brilliant economics

Oh, they will do that. Just like they have 99% voter turnout and 99% literacy.

John Larkin doesn't seem to think at all, and snarks a lot.

Food? Lumber and ammo see price increases because they have limited production rates. Demand rises and prices rise as well. But food... just eat the rich!

Eisenhower et al had a habit of tying the US to nasty and unpopular regimes like Batista and sticking with them well past their sell-by date. Castro could've been a US ally, Cuba might have still ended up communist but a mostly-harmless communist state like Kerala, one that regularly told the Soviets to pound salt, like Kerala.

But Fidel got all miffed that the US in the 50s mostly rebuffed his overtures and then the Soviets came creeping around promising guns and butter and flipped him.

Fidel regime was a nasty piece of work sometimes and the Cuban expat community who tend to be descendants of the fans of Batista, who were making bank in various hustles, but then had to get while the getting was good before the broke commie peasants kicked their ass for it, often tend to be nasty pieces of work, too.

I was listening to a Cuban-expat focused station on Sirius the other day where a commentator says "Post-Castro now that Cuba is ruled by a cartel of oligarchs we don't see how the country can survive in its present form, history shows that nations ruled by cartels of oligarchs don't last..." and I thought huh, funny, America has been ruled by WalMart and ExxonMobil for some time and it's been chugging along that way well enough for 50 years...

Not horrible, but you're never going to get boomer-rich from equity into those. It's unlikely you'll make back what you put into them.

Castro seized a lot of assets and annoyed the people who owned them. Many former owners are politically connected here.

You might have to settle for being happy with a friend.

I'd be very happy if that's all there were to it, but having equity in a property that's appreciated to more than you paid for it is a nice thing to have as you get older, health care in America ain't free for starters.

Remember that time Kay Tye bragged that her great-grandfather "had a monopoly of eggs in all of China":

Look, I can't disagree, libs do say some pretty dumb stuff from time to time. She comes off like her main gripe with the ChiComs is that the rights to all the eggs of China weren't passed down to her so she could still be the Egg Queen of China in her hereditary pagoda, in the 21st century.

What about Vietnam? Ho made a declaration of independence that was a translation of the US's. Vietnam and China have never been friends by the way.

Groetjes Albert