Do you think Cuba gives a good picture of how a Communist USA would look like?

I have seen some photos taken on Cuban streets and it looks somewhat bizarre that almost everything from the houses to the arrangement of utility poles and street lamps seems to be of the same standard and type that is visible in the more rural parts of the USA, but there are no advertisements, just propaganda posters and everything is pretty rundown.

Do you think a photograph taken on a typical present-day Cuban residential street could also represent an alternate timeline in which America went Communist sometime around the mid 20th century?
 
I have seen some photos taken on Cuban streets and it looks somewhat bizarre that almost everything from the houses to the arrangement of utility poles and street lamps seems to be of the same standard and type that is visible in the more rural parts of the USA, but there are no advertisements, just propaganda posters and everything is pretty rundown.

Do you think a photograph taken on a typical present-day Cuban residential street could also represent an alternate timeline in which America went Communist sometime around the mid 20th century?

No, simply because the pre-revolution societies were so totally different. Cuba is a good model for what most any communist Latin American country would look like. But not the US. The closest thing would be a Confederate States of America that survived and fell to a communist revolution.
 
It probably doesn't help that Cuba has been under embargo for half a century, without the embargo it probably looks different.
 
It probably doesn't help that Cuba has been under embargo for half a century, without the embargo it probably looks different.



Embargoed by how many countries? One for sure. And how many does it trade with? Wiki has it at 190 nations. Gosh, that's crushing, poor Cuba.
 
Embargoed by how many countries? And how many does it trade with? Wiki has it at 190 nations. Gosh, that's crushing, poor Cuba.

And the US is one one of its largest and closest neighbors. It's a bit like the UK suddenly being embargoed by all of Europe. Sure it can trade with the rest of the world but it's going to have a gigantic impact on economy and culture. It certainly didn't accomplish the US' goals but saying that the embargo had no impact is very silly.
 
And the US is one one of its largest and closest neighbors. It's a bit like the UK suddenly being embargoed by all of Europe. Sure it can trade with the rest of the world but it's going to have a gigantic impact on economy and culture. It certainly didn't accomplish the US' goals but saying that the embargo had no impact is very silly.



Has anyone said the embargo had -no- impact? Both US and Cuba says it costs something, but if Cuba didn't have the crappy government it has the US embargo would barely matter. With this government, even without the US Cuba would be in trouble. See Venezuela.
 
Cuba, before the revolution, was a third world country. It is also an island that needs to import most of the resources needed to maintain industrial civilization.

The US is a continent-size superpower that only depends on the outside world to import a few strategic minerals and on which the outside world is quite dependent. It is also, and has been for over a century, the most developed country on the planet.

To think that a Communist USA would look anything like Cuba is... Crazy when you know any economics. It wouldn't look like any other Communist country that has existed OTL either - even the relatively developed satellite countries in Eastern Europe were, compared to the US, quite undeveloped when they went Communist. They were also all devastated by WW2.

Even if the US were embargoed by her main trade partner (unlikely, it would take enormous political will for capitalist Europe to embargo the USA given how important US trade is for their own countries), it wouldn't look like Cuba, the US trades less with Europe than Cuba traded with the US prior to 1959.

I don't know what a Communist US would look like. Much depends on political developments. For example, compare the current ideology being practiced by the Chinese Communist party and compare it to what Mao practiced.

fasquardon
 
A lot of Communist countries have this problem. Turns out, state planning and socialism go hand in hand with stagnation in most cases.
 
Cuba was a backwards, exploited, poor country before its revolution. The USA, no matter when a posited revolution happens, is none of those things, so the end-result will definitely not be the same.
 
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