however, is that my students would meet a lot of people of their own age, some of them students from University of Havana, from Eastern University, from University of Trinidad, who visited these places, who would turn out to be prostitutes or thieves or beggars or what not.

48:38And it's very sad that what the government is doing to them, that they do not have any and many other ways to sustain themselves. And Fidel Kanzler, sure enough, from time to time, he would pick up two or three prostitutes and they would shoot them publicly. So you can imagine that the government is a campaign against moral sleaze. So the government, which have driven these people into the ground, would prevent them from feeding themselves. It would be a very funny place if it wouldn't be so grim. Well, if you have any, I would be happy to take some questions or comments. In Venezuela, there's also a strong man that supports private property rights and is destroying that country's economy, and Venezuela happens to be awash in oil.

49:39How close is the cooperation between Hugo Chavez's government and Castro's, and does he help provide the oil that Soviets have, that no longer, or made up that shortfall that Soviets no longer provide? Definitely, yes. Fidel Castro is an idol not only in the U.S. academia but also among some crooks south of Cuba and the people who would come to mind first would be Hugo Chavez and President Lula of Brazil. One of these tyrants in the making visited Cuba, were kissing Fidel. I was impressed by Colonel Chavez, however audacity, he was kissing Fidel mouth and Fidel right now looked like a very, very unfresh corpse.

50:33And so, yes, Hugo Chavez is supplying Fidel with oil, and yes, he is. I have some friends from Venezuela, they gave me some statistics from, interestingly, I'm from US Federal Register, that amount of political asylum cases from Venezuela to the United States in 1999 there was 27 cases right now it's 19,000 cases so very soon we will have in Miami Miami will not be Cuban anymore it will be it will be half Venezuelan half Brazilian so that's that's definitely it's a very sad thing it's again the same the same thing that The only lesson of history does not teach us anything, because for Chavez, the picture of Fidel, I mean the Fidel, the success story there of one person is immense, I mean he outlived what, seven US presidents, he has a lot of, according to Cubans, has just a crowd of bastards, he has his own harems and what not, he lives in seven different buildings, You mentioned the black market with respect to herbal medicines and healthcare. I'm curious how much you saw the black market,

51:58You mentioned the black market with respect to herbal medicines and health care. I'm curious, how much you saw the black market providing for the basic needs of Cubans above and beyond rice and bean rations that they may or may not be able to provide? The Black Market also has an open market, which was introduced by Fidel in 1994. It's an open farmer's market. However, it's heavily taxed by the state.

52:49To sell in that market, you need to pay the state just to have a place, an extraordinary amount of money. And then people can go and buy things there. However, the prices in that market, if you are getting this 270 pesos a month, then the prices in that market are prohibitive in most cases for you. So you cannot buy much. You can buy on this fresh market, it's mostly either foreigners or rich Cubans who would get relatives. Relatives in Miami, which were huge liability, you wouldn't get a good job if the government would know that you have relatives in Miami, the gusanos, the bad guys. That right now, that's the way to survive, because these relatives would send you $100 a month, can you imagine, $100 a month, so you're getting 10 times, you get an annual the Federal Reserve, fiat money, fractional reserve banking, Human Action, man economy, The markup, official markup, at least what the Cuban economists told me, is 140%.

54:19That means that the boombox sold in these dollar stores for relatives and party officials, which in the US would be $30, in Cuba would be $55. The same with almost everything. My quick point. You mentioned race in Cuba. My quick point, you mentioned race in Cuba. As it turns out, several of the most prominent political prisoners in Cuba are black. And ironically, while the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP have called for economic sanctions, for example, against South Carolina, they don't seem to have a lot of solidarity for their peers in Cuba who have been persecuted by a white autocrat. Absolutely, yes, absolutely. That's without saying. And what's interesting, what Fidel is doing, the only person who is really profiting from this embargo is Fidel.

55:10Fidel and his, because any time, interestingly enough, any time US Congress would discuss lifting of embargo, then Fidel would do something spectacular, like jail these people. was a year ago in March 2003. He jailed 75 people to 1,500 years of jail and murdered another three without even trial. So that's exactly when the people in Washington would think about this insanity. They would think, well, we'll leave it. And that doesn't make How do you explain this phenomenon of Castro idolizers and Che Guevara idolizers, not just in the U.S., but all over the world, this romantic vision of...

56:16and they were people like Che Guevara, he was a little bit of a different breed than Castro, who is kind of sleazy and what not, but people like Che Guevara, he was a true revolutionary, he was, I think, genuinely misguided person, genuinely misguided person, if not even mentally unstable, so he was risking his life and he lost his life for the sake of revolution and I was proud that that none of my students, one student, she bought this T-shirt with Che Guevara, but none of my students, and they kind of harassed her into putting this T-shirt away. However, you can see a lot of students from the United States wear this, in any campus, almost in any campus. So that's because he was being idealized, the same with Lenin and what not looks like, we're thought when communism collapsed, we thought freedom, liberty is vindicated, Communism Collapse. However, that means for some people, it means just let's have done more communism, more communism.

57:23Maybe I'm getting old and intolerant, but that atmosphere on most U.S. campuses is getting more and more, I mean, I feel asphyxiated. I feel asphyxiated. For me, just to come and breath some fresh air in Auburn is a wonderful thing to have. Yeah, well, I think some people tried to address it. There's a nice essay by Hayek called Why Intellectuals Love Socialism. Then Murray Rothbard wrote a lot about that as well, because that gives them, gives them claim to power. That gives them, they know more, they know better than Graeme Mosses or greedy capitalists. Greedy capitalists are making money, providing us with these wonderful things around, and what intellectuals do, they are kind of the dealers, second-hand dealers, and ideas, and the ideas would be providing them, providing them with a claim to rule others, to rule others.

58:26I would recommend, pick up the book, The Anti-Capitalist Inventory, which is for sale right now, sit here, answer your questions. Alright. Last question. You said that you're glad to be there of all but a month. I haven't had the opportunity to come in since I was paralyzed. So I'm even more glad to be here. But also that meant that I could get to Cuba without getting special permission. But you mentioned that Fulgencia's participant must have included something right, and I want to actually just speak up for him a bit more, He deserted the Cuban people, in fact he had to leave Cuba because the US withdrew support from him. It was the end of what Lew Rockwell was saying earlier, which would be the end of 60 years of unintended but totally misguided influence on Cuban affairs. I also think we should mention that Fidel was so popular, partly because of the great efforts of that wonderful newspaper The New York Times.

59:18Walter Duranty who supported Stalin, but people don't mention Herbert Matthews so much, which should be mentioned in the same sentence, because he was virtually Fidel Castro's PR man when he was the CM and Moisturist. Absolutely, Herbert Matthews was Walter Duranty for Cuba. He was, I think, just assigned, probably they have editorial boards in your time saying, Well, there's another communist coming up, so we would assign you to rescue that guy and to promote his views, because now we have, I mean, all our mass media still is captured, I mean, still Barbara Walters loves him, still Diana Sawyer, he kisses with him again, I mean, this is really a, this is really very courageous people. Then, then, then we have, Dan Rather is the most, I mean, he talks like he's on a payroll of Castro, then Oliver Stone with his idiotic film about Fidel, and he is telling us that he is the wisest person he ever met. He is the wisest person he ever met. Chris Christopherson,

1:00:21who not? I mean, Yoko Ono is just unbelievable. All of these people, Cubans don't understand that. All these people would be locked up for good in Cuba if they would live there for or what they do. So, thank you.