No mention of Cuba in the article but I think we can all agree that increased engagement could very well lead to the same results - increased freedom and wealth for all Cubans.
Interesting note on that topic: only 20 years after Bill Clinton normalized relations with Vietnam it's now "one of the most pro-American countries in Southeast Asia, with 78% of Vietnamese people viewing the U.S. favorably in 2015" according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States–Vietnam_relation...
This is a speculative outsider's view but a few things likely contribute to the pro-American statistic. My musings are based off of living in Vietnam for the last two years with my wife's family.
1. Half of the country was on the side of the Americans in the American War. The people that were on the losing side had a bad time after the end of the war. The Vietnamese refugees who went to the US had a much better time. Almost everyone in South Vietnam has a friend or relative who moved to the US.
2. An unusually large percentage of the population is young. They were born after the war and have been consuming American movies and pop stars since they were kids.
3. The Vietnamese don't seem to hold grudges for very long. For whatever reason, they seem to be a lot less traumatized by the war than the US was. This is despite the fact that they lost millions of people in the war.
4. China is currently the only real existential threat to Vietnam. It has been periodically invading Vietnam for thousands of years. The only ally powerful enough to curb a belligerent China is the US.
The other thing I would say is that I think the current economic growth is more a consequence of changes in economic policy in the 80s than anything that Bill Clinton did - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doi_Moi
I do agree however with you that the current US policy towards Cuba is silly.
>The Vietnamese don't seem to hold grudges for very long. For whatever reason, they seem to be a lot less traumatized by the war than the US was. This is despite the fact that they lost millions of people in the war.
Did people in the US hold a grudge against Japan forty years later? By then all the people who were actually making decisions are long dead. In any event Vietnam was involved in a dozen wars during the 20th century. We were just one of a long line of enemies. Also, it's easier to be gracious in victory.
>Did people in the US hold a grudge against Japan forty years later?
Well, actually, some of the ones left alive still do. At least among the few remaining veterans. It's not just the people old enough to have been making decisions, but people who joined to fight in their teens and were on the Pacific front of that war. Sad, but I've seen it first hand. Admittedly that's less and less true all the time as there are fewer and fewer of that generation left each year.
Cuba does better than Vietnam by all measures. Education (literacy rate is 80% in Vietnam vs 100% in Cuba), healthcare, nominal GDP (2k in Vietnam vs 6.9k in Cuba per capita), Human Development Index etc.
Being pro-American (whatever that means) is not the holy grail or something like that. Besides, the notion that Cubans hate the US is just wrong.
Cuba has all the benefits of a European nation. They've had major Universities for many centuries. They've had one of the highest literacy rates in the region for most of their existence. They have a tiny population (11m). And most importantly, they universally speak Spanish.
Vietnam has more than 80 million people, in 54 major ethnic groups with more than 50 distinct languages spoken.
"By all measures..." No, not by all measures. By some statistics, sure. But Cuba is an oppressive police state. Sure, humans can live long, healthy, literate lives in captivity. Yet what value is literacy when the state regulates what you can read and what you can say?
Vietnam is arguably a lot less homogenous than Cuba with respect to disparate linguistic and cultural groups. There is value in preserving heterogeneity just as there are in metrics derived from a unified market (or state) economy.
How great was life for the average Cuban in pre-revolution days? I think if I were a Cuban I would be more than skeptical of undoing all of the positive things that have been accomplished since 1959.
Still 2x Cuba and with usually less fingernail pulling. Communism is a worldwide failure both political, human rights-wise, and economically. Lets stop being "edgy" and defend it for easily garnered anti-US upvotes.
Are we going to ignore the largest carceral state in the world?
We can have a sober criticism of all forms of states and capitalism without insisting on one hand that there are only two possibilities and on the other hand that we must choose one as morally superior.
The imperialist nationalist history of capitalism is more than bloody, blood is what makes the world fertile for capitalism.
I will only briefly mention that leftists have attacked states like the USSR as a form of state capitalism since the days Lenin was still alive. I see little potential in developing this line of thought here.
You don't want to develop that here, that's ok, but It's worth saying that these were not the most common leftist opinions, and the USSR in particular was popular on the left far longer than was prudent, from a modern perspective. (Not saying I wouldn't have made the same mistake as human alive in the 50s)
Totally true. My claim is smaller than I made it seem. I don't like Marxism even though I find some of the analytic tools it provides to be very useful. Even so, I have to give it credit that its largest experiments were very popular with a lot of leftists.
Well, the USSR and other similar states funded a lot of leftist groups (and some still do). It's hard to say what's a "common leftist opinion" when you have to discriminate between people who speak honestly about their opinions, people who only echo the democratic centralist tendency of their party, and people who lie about their true values and goals in order to get resources from nation-states.
Article said something of 70%+ of the Vietnamese population was born after the Vietnam War. They don't remember the terrible things.
Plus China is being a bad neighbor right now to everybody. Enemy of my enemy is my friend. USA is currently at least to them is not an enemy, an enemy of the past yes.
Cuban still hates us and they got no other enemy other than us, USA. Plus their population still remember us and what we did, cause the embargo is on going and we are occupying Guantanamo which they wants back.
Interesting note on that topic: only 20 years after Bill Clinton normalized relations with Vietnam it's now "one of the most pro-American countries in Southeast Asia, with 78% of Vietnamese people viewing the U.S. favorably in 2015" according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States–Vietnam_relation...