Cuba suspended the deal back in 2022 because they couldn’t produce enough sugar and became a sugar importer instead, their sugar industry is in collapse. But yes, please tell me in more snarky and doomerist ways why China is a big bad bully for not continuing to buy sugar that doesn’t exist
Just an FYI for people getting angry about this: this deal to export 400,000 tonnes of sugar to China annually was suspended back in 2022, by Cuba, because Cuba ran into production issues, didn’t have enough sugar, and became a sugar importer. The deal remained suspended in 2023, again, because Cuba could not produce enough sugar. This year the deal was finally cancelled because, shockingly, Cuba still can’t produce enough sugar since their sugar industry has been in collapse for years.
And now the Financial Times of all places has made up some story about how China is punishing Cuba, and people are repeating it (literally no other sources exist for this, every article in English and in Spanish that I can find link back to the FT article).
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/cuban-sugar-industry-restructures-another-bleak-harvest-looms-2021-11-24/ (Start of the collapse and the last year people were still talking about Cuba maybe fulfilling its export but probably not because harvest was bad)
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/cuba-cuts-plans-export-sugar-with-output-expected-stagnate-2022-11-03/ (article from the following year about how Cuba can’t export sugar anymore because they can’t fulfill their contracts)
Edit: China is still Cuba’s number two trade partner. Could they do more for Cuba? Yeah, they could do more for literally everywhere, but complaints about how China needs to deliver more aid are way different than uncritically accepting that China is cutting trade ties with Cuba to punish them. (By the way, China is also one of the largest investors in Cuban infrastructure, so the real energy should be at wanting China to double down on helping Cuba fix their currently faltering energy infrastructure)
I think we’re talking past each other here because the article that spawned this thread is saying the cause is specifically to punish Cuba for walking back privatization, which is spin on the situation published by Atlantic Council goons. The thing I have asserted is that if you were to look at the parent comment and the linked article, and take it at face value, you are uncritically accepting US narratives.
At no point have I denied that this deal was cancelled, nor that trade deals are implemented, maintained, or cancelled, all entirely on the basis of profitability. That isn’t what this thread is about though. It’s about whether or not China is “punishing” Cuba.
It’s just a contract being cancelled, that could have any number of reasons behind it (and the most likely reason is profitability, which is problematic in its own right but not at all what this thread is complaining about). But to accept that it is being cancelled as a punishment to fail to privatize is pure conjecture unless you have inside information you’d care to share.
I never said the deal wasn’t being cancelled, but the outrage being generated here is that it is being cancelled as a punishment, which there is no evidence of that isn’t from a US-backed source.
Please do, actually, and find a source that corroborates what you are criticizing: that this trade deal is being cancelled in order to punish Cuba for not privatizing. Otherwise all you have substantiated is that the deal is cancelled, and not the why of it, which is what people are getting mad about. A deal being cancelled isn’t really anything: that happens all the time.
When you read an Atlantic Council article and then say “fuck Xi” I think the US has worked its propaganda well.
Sure and maybe the news that China is cancelling a trade deal is true, but the point of these types of NGOs is to frame it with a lot of unsubstantiated spin. This article you linked writes specifically that the trade deal comes as a punishment for failing to privatize, but I can’t find a single non-US funded source that links those as cause-and-effect. There is no evidence that this deal is being cancelled as a lever for privatization, which is the thing that you are criticizing China for doing.
That’s why when you use sources like this you can’t take their reasoning at face value, that’s just spreading Atlantic Council narratives.
Have you actually looked at the team of people who run this foundation?
“Founder and Executive Director - Parsifal D’Sola Alvarado. Parsifal is a senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub. In 2019 he acted as an advisor on Chinese foreign policy for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the interim government of Venezuela (this is Guaido’s fake government lol). Parsifal lived in Beijing from 2008 to 2016 where he served as communications manager and researcher for the China Files news agency.”
Come on, at least use sources that aren’t US feds.
Ah yes, why believe a woman who claims to be a victim of sexual assault when instead we could simply believe the guy who went live on the internet to praise Hitler.
That’s fair, but an important thing to remember in regards to China: Patnaik (2020) notes that 64% of the number of persons lifted above the international poverty line since 1990 was entirely on account of China. Whatever economic complaints that people on the Internet have, China has made moves to alleviate the immiseration of a billion people in the face of an over-reaching hyperviolent global hegemony.
As far as hope, I always take to heart Mariame Kaba’s assertion that “hope is a discipline.”
" I always tell people, for me, hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. I think that for me, understanding that is really helpful in my practice around organizing, which is that, I believe that there’s always a potential for transformation and for change. And that is in any direction, good or bad . . . hope is a discipline and. . . we have to practice it every single day. Because in the world which we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that there is nothing going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom. It feels sometimes that it’s being proven in various, different ways, so I get that, so I really get that. I understand why people feel that way. I just choose differently. . . I believe ultimately that we’re going to win, because I believe there are more people who want justice, real justice, than there are those who are working against that. And I don’t also take a short-time view, I take a long view, understanding full well that I’m just a tiny, little part of a story that already has a huge antecedent and has something that is going to come after that, that I’m definitely not going to be even close to around for seeing the end of. So, that also puts me in the right frame of mind, that my little friggin’ thing I’m doing, is actually pretty insignificant in world history, but [if] it’s significant to one or two people, I feel good about that."