Thirsters host Dr. Art Kohn, peppered his presentation with modest caveats, reminding us he was learning more than teaching about his topic. However, with memories of his visit to Havana still vivid, he was up for giving us his eye-witness account. The interest level was high with many attending, including Jonathan Potkin.
Cuba was in crisis around now because the District of Columbia had imprisoned the president and first lady of Venezuela, whom we don't hear about daily as one might expect, and Marco Rubio (the District president) is making sure VZ is no longer in control of where its oil goes. That oil now belongs to the District as far as the Beltway Mafia is concerned, and Cuba has long been on its enemies list.
However, US citizens are still permitted tourist visas and short hop airlines that don't need to refuel in Havana still serve its airport.
Art is a big fan of AI and used it to help with the slideshow, which took us through a lot of history, albeit briefly as this was but a two-hour long meetup at best.
I'd arrived with two guests, Don and Susan, having enjoyed their company, and Terri's, at their home base first. I was their driver / chauffeur for the evening. Don enjoyed the freeway twists and dips, which we took much faster coming home, in light traffic.
After the formal presentation, Thirsters (a pun on Thursday beer drinking, recalling our pub meetup years) asked questions and shared views.
Art's mental model is that a public-ownership-based framework equates to a top-heavy bureaucracy and a kind of egalitarianism that keeps the gap in living standards, between the best-off and worst-off, relatively narrow, but also keeps that living standard relatively low for everyone, on average.
Private ownership, on the other hand, which encourages competition, and a leaner government, opens the door to a higher top level standard, thanks to greater efficiency, but at the cost of a wider disparity in living standards. One might picture the two bell curves.
I shared one of my Cuba stories, the one about my friend who organized trips to Cuba for retired Pentagon brass, for fun in the sun and meetups with Castro. I thought about getting into the whole Ben and Jerry's ice cream factory scenario, but decided that was too complicated a kind of science fiction to pass off as a quick anecdote.
In the car driving home I shared my view that the District is at the hub of a military-socialist empire, centered around the Pentagon as a central planner. Between corporate hierarchies, flock-n-shepherd temples, and military service, US citizens have little opportunity to practice boots-on-the-ground democracy except vs-a-vs the District melodrama, which turns "democracy" into a kind of reality TV show.
Note that USers are by now used to having the Secretary of State be president, as this was true under President Blinken as well.
