DBWI Cuba and the Khmer Rouge switch policies

The Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia during the Vietnam war and though they were known to send out 'volunteers' to fight in other east Asian conflicts at home they were more mild compared to some communist governments.

Cuba under castro however was a nightmare world, Castro killed a lot of people even going so far as to murder anyone who wore glasses because they were intelectuals under his reign one in ten Cubans were murdered before the regieme collapsed.

But what if Cuba and Cambodia had each others polices how would that change the cold war and world history?
 
You'd need a WAY milder US invasion for Castro to be as laidback as Pol Pot. Maybe have Kennedy decide not to commit actual US troops, which means that the invaders don't get much past the Bay Of Pigs, and hence do considerably less damage to Cuba. This curtails Castro's most paranoic tendencies from coming to the fore.
 
I guess Pol Pot could have claimed other influences besides Gandhi - imagine if he were influenced by a shithead like Stali or Mao. But he was far too peaceful, instead preferring to provide incentives to work on rural farms and keep Cambodia to itself.

Castro...ugh. Even Khrushchev wouldn’t work with that crazy fuck. I heard Khrushchev considered putting missiles in Cuba at one point until he decided Castro might launch them himself. Apparently the battle to overthrow Batista made him a monster, and he drew inspiration from Stalin and even Hitler in terms of methodology. It’s a good thing even the Soviets got sick of him after he actually tried to invade Nicaragua.
 
I'm not sure you would prevent the Cuba War, as no matter what the United States was not going to tolerate a communist state less than 90 miles off their shores, but it would definitely lack the level of international support it had OTL if we were fighting against a laid-back "moderate" as opposed to the monster Castro actually was. The Cuban people would have probably been a hell of a lot more willing to fight for Castro had he been more moderate. OTL most Cuban resistance collapsed after just a few days (barring the M-26 insurgency), while the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea (as well as the resulting Chinese invasion of Vietnam) proved so costly for the Vietnamese that it resulted in the pro-Soviet regimes in Hanoi and Laos being ousted and replaced with Chinese puppets.
 
I'm not sure you would prevent the Cuba War, as no matter what the United States was not going to tolerate a communist state less than 90 miles off their shores, but it would definitely lack the level of international support it had OTL if we were fighting against a laid-back "moderate" as opposed to the monster Castro actually was. The Cuban people would have probably been a hell of a lot more willing to fight for Castro had he been more moderate. OTL most Cuban resistance collapsed after just a few days (barring the M-26 insurgency), while the Vietnamese invasion of Kampuchea (as well as the resulting Chinese invasion of Vietnam) proved so costly for the Vietnamese that it resulted in the pro-Soviet regimes in Hanoi and Laos being ousted and replaced with Chinese puppets.

what about domestic politics? The news broadcast castro's killing fields directly into American homes, that pretty much had to have shifted American poltics significantly.
 
Maybe have Castro's brothers survive the Cuba War and the revolution. Perhaps they could've guided him towards a more moderate path, or at least a path that didn't involve his decades long bloodbath against the west.
 
At least Communism in South America withered on the vine after that. The People's Paradise looked a lot worse when pictures of walking skeletons came out.
 
I guess Pol Pot could have claimed other influences besides Gandhi - imagine if he were influenced by a shithead like Stali or Mao. But he was far too peaceful, instead preferring to provide incentives to work on rural farms and keep Cambodia to itself.

One of the most inspirational sights in the history of socialism was the movement to the countryside, with throngs of Cambodians, of all ethnicities, marching peacefully out of the cities singing traditional folk songs from their various cultures. Rumour has it that when Vietnam was mulling over whether to continue sending foreign aid, that footage had the guys in Hanoi literally in tears, and that's the reason they decided to support Pol Pot.
 
One of the most inspirational sights in the history of socialism was the movement to the countryside, with throngs of Cambodians, of all ethnicities, marching peacefully out of the cities singing traditional folk songs from their various cultures. Rumour has it that when Vietnam was mulling over whether to continue sending foreign aid, that footage had the guys in Hanoi literally in tears, and that's the reason they decided to support Pol Pot.

I remember those videos from a course I took in college. It was the reason I learned a bit of Khmer...that and this gorgeous exchange student who completely broke my heart. The TA who ran the discussion section said that someone asked Pol Pot in his old age about the incentives and why he deviated so much from the typical brutality of most communist dictatorships. He was said to reply through a translator or two, “It worked, didn’t it?”

Did it ever. Cambodia is the ricebasket of Asia to this day and what Kofi Annan called “the world’s only benevolent dictatorship.” Pol Pot named his grandson his successor and was said to have told the young man, “Treat the people with kindness.” And to this day he does.
 
Pol Pot named his grandson his successor

It's amazing the way Pol Pot managed to synthesize marxism with traditonal agrarian culture's respect for family continuity. Though I guess it's pretty logical, because the offspring are going to have a sense of preserving the family's legacy in the form of the nation's well-being.

Maybe if Kim Il Sung had handed power to one of his children, the DPRK might today be something as beautiful as Cambodia, rather than the marxist-in-name-only cesspool of whores-and-casinos, pandering to foreign tourists, that it has become under supposedly meritocratic rule.
 
It's amazing the way Pol Pot managed to synthesize marxism with traditonal agrarian culture's respect for family continuity. Though I guess it's pretty logical, because the offspring are going to have a sense of preserving the family's legacy in the form of the nation's well-being.

Maybe if Kim Il Sung had handed power to one of his children, the DPRK might today be something as beautiful as Cambodia, rather than the marxist-in-name-only cesspool of whores-and-casinos, pandering to foreign tourists, that it has become under supposedly meritocratic rule.

It makes a lot of sense to build up family farms, even if they’re more like “village farms” - somewhere between the small family farms and the nightmare that was collective farms - so they can grow all the crops they need but not step on each other’s toes. That and the villages all maintain an ownership stake passed down to every worker. It’s basically rural syndicalism and it works perfectly.

And yes, maybe if Kim Il-Sun had passed the DPRK down to his kid...you know, I can’t do that. Kim was an incorrigible shithead, and his kid probably wouldn’t have been much better. Thankfully he wasn’t ready when the old man dropped dead - on the day I was born, no less, November 11, 1982 - and a bunch of bureaucrats took over and turned into Dirty Prostitutes, Roulette and Kleptomania.
 
Despite how competent and educated the leader of Cambodia is a lot of people felt that him taking over from his grandfather was nepotism even now.
 
The Cuban government ordered a moment of silence for the people killed under Castro.

This comes with the unveiling of the black maze, a maze created by Martin Ortez a Cuban artist it has the names of every person that the castro regieme murdered on its black walls.
 
Collapse of the regieme is a nice way of putting , Nikita Khrushchev telling Fidel Castro you are insane, you and your concrete are not communist you are an abomination marxist-leninist ideals. we want nothing to do with you you are now the American problem.
 
To be fair, the geography of the 2 countries might have something to do with it all. Cuba is an island, while Cambodia has long land borders. It's much easier to go full cray cray when you're on an island and it's really hard to get the heck out of there once all the boats were gone, while it's far easier to intervene at the first sign of madness when it's a simply march over the border.

Reversing the fate of the 2 countries might be a tall order.
 
To be fair, the geography of the 2 countries might have something to do with it all. Cuba is an island, while Cambodia has long land borders. It's much easier to go full cray cray when you're on an island and it's really hard to get the heck out of there once all the boats were gone, while it's far easier to intervene at the first sign of madness when it's a simply march over the border.

Reversing the fate of the 2 countries might be a tall order.

This is true, but an island within a stone’s throw of a superpower that really doesn’t like communism makes it difficult to go full-on nutso. How Castro pulled it off as long as he did is nothing short of a...what’s the opposite of a miracle? Like a really unlikely event that is really bad?
 
This is true, but an island within a stone’s throw of a superpower that really doesn’t like communism makes it difficult to go full-on nutso. How Castro pulled it off as long as he did is nothing short of a...what’s the opposite of a miracle? Like a really unlikely event that is really bad?
Diabolus ex machina

But to be fair Castro was so cray cray that he wasn't much of a threat to anyone but the Cubans themselves, and once the US knows that the Soviets weren't gonna touch that island with a 10ft pole they stopped giving a fuck for the most part, just letting the insanity to melt itself and then go ahead and pick up the pieces afterward. Didn't help that Bay of Pigs made the US government & military to decide that the next time they return would be on a time and location much more of their own choosing.
 
And yes, maybe if Kim Il-Sun had passed the DPRK down to his kid...you know, I can’t do that. Kim was an incorrigible shithead, and his kid probably wouldn’t have been much better. Thankfully he wasn’t ready when the old man dropped dead - on the day I was born, no less, November 11, 1982 - and a bunch of bureaucrats took over and turned into Dirty Prostitutes, Roulette and Kleptomania.

And now we've even got the most iconic photo imaginable to encapsulate the decline of the DPRK into a debauched hellhole: whatshisname, that Manhattan real-estate guy with the bad toupee, playing blackjack while flanked by some high-ranking North Korean apparatchik at a Pyeongyang casino.
 
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