As I say, in Cuba, like everywhere else on the planet, it is essential to take the time to learn to deal with the economic system. This probably doesn't shock the reader as unexpected news. We know going into the situation that Cuba is a socialist nation with a socialist economy.  Socialism causes mischief, but it has also has had its benefits to Cuba and to the Cuban people. It is clear that there have been benefits, and anyone who states that this is not the case is merely posturing and not looking at the facts. As an extranjero, (foreigner) you can play the best of both worlds.  You don't have to become a card carrying communist in order to live in Cuba; you're not a Cuban and you're probably not a communist.  As I've said before; use each nation for the attributes it has that work in your favor, why should you live in one oppressive nation on its terms when you can live in all nations on your own terms? In Cuba you can have a base of operations that is extremely private, including your banking, business and personal affairs. You can deal with the wider world; live whenever and however you want in the Caribbean world of Cuba; and come and go as you please without your private affairs being made public knowledge as they are in the USA and Europe.  Privacy is a great luxury! Did you know that you can travel worldwide on a Cuban airline without your personal and private travel information being reported to Big Brother?  The airlines of most nations are forced to provide a list of passengers to the US Government. That's a fact.  There are numerous cases of passengers flying from Canada to South America being pulled off of planes that had to make an emergency stops in Miami - - This won't happen to you on [ Aerolineas Cubano ] a Cuban airline, and Cuban airlines serve absolutely every area of the world except the United States of America. Isn't it ironic that after 200 years of striving for financial freedom that the only safe and private places to place your money is China and Cuba?  Talk about the world turned upside down.

The old Cuba The new Cuba  The new Cuba at places like Marina Hemingway is one among many locations where the extranjeros are now living - Did someone tell you that you can't live there?  Who?  It is surprising how many rational people still obeyed Hitler's orders even after it was evident that the Nazis no longer had a moral imperative. - -  Don't obey irrational orders - Your life belongs to you, not to some moron with a 91 IQ

Rather than go into the politics, the disparities, the name calling and the sharpening-stone grinding of one select ax or another I will get to the point.Cuba is a hell of a fine place to live; but up until now there was no detailed information of how to live there.  The publication of the eBook by Christopher Howard changes that; at least the part about the lack of information.  I stated above that " . . . living well is not very difficult in Cuba once you learn how to go about doing so."  I also stated that Cuba is a "is a damn interesting location for select individuals"  Okay, while that doesn't say it all, that at least opens the doorway into the garden.  Yeah, living in Cuba is extraordinary, and not just for those old guys looking for a sixteen year old Cubana chica to shack with...   foreign women are going to Cuba to live; (educated women) getting involved in social programs; sending their children to Cuban schools, and learning things they never would have learned had they not made the jump; moneyed people are also going to Cuba and running their affairs from there with a greater degree of privacy than they an find anywhere else. There is also business opportunity in Cuba.  Yeah, it sounds like an oxymoron; who makes money in Cuba you might ask.  Well, I know a person who was involved in the new BMW dealership in Havana; and he reported that they sold 400 BMW's the first day they opened. [ The world is full of odd contradictions, what you think is true is sometimes false, and what you think is false, is sometimes revealed to be the truth.  But not across the board. I've turned all the conspiracy theories over to my dog Katyusha.  She is studying them. ] Ernest Hemingway always lived in the best places.  Paris, Spain, Key Largo, Cuba.  He was constantly hounded by the IRS and the FBI, and the hounding eventually killed him, as it did Joe Louis, Woody Herman, and other American heroes.  He loved Cuba, loved his home there, but pressures from the US government forced him to abandon his home and go to the USA to live.  There is strong evidence that the move killed him, and the pressure of being accused of being a communist by the FBI drove him to suicide.  The recent arrest of Dr. Ward Dean MD in the USA provides further evidence that the USA is no longer a safe place to live, nor a moral nation with a moral government.  If Hemingway would have stayed in Cuba he might have lived another 20 years and produced further works of art that would have enriched humanity.  Protect yourself by thinking independently and as an individual. You own your own life...  protect it by making independent judgments. Should we be surprised that there's money in Cuba? Imagine that you are rich Spaniard or an Italian with a huge multi-national corporation that makes millions.  You want a Caribbean hideaway -- so you choose Cuba.  Where else? To some US or UK government controlled Caribbean island where your business is common knowledge to everyone?  In Cuba, you've got one of the most secure spots on earth.  (This based on the very probable supposition that anyplace safe from US Government snooping is the only safe place to be.)  I very much agree with that.  There is no crime in Cuba.  (Whoops the US government left that out when they told you Cuba was a Rogue State.) Even foreigners get excellent medical treatment in Cuba at a price lower than anywhere else in the world based on what you get for what you pay.  (A large number of non-Cuban foreigners specifically travel to Cuba for medical treatment, as they get 'First World' medicine at bargain basement prices.)  Okay, the US government left that part out too.  But they're the ones who've blockaded Cuba and pushed her into a economic corner.  Well, it is easy to admit that Castro could have done better things with the economy and civil liberties while Russia had the island on welfare and he had a free lunch; but he was too busy being a firebrand, add to that the fact that Communism and Civil Liberties don't mix. An engineered society must be a restricted society by definition.  That aside, this isn't a political document, it's an announcement of the fact that you can live in Cuba, and live quite well.

I've mentioned elsewhere that if you're being stalked by a stalker, whomever that stalker might be; then Cuba is the best place to avoid being stalked. Nuf' said. 

The bottom line?  Cuba is absolutely beautiful . . . has great food, great cigars, great rum and great entertainment.  Start living you life as if it belonged to you.  It is your life.  You can live it the way you want to in Cuba and still travel the rest of the world on an airline that doesn't broadcast your personal affairs to those who would oppress you.  The world has changed; learn how to utilize those changes, or give up the idea of a worthwhile future.

I think communism is crap.  I don't want to give the impression that I think otherwise. According to Aristole, it is a sad day for humanity when one feels the need to to formulate the way in which each individual should be living: intuitively without having to think about it. That applies to Castro, it applies to Chávez, it applies to Stalin, and despite rhetoric to the contrary it applies to George W. Bush. A mixed economy is not much better than Communism; and pretending that the Americans and the British aren't brain-washed by their government through television and the media is just as stupid as pretending Cubans have civil liberties. Aldous Huxley once said "The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing doing something but by refraining from doing. Great is the truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."  Before I go on record as having said that Cuban Communism is the path to take, let me remind the reader what I said about Che Guevara, Statism, Hugo (Big Mouth Small Brain) Chávez, Cuba, and the issue of stupidity vs. idiocy in today's non-lucid world.  Just to set the record straight, I want readers to know I'm not anti-American, I'm anti-Statist; which is to say, I'm for individual liberty and against the media hypnosis that's destroyed the lucidly of the masses.  Goal!

Che Guevara, who was Che Guevara? Che Guevara was an Argentine. Argentina is a nation that invaded and did great damage to Paraguay, Uruguay, and Great Britain.  The wind that blows across the Río de la Plata from Buenos Aries, is seldom good air.  Che Guevara was a poseur, someone who talked about solitary with the sugar cane cutters, spend one afternoon cutting sugar cane, and then fled back to Havana for another photo opt. He was a phony, a Hollywood actor playing Billy The Kid. He accomplished nothing, and that he was popular with the intellectually impoverished is evidence.  An Argentine sees himself as a great soccer player, a great Hollywood actor, a movie star, waiting only to be discovered.  Che was discovered, he was for the great revolution. . . . are the cameras rolling?  Wait, I need my cigar, and a little more makeup. Do I look profound, romantic?  Fifty years later the cutters of sugar cane in Cuba still cut sugar cane with antiquated technology, day after day in the hot sun.  They are still waiting for Che to show back up, for another great photo opt, and two hours of solidarity for the cameras. ¿Qué Pasa Con Cuba? Still, all things considered, Havana is a thousand times better than Juarez or Honduras or any of the other USA hybrids with their maquilas, [or manufacturing zones]. The USA though its benign neglect [reminiscent of the reign of Porfirio Díaz] has created situations in many Latin American countries that are worst than Cuba will ever be, and these American slave zones contain none of the culture of Cuba. The recent toll in female homicides (and rapes) in Ciudad Juárez is believed to exceed 5,000 victims. The victims of these crimes have preponderantly been young women, between 12 and 22 years of age. Many were students, and most were maquiladora workers. The children the Argentines dropped out of army helicopters over the Río de la Plata were dropped with CIA complicity, the brutal corruption and nepotism of Venezuela's elite's has been replaced by a half-wit who believes that to cure the heart disease of corruption you remove the heart. The witch doctor tactics of Hugo Chávez are not suitable for the production of freedom, the fifty year old VooDoo politics of the US Government will not produce freedom. Everyone is busy creating what we don't need.

Fifty years later the cutters of sugar cane in Cuba still cut sugar cane with antiquated technology, day after day in the hot sun.  They are still waiting for Che to show back up, for another great photo opt, and two hours of solidarity for the cameras. Intellectuals who believe in the engineering of society, always see themselves as the engineer, not as the engineered. I call bull-crap on them.

What do we need?   We need freedom. If we have to have freedom by lying on a beach in Cuba and pretending the sugar cane cutters have a life, or pretending Obama's plan to "close all the tax havens", is going to somehow benefit us, okay let's live in a world of pretense. To be free means we have to learn to ignore the idiocy of government in all of its hideous forms and live our own life as an EscapeArtist. If you suffer pangs of guilt over the victims of government you can always rush back to America and open a Health Care clinic for Darwin's failures, or go out to the sugar cane fields and spend the day in solidarity. Reality in the 21st century teaches one thing clearly to those who are paying attention; and that is that governments do not produce freedom, the insinuation that they might do so is a contradiction in terms. The Harry Browne freedom article which I ran produced a great deal of feedback; all of it very positive. There are fond memories of Harry, and it is surprising how many people were influenced by Harry's freedom book. So freedom still has some appeal to those who realize that it's a state of being and not a word. I suspect as the population of the world pushes towards 8 billion that there will be even less freedom, more government, more sub-liminal brain-washing, but that's the way it is in a millenarian society gone astray; perhaps we never had a chance to begin with, at least in great numbers.  At the moment the individual can still slip between the cracks if he or she keeps their eyes open and does some clever thinking.  In closing I want to make some off-handed remarks about freedom. To do so I would like to point out some popular misconceptions about freedom and the societies we live in. People have been led to believe that the great conflict of our time is between the way various governments supervise & squander their confiscated tax dollars. I disagree; I believe that a government can best be defined by its capacity to produce freedom. If a government cannot produce freedom it is a failure.  There's a lot of failure out there.  A whole lot of it.

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