When comparing, say, American democracy with Cuba, it’s valuable to critically examine what one means by democracy, as Americans all grow up learning that it’s fairly specific things that the US has and it glosses over other ways in which the US is not particularly democratic but other countries, including Cuba, are.

A simple example is: if something is popular and benefits the public, how likely is the state to create interventions and draw its policies from the public? When was the last time the US had a plebiscite for a major national policy change? Cuba had one to introduce its new family code just a year and a half ago and it’s more or less the best one in the world. Last year in the US, a series of unelected oligarchs allowed the banning of abortion by individual states, with those that have highly racist voting policies leading the pack. When looking at states run by communist parties, it’s actually fairly common to see substantial reforms and changes in response to popular demands and bottom-up organizing. This is almost never the case in the US, where every major protest movement fails and is often put down by the cops and very popular and practical policies go unimplemented because they aren’t favorable to capital.

Speaking of capital, a lot of freedom boils down to economic exploitation and the extent to which it is capital, not the public, that dictates policy. The reason so many people in the US suffer without healthcare is due solely to the profit-seeking system that controls the country. There is no practical benefit to the private health insurance system, it’s purely a drain on everyone except for the people that run and own the insurance companies themselves. It doesn’t matter that nearly everyone hates the system, though, because (1) capital invests in a large volume of propaganda to spread a false understanding of the issue and (2) capital buys the politicians that could otherwise introduce serious policy changes. Capital is not democratic, it’s oligarchical. Cuba has one of the most effective healthcare systems in the world and guarantees it up all of their people based on need and their ability to fund it (i.e. avoid blockade-induced crises). It’s extremely popular and healthcare inequity was one of the first issues recognized by the communist government as limiting modernization and core freedoms (along with literacy and the overall economic base). These are not just good things, they are how needs of the public elicit important changes in policy.

Living under a capitalist system like in the US, 1/3 of your waking hours are controlled by a petty dictatorship known as your boss and the overall hierarchy of privately owned enterprise. If any of those petty lords up the command chain feel like it, you can lose your job and therefore your ability to have housing, food, warmth, healthcare. The reason doesn’t even matter if they’re half-intelligent, various policy protections usually only apply if the employer is stupid enough to telegraph their reasons. In places like Cuba, there is frequently direct workers’ democracy in the workplace itself, with the same people who do the work also voting on how to run their enterprise and allocate resources. Want to have a cantina with a cook for all your meals so folks don’t all have to bring in their own individual meals? If you convince your fellow workers, that can and will and does happen. It happens fairly frequently, in fact, even in a country so impoverished by US imperialism.

And don’t forget about that imperialism! The capitalist system places these other countries under siege, actively limiting their capacity to develop and prompting defensive measures. Cuba developed its secret police in response to sabotage and terrorism funded and coordinated by the Americans that attempted to invade and then blockaded. If capitalist countries could let others be, you would see less of this “siege socialism” that requires various forms of monitoring and policing. Though to be clear, none of these communist-run states are anywhere near the level of policing and incarceration of the United States. It’s a pure propaganda coup that Americans think state oppression is somehow worse in these other countries with vastly smaller percentages of people imprisoned and cops employed.

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AES countries are not utopias and are in some cases more reactionary on certain issues than socdem capitalist countries. These are real socialist projects and they are imperfect just like every other system. However, they are making strides towards socialism. Cuba has LGBT+ rights enshrined in the constitution, something the “democratic” U.S. could only dream of.

Oh yeah healthcare is lightyears better in these countries than the old imperial U.S. too.

The DPRK and Cuba get special mention for being under siege, they literally don’t have the luxury of complete openness or whatever because that’s how you get the CIA creeping in and doing a Pinochet. Their revolutions have to be defended and the US is more than happy to demonize those defensive measures while neglecting to mention its own role in necessitating those measures.

One of the most helpful things for understanding this, at least in my experience, is studying how fundamentally undemocratic liberal democracies are in any practical sense. Public policy doesn’t match public sentiment. Huge numbers of people are disenfranchised, effectively and literally. Political parties hold immense authority over who has a practical chance of holding any given elected office. Plenty of positions are appointed without democratic process. That’s to say nothing about the fact that private interests, which are not democratic, are in control of most of the economy.

Others can speak to the relative democratic nature of the Bad Countries, but I think that it’s helpful to do a closer analysis of whether the ostensibly legitimate democracies even really qualify as democratic in the first place when they don’t produce democratic results, in either legitimacy or practical outcomes.

Did you know the US never ended the Korean War? It’s still officially ongoing. Everything you’ve ever heard from Americans and their allies about North Korea is quite literally war propaganda. And it’s not a cold war either since the US annually partners with South Korea to practice invading them.

a recent example, U.S. Government forcing the sale of TikTok because they are not happy about the content being posted there.

U.S. is ‘free’ so long as there are no threats (see Red Scare, McCarthyism). You can speak all you want, even ‘subversive’ shit but as long as its not significant to cause a revolution or something, they’ll let it slide.

My usual answer is:

You can just go there. You know that you can do that, right? Just hop on a flight, go see China. It’s a cool country. I highly recommend it!

And (if you aren’t an American—gee, I wonder why that’s illegal for you) you can take a weekend trip to Korea while you’re there. Also an extremely normal place. The street food kicks ass.

Somebody needs to put that on that skeleton meme. YOU CAN JUST GO! HIT DA BRICKS! BYE, CAPITALISM!

Wed probably need to start by picking one country to focus on at a time.

Off the top of my head, Cuba has some top notch laws that enshrine rights for queer people, or at least laws surrounding that that put America to shame. That’s a huge W worth pointing out to people.