Dear Editor It was not so long ago that the loudest local global warming denier was shooting his mouth off on a regular basis, insisting that it wasn’t happening, and never mind the science. But then 2015 was the hottest year on record, and heat waves started killing people in droves, and it became a little too hard to insist that this was all a socialist conspiracy.
So what does this Mouth of Harper do for an encore? He flips the page in the Book of Untruth and copies and pastes from a new section. Time to insist that there is no poverty here, and anyway, those bad socialists over there are worse off than us. (Burnaby NOW, July 1).
The working poor know what poverty means. The engineer from Korea and the lawyer from England, working as security guards for near-minimum wage, know what that’s all about. So does the guy who was working in a factory at a decent wage and is now homeless. Scratch just about anyone, and you will hear these stories. But at the same time, real estate speculators are raking in obscene amounts of money. That’s what’s going on in Canada.
It’s different in Cuba, where everyone is poor. Except that, taken in context, they aren’t poor at all. The proper comparison for Cuba is other Latin American countries. In that comparison, Cuba ranks very, very well.
Even compared to the First World, when considering important indicators such as literacy and infant mortality, Cuba ranks very, very well. The Cuban health-care system is world-class.
But even that ignores the most important piece of information, which is the 50-year long economic blockade that Cuba has suffered. Any non-socialist country dealing with that would have collapsed long ago.
As to Fidel Castro, whom some slander as a dictator, to the Cuban people he is a hero. He led them out of the actual poverty that existed under the Batista regime. He, and Che, and Raoul, et al. If he has any extra privileges, it is because the Cuban people insist that he has them. Which they do, every year, when a million people demonstrate in the streets of Havana and celebrate their government. And which they do every day, because the Cuban Revolution is still going strong, every single day.
Victor Finberg, Burnaby
