Comments by "SkyRiver" (@SkyRiver1) on "Should Cuba Integrate with North America? || Peter Zeihan" video.

For "Cuban upper class" you should substitute the term "mafia connected" cause that is where all the real money came from in pre-revolutionary Cuba.
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And "the mafia never forgets", but it sure seems like everyone else has forgotten that Cuba was a criminal empire totally in the pocket of the US mafia, which ran it like a subsidy, literally delivered suitcases of cash directly to the president, and owned all the sin businesses, from whose crumbs that fell off the mafia table, a good number of the well-off Cubans who fled were dependent.
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Plus how would they deal with giving the Jewish/Italian/Cuban mafia their criminal run country back? When Cuba was taken over by communists it was taken basically from a cabal of gangsters that controlled every aspect of government and all the commerce that really mattered, casinos, money laundering for the US operations, drugs, prostitution. The gangsters are lining up with their hand out and the mafia never forgets. Plus if anyone thinks that Cubans are going to labor for 10% of what others are getting for more than a nanosecond, they you do not realize that the number one form of suicide in Cuba is from jumping off of their egos.
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@frequentlycynical642 The mafia used Cuba to wash the proceeds from the US mainland as well. Gambling, both legal and not, drugs, loans, the whole bit, and pot and speed may have been coming along, but heroin was the money maker. No doubt the economy in Cuba, in general received more from sugar, but as to whether or not the total income from sugar production was even in the same order of magnitude as the take from organized crime on the mainland and Cuba is something that nobody outside of Lansky would know. And maybe not even Myer knew.
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