The Chickens Come Home to Roost. Part II: The Need For Social Democracy

After a week in Cuba we flew to California. We have a German friend there who we join on an early morning walk in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. The walk is with an eclectic group of anthropology, sociology and psychology professors who were all very interested in our trip to Cuba.

In trying to put my impressions into context I described myself as a Social-Democrat. When pressed to define what that was I explained that it meant that although I was a capitalist economically I believed in democracy politically, and more specifically in the need for (relatively) high taxes and the need for regulation in almost every facit of life.

There are more people in the Greater Los Angles area than in Cuba. In California even the riverbeds are covered with concrete. The amount of traffic is overwhelming, as is the number of homeless people. Driving from Central LA to Pacific Palisades on Sunset Boulevard the chasm between rich and poor is breathtaking, and this doesn't even take into account truly depressed areas of the city.

Cuba has free health care for all. And free education. The literacy rate is 90%. In California the literacy rate is 75% and the poverty rate is over 15%. Travel to Montecito, one of the most expensive towns in America, and then to its neighbour Santa Barbara which just suffered it's seventh homeless death in 2011.

Cuba is ranked 117th in the world economically. California is 8th.

But again I get ahead of myself.

As much as I appreciated what Castro had achieved-if nothing else he rid Cuba of a brutal and corrupt military dictatorship intimately interwoven with organised crime-he demonstrated that even under a somewhat benevolent and honest communist dictatorship it was still a dictatorship. The flip side of the social welfare provided by the communist state is that there is essentially no ambition, no real progress, and no growth. This is not paradise.

And yet when compared to California, that part of the USA which epitomizes the American Dream, when confronted by the blight of an incongruent mishmash of gated communities and abject poverty as the result of unregulated captialism and failed social policies, I am left nostalgic for the mythical past of my childhood as presented by the Cuba of today.