> Again, a bizarre representation. Israel and the USA are the only countries in the world to boycott the Cuban economy. They don't prohibit Cuba to trade with and receive aid from the rest of the world.

This is just a lie man, and lying is bad. The US by itself is already a good chunk of the world economy, obviously. But besides that, the US prohibits foreign companies that want to trade with Cuba from engaging in bussiness with the US. So if, say, a german company wants to sell their products in Cuba, that means they won't be able to do it in the US. And there are multiple similar mechanisms, regulations and sanctions that make it very difficult to trade with the US and with Cuba at the same time, or to do bussiness with both countries or with US allies, and so on. And can you guess which market is any company going to choose? Tiny communist island, or the biggest economy in the world?

The claim that Cuba can "freely" trade with other countries is propaganda, plain and simple. This is the bullshit that the US media promotes.

> "Of course the U.S. cannot prohibit firms from other countries from trading with Cuba," Richard Feinberg, a professor of international political economy at the University of California-San Diego, said in an email. "However, the U.S. has instituted various economic sanctions that make that trade and investment riskier and more costly, creating serious disincentives." USA Today

The cynicism you have to have to say that trade from other countries is "seriously discouraged" by the largest economy in the world, while at the same time claiming that Cuba is able to freely trade with other countries, is repugnant.

>Israel has indeed suffered an economic block-aid from much of the Muslim world for the entirety of its existence. Yet, it's doing so well economically that some Arab countries have abandoned the effort so as to benefit from economic relations with Israel.

Lobby groups were able to sanction laws against boycotting Israel. So not only they are not sanctioned by the largest economy in the world, they have laws against boycotting them. Imagine that! I can't think of any other country in the world that has laws against boycotting that country.

> I see. Communists in the USA are arrested and imprisoned in the USA just like non-Communist activists are arrested and imprisoned in Cuba? Believe it or not, the Communist Party of the USA exists legally....its representative runs for President every 4 years. Is there any non-Communist equivalent in Cuba? Better do some remedial studying.

Communist parties in the US and in most of western europe were dismantled during the cold war, you should know. Unrelentless persecution, infiltration, sabotage, false flags, criminalization and assassination of political activists caused a chilling effect and destroyed this organization. I don't know if you are being disingenous or you actually don't know the level of persecution and sabotage that these organizations had in the past. The black panthers were at a time, the largest communist and revolutionary party in the US. And they were chased to literally death. You should know that. Anti-war activists were thrown in jail, repressed with bullet and batons, killed in clashes with the police, suffered from false accusations, and so on.

The CPUSA is able to legally exist because they are so weak and tiny. How can you not see that? If any communist party gained any kind of traction in the US, it would be sabotaged, criminalized and persecuted. This is not an opinion, it is an assertion based on verifiable past experiences.

> Internal repression did and does exist in the United States, but it was not mostly subtle, it was mostly overt. The presence of police—with guns, clubs, dogs, tear gas, and firehoses—is not subtle. Burning crosses are downright ostentatious. Deployment of the National Guard to put down urban uprisings was common practice—there were over 1,000 urban uprisings between 1960 and the mid-‘70s, which means hundreds of instances of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and columns of soldiers invading American cities. According to the most conservative estimates, between 1965 and ’67, around 130 black men were killed and 28,000 arrested in various instances of urban unrest (when you consider that 43 people were killed in Detroit in July 1967 alone, those numbers seems way too low).31 The McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 established a concentration camp system (6 were completed) where accused subversives would be interned in the case of national emergency; Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and Martin Luther King all warned that this law could be used against their movements.32 In 1950, the FBI actually drew up a list of 12,000 accused subversives who were to be rounded up and held in Guantánamo Bay-style indefinite detention–the only reason they weren’t is that Truman declined Hoover’s demands to incarcerate them. After the riots that followed MLK’s assassination, the Army drew up apocalyptic plans under the rubric of Operation Garden Plot to deploy brigades to 25 cities to wage an open counterinsurgency war. If resistance to the status quo had intensified in the 1970s, rather than waned, the Pentagon was ready to turn American cities into “scenes of destruction approaching those of Stalingrad during World War II,” in the words of one Army general.

Noam Chomsky and the compatible left

> Tell that to the hundreds of human-rights activists languishing in Cuban jails for daring to speak out and demonstrate in defense of freedom!

Lol, "in defense of freedom". Freedom from whom, freedom to do what? Freedom to marry whoever you want, to eat every day, to have a house, to have higher education, to rest, to leisure? Or freedom to restore capitalism, to prostitute children and reintroduce gambling? Freedom to make Cuba a US colony again, like during the Batista years? Freedom to do what?