I just saw a news report on the first cruise ship from the US to visit Cuba. One of the especially brain – dead passengers chirped eagerly that he was “happy to be able to visit before Burger King gets in here.” Of course, Cuba has been open to every luxurious hotel chain run by Western companies for decades. The existence of these Western hotels, casinos, cruises, restaurants, etc allowed Cubans who got jobs there to avoid starving. So the the anti-capitalist island where no vestige of Western commerce is present and where people experience starvation to entertain fat American tourists does not exist.
Where do idiots like this tourist even come from, seriously? They are as bad as the Canadian fool who tried telling me back in 1997 that people in my city in Ukraine were being “exploited” by Philip Morris having opened a factory on my street because the company wasn’t paying the Ukrainian workers the same salaries as Americans were getting for the same work. I remember wondering how it was even possible for an adult to say something so deeply idiotic and look so content about it. I’m still wondering.
These idiots seriously piss me off, they live in such a bubble they think anything corporate or having a job out of necessity is horrible. Most people who don’t have their head up their ass shop and eat at chains and have a job they might not like but are happy to have a job. These morons seem to think Burger King is evil but like you said, such corporations provide jobs to very poor people who are most likely grateful to have a job. This is why many ordinary people don’t like certain kinds of liberals, too many of them have cranial rectitus 😁
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This reminds me of a conversation I had with a campus activist many years ago who wanted me to sign a petition against some of our university’s official sportswear being produced in Indonesia (or perhaps it was Malaysia) where the workers only earned a few dollars a day. I asked the protester how much the average person in Indonesia (or possibly Malaysia) earned and was told that didn’t matter because they were only making however many dollars a day and that was an outrage. I replied that of course it was an outrage, but the average wage mattered because you would clearly want to demand that they be payed at least the average if not slightly better than average for their country. It turns out that the petition was to stop purchasing all sportswear from the low wage country, not to demand that the workers all get better pay. I didn’t sign the petition, because I figured the poor workers were better off making low wages than no wages at all, and the activist accused me of being a horrible person.
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It is hard to explain the nature of the Cuban economy to people who have no experience of things like two-tier currencies, special stores and services for rich people and so on.
I”ll bet they were surprised, too, at the power of the Catholic Church there and the street level griping, which is pretty non-stop.
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Exactly.
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