Reverse the fates of Cuba and North Korea

Your challenge, with a POD after 1959, is for North Korea to be a semi-decent communist state which is gradually opening up to the outside world and for Cuba to be a crazy "communist" rogue state which often threatens the US with nuclear war and has shitty living standards.
 
Your challenge, with a POD after 1959, is for North Korea to be a semi-decent communist state which is gradually opening up to the outside world and for Cuba to be a crazy "communist" rogue state which often threatens the US with nuclear war and has shitty living standards.

I highly doubt that a Juche Cuba would survive shortly after the Cold War. North Korea only survives in OTL because of Chinese allowance, and the thought of what the ROK would do with the refugees. Remember, America nearly started WW3 over nukes in Cuba. If nukes are being developed in Cuba, Castro will be flattened, and there is nothing anyone will do about it. I guess if you had some insane pacifist take over America at the time, but even then, a Cuba so insane that it would take such an absurd risk would probably go to war sooner or later.

A more moderate N. Korea is comparably easy; just get a military coup against one of the Kims if they seem to go too far, and wind down the rhetoric.
 
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oberdada

Gone Fishin'
A different North Korea is a possibility, considering the almost unconditional support from China.


Cuba being like North Korea would have collapsed by now.
 
Your challenge, with a POD after 1959, is for North Korea to be a semi-decent communist state which is gradually opening up to the outside world and for Cuba to be a crazy "communist" rogue state which often threatens the US with nuclear war and has shitty living standards.

Like the US would allow that.
 
The problem with this is that Castro was a wildly popular, reasonable (well, for a dictator) leader. If you want a North Korea style country, you have to have a different leader - and if you have that, why would the country be Communist instead of something else?

For that matter, if the Cuban leadership HAD been North Korea style, CIA actions supporting anti-communist rebels would have been far more successful, and an alt-Bay of Pigs might well have worked.

NK survived ONLY because it had China and the Soviets literally on their doorsteps.
 
One of the CIA's plans to assassinate Castro actually works and a more violent and incompetent leader takes his place?
 
One of the CIA's plans to assassinate Castro actually works and a more violent and incompetent leader takes his place?

Would also be taken out by the US, Soviets be darned. US would not tolerate an extremely closed, erratic hard-core Communist regime (which would have to be heavily propped up by the Soviets as the NKs are by the Chinese) with nuclear weapons (or attempts to get nuclear weapons) within miles of its borders. The refugee problem and people trying to escape would be ramped up to 11 even as opposed to OTL. WW3 might be kicked off if you had a Kim-style leader in Cuba.
 
Making NK not a dysfunctional hellhole ought to be easy.

So far as Cuba goes, I think nuclear-armed is a bit of a stretch, but massively insular is entirely feasible IMHO. Probably takes someone less popular and more hardline in place of Castro, following a botched US intervention (Bay of Pigs perhaps?) that hardens the Cuban people against the US. The occasional artillery duel around Guantanamo Bay might be accepted as less costly than trying to pacify Cuba and rebuild after an invasion...
 
The geopolitics are completely different. Cuba only gets a crazy, ruthless tyrant if the United States wants them or allows them to. The North Korea regime just has to allow China to tolerate it. Something moderate and reasonable would wind up uniting with South Korea.
 
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