Cuba is such a tragedy – a prosperous and basically decent society, wrecked. The old buildings are like ancient ruins that provide hints of the accomplishment and promise that used to be.
(via Babalu)
Havana’s Deco Ruins
(via Babalu)
Latin America
(via Babalu)
The Real Chicago Boys
From City Journal:
“Pinochet had no clue about economics,” Lüders recalls, “and our country was in a desperate situation.” But when Pinochet asked Friedman, who had helped mold Chicago’s economics department, to provide solutions for hyperinflation, the great economist proposed just the right cure: monetary control. Harshly criticized in the U.S. for his “collaboration” with the dictator, Friedman responded by asking whether he should have let the patient—the Chilean economy—die instead.
Lüders admits that he and his fellow academics relished the chance to devise a new economic model on a blackboard and observe the results. At first, those results weren’t much to brag about. In the early 1980s, external shocks, capital flight, declining prices for copper (the main Chilean export at the time), and excessive trust in the market’s self-correcting mechanisms caused many glitches—and a severe recession.
Beginning in 1985, however, the more pragmatic Hernán Büchi, who served as finance minister under Pinochet, helped correct the errors through tighter control of capital flows into and out of the country. Though he holds a degree from Harvard, Büchi is still deemed a Chicago boy in a land where that city’s name has become a generic term for free-market economists. “The economic solutions we provided for Chile had nothing extraordinary about them,” Lüders says. “We privatized the companies, which had been nationalized by the Socialist Allende regime. We stabilized the currency. We opened the borders to trade. The strong Chilean tradition of entrepreneurship took over from there.”
(Thanks to Val Dorta for the link.)
Lacking Perspective
Things are pretty grim. Armed gunmen are getting bolder. Agents of the duly elected government are at risk, with many of them being assassinated in front of their families. Police officers are specifically targeted, often being kidnapped so they can be tortured to death. The message is simple: Join the side of law and order and you will be killed. The favorite method of execution is to behead the victim, a tactic favored by terrorists.
Sounds like the most overwrought prose from a journalist describing the situation in Iraq, or maybe the Palestinian Territories. But I’m talking about the drug war being waged in Mexico at this very moment. The Washington Post article behind that last link states that 600 people have died this year.
I doubt very highly that either their figures or analysis of the situation is accurate. I have reason to believe that things are much worse. StrategyPage.com states that over 1,200 people have been killed this year. What is most alarming is that the drug gangs are actively recruiting regular Mexican Army deserters, men that have had training in combat, weapon use, and who are able to plan and carry out complex operations.
There are a few questions about this situation that need to be asked. The most important is: How did the drug gangs manage to become so powerful that they are able to take over whole towns, defy the Federal government, and assassinate important officials?
Quote of the Day
In turn, very few Cubans left their country for good before 1959. Sure, there were some who emigrated to the United States, but compared to the masses [immigrating] from Europe it was a very small group per capita.
If you’ve stuck with me thus far, what comes next should be obvious. Simply put, after castro and his bandits took over in 1959, the boats and airplanes changed directions. They began leaving instead of arriving in Cuba. Estimates place the Cuban-American emigration to the United States at over a million. From a population of 6 million in 1959, that’s staggering. This doesn’t count the many Cubans who emigrated elsewhere in Latin America, as well as to Europe and even Australia. A country of immigrants became a country better known for its human export. A country which boasted sugar among its exports now spits out its own flesh and blood.
The ‘Return of the Latin American Idiot’
Alvaro Vargas Llosa writes at the website of The Independent Institute:
Ten years ago, Colombian writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Montaner, and I wrote Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, a book criticizing opinion and political leaders who clung to ill-conceived political myths despite evidence to the contrary. The “Idiot” species, we suggested, bore responsibility for Latin America’s underdevelopment. Its beliefs—revolution, economic nationalism, hatred of the United States, faith in the government as an agent of social justice, a passion for strongman rule over the rule of law—derived, in our opinion, from an inferiority complex. In the late 1990s, it seemed as if the Idiot were finally retreating. But the retreat was short lived. Today, the species is back in force in the form of populist heads of state who are reenacting the failed policies of the past, opinion leaders from around the world who are lending new credence to them, and supporters who are giving new life to ideas that seemed extinct.
…
The Idiot’s worldview, in turn, finds an echo among distinguished intellectuals in Europe and the United States. These pontificators assuage their troubled consciences by espousing exotic causes in developing nations. Their opinions attract fans among First-World youngsters for whom globalization phobia provides the perfect opportunity to find spiritual satisfaction in the populist jeremiad of the Latin American Idiot against the wicked West.
Read the whole thing, the article is well worth the time. Llosa describes the various species of predatory socialists who rule some key countries in South America and goes on to argue that there currently is a major conflict between pro-Western forces and those who would like to keep it on its present course. The negative influence of European and American intellectuals could well make it impossible to overcome the ‘Latin American Idiot’ and so finally get over economic stagnation and the subsequent, widespread lack of trust in democratic institutions.
The article also is very timely, the (mostly) European variety of economic and ideological idiot is currently preparing to protest the upcoming G8 Summit.