Cuba Has Not Been A Bad Neighbor Or a Threat To the US -- Ever. There Is No Cuban Taint.

[PETRUS]

23. Something else about Cuba...

With each passing year, I become more and more preoccupied with, and worried about, what we are doing to the biosphere. Climate change gets a lot of attention (as it should), but we're not making progress on that front, and it's not the only ecological boundary we are overshooting.

I don't know if you're familiar with the Human Development Index. It's a measure that's been broadly adopted as a way of gauging "progress." They key components are life expectancy at birth, levels of education, and per capita GDP. An alternative to that has been proposed, which is called the Sustainable Development Index. It weighs per capita GDP differently, keeps the life expectancy and education figures as they are in the HDI, and includes measures of material consumption and carbon emissions. Cuba comes out at #1 on the SDI.

Cuba may not have the economic growth of countries that embrace capitalism, but they don't have problems with hunger and homelessness either, their life expectancy and education levels are very high, and they do it with a much lower level of resource consumption and waste production. My belief is that, because of ecological limits, if the collective "we" don't abandon the growth paradigm, humankind will be facing a very bleak future.

If you're interested, here's a link to a paper about the Sustainable Develpment Index:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919303386