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CODieK slash Special Offer. Oh, And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. My name is James Bloodworth. I'm the author of Hired and a freelance journalist from London.

I recently wrote an article for persuasion on Cuba and the protest that recently took place there.

I spent quite a long time, around a year, living in Cuba 10 years ago.

I went there as something of an idealist. I was never pro-Castro so to speak, but I was interested in the revolution I thought it had done some positive things, more positive than negative I would say.

Yet this year I spent in Cuba really opened my eyes to the reality of the situation on the island.

So on the one hand, the economy was a disaster, and it wasn't all the fault of the United States embargo. The centrally

planned economy simply didn't work. There were shortages of everything, everyday

goods, things we were in wealthy countries consider the basic necessities of life.

But also there was this stifling atmosphere of repression.

So I had friends, people I met who had been fired from their jobs in Havana University for writing very mild criticisms of the Cuban government.

A black Rastafarian friend of mine was taken in by the police and had his dreadlocks forcibly cut off because this was seen as kind of a bourgeois

deviation from communist morality and also he was arrested again for simply hanging around with foreigners

i.e. myself. and when I came back to the UK from this

...