You’ve probably heard about the recent protests in Cuba, but you may not have heard of just how much misery socialist policies have inflicted upon the Cuban people and how they vindicate the Church’s constant condemnations of socialism.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. You’ve probably heard about the protests that are going on in Cuba right now. So I thought this would be a good opportunity to share reason 4,382 for why socialism doesn’t work. So welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. And so reading up on what’s going on in Cuba, this is not just a recent event. This is years, if not decades of simmering tensions boiling over because of Cuba’s failed economy. And what’s important to look into this is that many of the things that the Cuban government promotes under the name of socialism or communism, and don’t let people tell you, oh, well this is communism. It’s not socialism. They’re a fruit cut from the same tree. When you read the writings of Vladimir Lenin, he talks about how the communism is the end goal. And socialism is the midway point to communism.
Trent Horn:
It’s sort of a state sanctioned communism, which they would call socialism. So don’t let people try to tell you that communism is just socialism’s embarrassing authoritarian little brother. They are both related to the same thing. You will say, oh, I don’t want communism. I want socialism. Communism’s too authoritarian. All right. Yes, authoritarianism is a problem. But you’ll see that with socialism, which is the central planning of an economy, the idea that the means of production are socially owned, which would mean that they’re owned by the community. But since the community doesn’t have the time or resources to manage all of the factories and the farms, it ends up the government does that. In order for the government to manage the economy in this way, it has to put forward very authoritarian measures. So it’s not like you can have socialism without authoritarian communism. What the Pope’s have said, go to Pope John the 23rd, Pope Paul the 6th, we can go all the way back to Pope Pius the 9th.
Trent Horn:
They all talk about socialism being the same thing. Pope Leo the 13th said socialism reaps a harvest of misery. And one of the reasons in there is cyclical is that it inevitably leads to totalitarianism and authoritarianism. And Cuba is an example of that. So that’s what I want to talk about today, because then this is a faith issue because the Catholic church has consistently rejected socialism since its inception 150 years ago. So I’m going to start with a news article from nbcnews.com. That’s actually more revealing that I would expect from a mainstream news station. And then I’ll share with you more of my research showing what socialism has done to Cuba. So this is an article published I think very recently. It says, why is Cuba exploded in protests? It goes beyond the US embargo and the pandemic. So this was published July 13th and people will say, oh, well they’re protesting because the US has had a trade embargo with Cuba and that’s causing economic ruin.
Trent Horn:
And the pandemic was really hard. Well, the pandemic certainly reaches… It elevates tensions, but this article talks about this as been long coming. So it says Cuba has been grappling with acute shortages of food and medicine throughout the pandemic. People make lines for blocks to buy whatever they can find at stores. Inflation and blackouts during the tropical summer heat have aggravated the situation. Cuba’s government blames economic crisis on the trade embargo. And so it talks about that.
Trent Horn:
But the article goes on to say, the embargo is not solely to blame for Cuba’s woes. One of the most important factors that has led to years of economic stagnation is the country’s Soviet style, centrally planned economy and its hesitation to adopt market oriented reforms that other remaining communist countries have taken. That’s the thing. Socialism, Francis Fox Piven, a democratic socialist of America, political scientist, says socialism, a lot of definitions, but what they all have in common is constraining the market. So instead of having a means of production owned by private businesses and firms and individuals, you end up with the government running it. And when you do that, you get a situation like what you have in Cuba.
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Freedom remains a distant dream. Among the government graffiti is the slogan socialism or death, which could be read more as a warning than a call to patriotism. Housing, medical care and education are all free. But look at what’s missing from this picture. This has to be the only harbor in the islands that has no boats. The government restricts ownership because many Cubans would sail away.
Trent Horn:
And that’s the thing was so-called socialist workers paradises. They’ll set up borders and security, not to keep people from trying to break into the country to enjoy socialism, but to keep people from illegally escaping the misery of socialism they’ve inflicted on their own. People. Look at the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Look at the Berlin wall, separating east and west Germany. And it’s the same here in Cuba. The Cubans aren’t worried about boats secretly trying to get into Cuba. They’re worried about their own people leaving the nightmare that they’ve created.
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Every neighborhood is organized under its own committee for the defense of the revolution. The CDRs hold neighborhood meetings, and every Cuban has to attend. A lot of them hate that. Because the government runs just about everything, 80% of the Cuban people are government employees and they get paid pretty much the same somewhere between 20 and $50 a month. It doesn’t really matter much whether you’re a street sweeper or an accountant. They also get one of these. It’s a food ration book. It covers things like eggs and milk and meat and rice. The food is purchased with these ration books is virtually free, but it’s supposed to last a month. And any Cuban will tell you it lasts about 10 days.
Trent Horn:
And so the problem is these shortages occur because the government plans the economy and the government does not have access to the knowledge of knowing what people want when they need it. Nearly all of the services are provided by the state and think about how inefficient the state is when you go to the motor vehicle department, when you try to call a state department. If you think about it, state agencies don’t have customer service. They don’t need customer service because if they are a state agency that has a monopoly, you can’t go anywhere else. You just have to put up with them. And this problem has been around for a long time and Eliana Cardoso’s and Ann Helwege’s book Cuba After Communism. This is what they write. What happens under these socialist policies.
Trent Horn:
“Cubans cannot easily set up a small business on the side. People say they’re hairdresser and seamstresses, but few hang up a sign for services. A broken pipe meant waiting a few weeks for the state plumber to arrive. Access to most goods is too limited. And the penalties too high for people to set up illegal shops and kiosks. The state not only fails to provide goods but prohibits people from filling the gap with informal markets.”
Trent Horn:
And this is going on. You look at 2019, you still had these shortages people waiting in long lines to get eggs, to get chicken. And what’s interesting is that Cuba imports 60 to 70% of its food even though they have access for a lot of domestic food production, but it’s all terribly inefficient and when people try to get around it, when they try to do things on the black market, it’s very stiff penalties. When you sell eggs or meat on the black market, you can go to prison for 15 to 20 years.
Trent Horn:
You can spend more time in jail selling eggs and chickens illegally than you would for murdering somebody. But it’s not just food where things start to go downhill. It’s also medicine. And a lot of people get seduced by this. They’ll say, oh, Cuba has great medicine, has got great healthcare, regardless what you want to say about Cuba, their healthcare isn’t about profit. It’s about people. And so it serves people.
Trent Horn:
Michael Moore did that documentary a few years ago. I don’t know if it was Fahrenheit 911. It was several years ago. And he took firefighters who had injuries sustained from their rescue work at 9/11. And he wanted to get the medical help. So he just took them down to Cuba. And apparently he got all kinds of great treatment there for them. But Cuba is a communist country and these countries engage in propaganda. And so back when he worked at ABC news, John Stossel did a report on this for ABC. I doubt they would ever air a report like this today. But back then, Stossel called out more on these inaccuracies related to Cuba. So I’m going to play a clip from that ABC report on what Cuba’s socialist system is really like.
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When Moore’s group arrived, they were taken to a special section of this showcase hospital.
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I asked them to give us the same exact care they give their fellow Cuban citizens. No more, no less. And that’s what they did.
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Do you really think that’s what they did?
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I know that’s what they did.
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Cuban born human rights advocate. Dr. Jose Carlos says Moore’s movie tells lies, and there are plenty of pictures like these smuggled out of Cuba that tell a different story, a story of dilapidated hospitals with bleak rooms, where patients have to hang clothes to dry on the windows. Filthy conditions. Floors covered with bugs patients who are neglected, some who starve.
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George [inaudible 00:09:38] said, who writes the anti-Castro website, therealcuba.com says Moore and his group were taken to a part of this hospital that’s reserved for the privileged. Elites, he says, get special treatment.
Trent Horn:
And that is a classic trope in socialist governments that what ends up happening is you promise prosperity for the poor, but you only end up getting these privileges for the elite. It happens all the time. You look at the nation of Zambia, for example, Greg Mills, and his excellent book Why Africa Is Poor talks about how Zambia became such a wreck under President Kenneth Kaunda’s socialist policies. This is what he writes in the book. “Kaunda’s socialism has created a civil service geared to protectionism and regulation at all costs and a private sector attuned to working within a system that rewards insiders and discourages independent entrepreneurship.
Trent Horn:
And then I like what he adds in parentheses. “We should not underestimate the fact that this system, a feature of most African countries works just fine for the elite.” And so what you have in these kleptocracies and these socialist governments, it’s supposed to be for the many, it ends up being that businesses are stifled. And the only people who are able to thrive, the only people who can get the good jobs, get the good housing are coincidentally those people who have connections to the socialist planners.
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Cuba claims it has low infant mortality. The doctors tell us the data’s misleading because when there might be problems, they just abort the fetus.
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I personally used to do 70 to 80 abortions a day.
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They told me I should end it pregnancy.
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[inaudible 00:11:19] Sanchez’s doctors told her her fetus had signs of down syndrome and should not be born.
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It was my very first pregnancy. I wanted to have the child.
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And there is something else they do. Some doctors say, if a child dies a few hours after birth, they don’t count it as ever having lived.
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It changes the number, even though the same number of children may be dying or more.
Trent Horn:
This has been confirmed over and over again by a lot of different studies. In 2018, there was a study in the journal of health and policy planning. And this is what it talks about when it comes to these apparently low infant mortality rates. It says “Physicians likely reclassified early neonatal deaths as late fetal deaths, thus deflating the infant mortality statistics and propping up life expectancy. If we combine the misreporting of late fetal deaths and pressured abortions, life expectancy would drop by between 1.46 and 1.79 years for men.”
Trent Horn:
So yeah, there might be other countries are not as developed as the United States that maybe have lower infant mortality rates. You see where this argument is going from people who promote socialism, but that’s because in the US we take risks. We’re willing to do intrauterine surgery on a 24 week old child who has spina bifida.
Trent Horn:
We’re willing to help children and give them as many resources as we can, even if they might end up dying anyways, because we treat every life as being valuable. It doesn’t mean that the US healthcare system is perfect far from it. There’s a lot of things we can do to improve it. But what we shouldn’t do is to think, oh, wow, what if we just handed all of this over to the government to figure out on our behalf. When you’ve dealt with the government, if you’ve ever dealt with them as a bureaucracy, or as I have even working for the government, you know that they don’t reward ingenuity or innovation. They want people to keep things going the way that they always have been. And so it prevents things from getting better. When people are able to freely interact with one another, within a market-based environment, then you see things like innovation.
Trent Horn:
You see improvements, you see a growth in human flourishing. That doesn’t mean markets are perfect. Markets are not perfect because people are not perfect. Markets are just people interacting with one another for the goal of making a living. And so since people aren’t perfect, you’re going to get imperfect results. But since people aren’t perfect, it’s better to disperse the power and authority that people have over one another. And that’s why when you concentrate it into something like the government or the state, trying to plan all of this out, you get what Pope Leo the the 13th called a harvest of misery, which was going to be the original title of can a Catholic be a socialist, but our editor thought we should just be more blunt and direct with the title.
Trent Horn:
So hey, I hope this was helpful for you all. Maybe give you a little bit more insight. As I said, if you want to learn more about the Catholic church’s teaching on socialism, I would recommend my book, Can A Catholic Be A Socialist? Thank you guys for watching. Don’t forget to like this video, subscribe. Be sure to visit us at trenthornpodcast.com to help us to create more great content like this, but thank you all. And I hope you have a very blessed day.
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