Cuba to sell cars for first time since revolution... $260,000 each.

[tooAlive]

A new Kia Rio hatchback that starts at $13,600 in the United States sells for $42,000 in Havana, while a fresh-off-the-lot Peugeot 508 family car, the most luxurious of which lists for the equivalent of about $53,000 in the U.K., will set one back a cool $262,000.

Cuba's Communist-run government traditionally has placed huge markups on retail goods and services paid for with hard currency, a policy that amounts to a tax on people who can afford such goods. The practice applies to everything from dried pasta to household appliances to Internet access.

Someone please inform the mainstream media that these Cuban dictators are wrong to call themselves communists. :glare:

http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/photo-gallery/2014/1/cubans-allowed-tobuycarsforthefirsttime.html

http://news.yahoo.com/cubans-aghast-car-prices-law-kicks-050343367.html

[Conscript]

Cuba's Communist-run government traditionally has placed huge markups on retail goods and services paid for with hard currency, a policy that amounts to a tax on people who can afford such goods. The practice applies to everything from dried pasta to household appliances to Internet access.




I dont even know why this is mentioned, especially the tax part, other than a ridiculous anti-communist stab. Capitalism does the same exact fucking thing, even more so. Holy fail.

[Tim Cornelis]

I dont even know why this is mentioned, especially the tax part, other than a ridiculous anti-communist stab. Capitalism does the same exact fucking thing, even more so. Holy fail.

Not entirely. Capitalism adds markups to commodities (iphone 4s costs something like 280$ to produce and is sold for $650 or so), however the Cuban tax is far higher than this.

[Conscript]

Not entirely. Capitalism adds markups to commodities (iphone 4s costs something like 280$ to produce and is sold for $650 or so), however the Cuban tax is far higher than this.

But it's just a quantitative difference. Where do we draw the line into what counts as a tax on those presumably 'successful' enough to afford it, and what is just capital's share? This article criticizes the system it defends. Cuba is also of course capitalist, but being 'socialist' in the ML context basically means extensive subsidies for commodities, the opposite of what the article attacks. The cuban tax is an exception to the rule, instead favoring something very capitalist, a mark up for the sake of Cuban capital. I just find it ironic, especially considering the liberal-imperialists' use of state power to weaken Cuba economically, then their criticism something like this (meanwhile, college textbooks, for example, are a fucking state-sponsored racket).

Liberals have no issue with a 500% mark up, so long as it's their system doing it. The very fact the Cuban state is involved discredits any exhange in their eyes, so 10% or 500%, what is the difference with them?

I'm not sure if inflating the price to 10x beyond the real exchange value would even put a dent in what capitalism does on a mass scale, with every commodity imaginable and frequently assisted by the liberal-imperialist state by some means. ML state-capitalism is usually far more generous, at least in the heyday of stalinists when they lifted up entire nations with their aid, let alone what they did for their citizens.

[SensibleLuxemburgist]

Sooner or later, Cuba is going to fall in once again into the capitalist fold just as China and the former Soviet Union did. This proves history does repeat itself once again.