Michael Totten - Communist Quotes

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I've been to fifteen formerly communist countries, plus Cuba, which is still communist. Vietnam is the only one with good cuisine. I can't recall enjoying a single quality meal in Europe's former Communist bloc. Marxism bulldozed restaurants along with everything else, and chefs in post-Communist Europe haven't had much time to master their craft. Cuba's food is still mostly terrible, though a handful of restaurants are privately owned and offer tolerable fare. The biggest problem there is a chronic shortage of quality ingredients. Yet Vietnam, still nominally communist, somehow has outstanding food everywhere, even on the street. It must be some combination of the ingredients, the cooks, and the cuisine itself.

Michael Totten
I've always wanted to visit Cuba—not because I'm nostalgic for a botched utopian fantasy but because I wanted to experience Communism firsthand. When I finally got my chance several months ago, I was startled to discover how much the Cuban reality lines up with Blomkamp's dystopia. In Cuba, as in Elysium, a small group of economic and political elites live in a rarefied world high above the impoverished masses. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of The Communist Manifesto, would be appalled by the misery endured by Cuba's ordinary citizens and shocked by the relatively luxurious lifestyles of those who keep the poor down by force.

Michael Totten
Iran probably wouldn't be that aggressively secular if it had a genuinely representative government—unlike Iran, Azerbaijan spent more than a half century under communist rule—but it would almost certainly look like Lebanon or Turkey where there's a healthy balance between the secular and the devout. The Iranian government wouldn't need to send thousands of undercover 'morality police' into the streets in the first place if adherence to strict Islamic codes was what everybody actually wanted.

Michael Totten
I'd love to see the United States recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation as long as the Pacific Rim doesn't blow up. For one thing, Taiwan is a sovereign nation whether or not Beijing and Washington say so. It has its own democratically elected government and its own institutions. It makes its own domestic, foreign and trade policies with zero input from the Chinese Communist Party. Its citizens have their own passports with "Republic of China" written across the top. Recognizing these facts is just an acknowledgement of reality.

Michael Totten
By obsessing over politics above all else, identitarian artists of the twenty-first century resemble the Socialist Realists from the Soviet Union in the early- to mid-twentieth century. One could charitably call Socialist Realism an artistic style, one that glorified peasants, factory workers, and Communist values, but it was nurtured by a totalitarian police state and was the only style allowed by the government lest hapless artists wished to live out the remaining days of their lives in a Siberian slave labor camp.

Michael Totten
I visited Iraq seven times during the war... Baghdad, while ugly and dangerous, is vastly freer and more prosperous these days than Havana. Anyway, Iraq is precisely the kind of country with which Castro wants you to compare Cuba. It's the wrong comparison. So are impoverished Third World countries like Guatemala and Haiti. Cuba isn't a developing country; it's a once-developed country destroyed by its own government. Havana was a magnificent Western city once. It should be compared not with Baghdad, Kabul, Guatemala City, or Port-au-Prince but with formerly Communist Budapest, Prague, or Berlin. Havana's history mirrors theirs, after all.

Michael Totten
Of course sanctions have a negative effect on the economy, but the main cause of Cuban poverty is communist economics. Every communist country in the history of the world has been impoverished. It's a bankrupt system that has never worked and never can work. Here's just one reason why. The United States has a minimum wage while Cuba has a maximum wage. And that maximum wage is a paltry 20 dollars a month. No one can get ahead. It's impossible. It's illegal. When prosperity is a crime, there can be no prosperity, and that's entirely the fault of Cuba's communist party.

Michael Totten