Talk:Cuba/Archive 3

message: I removed the section on human rights because it is an aberration from the standard form for Wikipedia country others. In other articles there are a series of standard sections on history, politics, economy, and demographics-- each with a link to their respective main articles, along with a "miscellaneous" or "other" section for everything else. In other articles, human rights go under "other" or under the related articles. This is the case for the United States. It is even the case for other communist countries like People's Republic of China.  Thus, it appeared that the inclusion of a section on human rights in this article was at best arbitrary or at worse politically determined without reference to the NPOV policy. 172 | Talk 09:57, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: You seem to have things upside down. Hasty cut and paste merges from redirected articles constitutes sloppy editing. Removing long, rambling, extraneous material so that an article conforms to standards, however, constitutes proper copyediting. If someone writes a lot of material but doesn't find a proper place for it, the thing to do is store it in a temp article (say) Republic of Cuba/temp, rather than just dumping it in any article... If you want to know how the format is spelled out, compare the articles on you own. Take a look at the entries on Russia, People's Republic of China, United States, Colombia, and Mexico (2-3 of which too have controversial human rights records like Cuba), as I suggested earlier. 172 | Talk 23:25, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I wasn't the one who did the hasty cut and paste, and in any case, that merge is now complete.  I don't see anything here that I would consider extraneous, tho it is still verbose in places.  I do find it strange that you kept deleting the Education and Health sections when there is an Education secction in the United States and Mexico articles and a Public health section in the People's Republic of China, so those two sections can clearly be justified by the examples you've given. Caerwine 23:34, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

text: With the current content of the human rights section, if it doesn't get separated out in a section of its own it would belong in the Politics section.  I certainly would see nothing wrong with incorporating a Human rights section in every country article.  I'm still waiting for you to indicate where one can find a Wikipedia guideline or policy concerning the content and formatting of Country articles.  I'll happily defer to that, as such a guideline or policy would help reduce the edit wars here, but at this point all I see now is a question of taste in presentation now that the merge from Republic of Cuba has been completed. Caerwine 23:49, 11 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually the choice of using WHO data (not UNESCO, that's the Education section) for the Public health section was motivated solely because it had a broader set of measures than those included in the CIA factbook. (I was the one who added that table to the then already extant Healthcare section.)  The data that was gotten from the WHO source, is if anything, less upbeat than that of the CIA factbook, tho that may be due solely to differences in the data year used. Caerwine 00:12, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Shall we start by putting a human rights section in United States then, and expand to other countries if that's successful?  It would solve this discussion, it would improve wikipedia, and it would mean that we're not accused of being biased against certain countries.  There's already an article at Human rights in the United States, but it's listed in small print, halfway through "other topics" in an infobox at the bottom of the page, rather than having a top-level section to itself.  Perhaps someone should start by discussing plans at Talk:United States, or propose a wikiproject.  Ojw 17:10, 6 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Opening comments

message: One notes that some appear to have a dislike for the succession of Cuban presidents, and keep deleting any references to them except Batista.  Could this be taken to suggest a bias against elected presidents in general? Or does this censor find Cuba's democratic traditions distasteful? (El Jigüe, 10/11/2005)
:What it indicates that this article is the wrong place to list every leader of Cuba.  Note that there are a grand total of seven presidents mentioned in the United States article, over a longer period of time than the Republic of Cuba.  The article could use one or two references to people between de Cuellar in 1511 and Marti in 1895, but between 1895 and 2005, I think mentioning Marti, Palma, Batista, and Castro should be sufficent for this article unless there is something of signifcance that can be mentioned about them.  Unfortunately, on a topic as broad as all of Cuba, simply winning an election is not sufficient enough. Caerwine 00:57, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Cuban Presidents

message: There have been certain revert warriors that among other changes, have been insisting that the capital of Cuba be identified by its Spanish name, La Habana.  Given that this is en.wikipedia.org, the capital of the Czech Republic is identified as Prague, and not Praha, and the capital of Italy is identified as Rome, not Roma.  Given these conventions, why should Havana be identified as La Habana contrary to the existing conventions? --Bletch 14:37, 12 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Given that the guideline is standard use in the English language, and Guantanamo Bay is called just that in English, I'm not sure how the name "Cumberland" fits in to things. --Bletch 18:13, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

text: Ahhh ok... funny the Guantanamo Bay article does not have the word Cumberland in there at all.  Care to add this info to that article? --Bletch 23:27, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

text: Good question; a quick Google search doesn't seem turn up anything.  I'm somewhat inclined to guess that it was Havana in Spanish at some point; for whatever reason, English speakers have not mutilated the spelling of Latin American city names the way they have European city names.  --Bletch 16:47, 13 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Havana vs La Habana 

message: The template is there for a reason. If you don't like it put a Vfd on it, and on all the others fromm other countries. If you have a problem with infobox comntent edit the template. Do not remove the template so you can spread your edit wars over this page, SqueakBox 19:44, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Template

message: My attention to this article was drawn by the last edit summary -
: "Encyclopedia's do not call France or the US "capitalist state", so it is not fair to call Cuba a "communist state". 2nd: it implies that the communist party is "ruling" the country, which is false" - 
::what they do say is that the USA is a "federal republic" that the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy and that France is a unitary republic. It is disingenuous to describe Cuba as a Republic when the only legal political entity is the Communist Party and all other forms of political expression are prohibited. That means that the country is ruled at the discretion of the Communist Party - ergo - it is a communist state. Our definition at communist state lists Cuba as a prime example. Jooler 16:57, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Recent edits

message: I removed this parenthetical comment:
He says that if the United States get hit, the economy of the rest of the country will take the blow (although that was slow to start up when Hurricane Katrina hit), ... 
It is not relevant to the article, and it states a non-neutral POV about the government's actions regarding Katrina, which is a controversial issue.
--147.154.235.53 14:16, 26 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: side comment

message: The Cuban sugar crop has dropped at least 70% by the most recent figure to about 1.6 million tons in 2004 .  Cuban government experts are blaming the drought and expect the drought to continue as hurricanes rage off shore.  This strange drought may well be real and a product of extremely poor land management (El Jigüe, 10/17/2005)
The nine million tons you are taking as the baseline was in fact the highest annual yield reached before the ten million ton target was acknowledged as unrealistic. The diversification away from sugar monoculture started years ago and the recent figures need checking against the target yield for the year in question. 
What is strange about the drought? How many years has this been going on? I haven't visited since 2000 but market gardeners I talked to then were complaining then about lessening annual rainfall.  They were doing their best to maximise water conservation: your "extremely poor land management" is just another of your desire to blame Castro/the Cuban government for anything negative that happens in Cuba. MichaelW 17:02, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Sugar Crop

message: :The Indigenous Cuban population, including the Ciboney and the Taíno, were forced into reservations encomiendas during the Spanish subjugation of the island of Cuba.
Besides being an awkwardly phrased sentence, this is ambiguous.  Encomiendas were not reservations, in at least the sense of Native American reservations in the United States.  If I knew more about the precise situation, I'd remove either the word reservation or encomienda, depending on what what exactly happened.  Can anyone shed some light here? --Bletch 16:45, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes I am familiar with the encomienda system; what I am trying to figure out is whether the passage in question needs to be changed to encomienda, or reservation, or something else.  --Bletch 01:35, 21 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reservations vs Encomiendas 

message: I saw a show on alligators the other day (yes I admit it was the Crocodile Hunter!) that said there was a Cuban national park created specifically for their protection after the Revolution.  Can anybody inform me about it?  I also saw in a bird book that several species of North American birds are now only present in Cuba, is this because of differences in land development, or geography, or environmental protection strategy between Cuba and the United Sates?  What is the environmental policy of the Cuban government?  Is there an article on the national park system there?
Note: This question is not meant to start a political debate.
--RPlunk 23:25, 3 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: National Parks

message: It is important to remember that although Cuba's healthcare system is widely regarded as one of the best in the developing world. WHO data cited here comes directly from national health authorities of each country .
So that's an even playing field then, leaving Cuba with its reputation intact.MichaelW 20:27, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Cuba Health Data

message: There is an minor edit war going over at List of dictators over Casto's election (see Talk:List of dictators#Castro edits. The main problem now seems to be how Castro retains power. Is he elected, appointed or does/has he declared himself president? If he is elected then who does this? I have read National Assembly of People’s Power of Cuba, Council of State of Cuba, Cuba#Politics, Cuba#History, Elections in Cuba, Politics of Cuba and Communist Party of Cuba. Not one of these indicates how he obtains the post of president. Can someone clear this up. CambridgeBayWeather (Talk) 17:18, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Castro's power

message: The paragraph on human rights is rather weasely and problematic. "Many argue that several/many/whatever thousands..." is absolutely ambiguous. Who are those many (cite a few, "Many organizations, such as...") and what are their exact estimates (cite minimum and maximum)? --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 15:24, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Human rights again 

message: Who says so? Ever visited any Communist country? 
Xx236 11:11, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  its authority is moral 

message: Any Communist country is based on political police. What is the name of the Cuban one?
Xx236 12:43, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is the name of the political police? 

message: Charles McKelvey. A bunch of such people claimed that the "socialist" states invented socialist democracy, much better than degenerated western democracies. Sooner or later a child will shout - the king is naked. And everyone will say - there was no democracy in Cuba 2006. 
Xx236 15:48, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Charles McKelvey 

message: Batista - it was 45 years ago. The main problem with socialist economies is socialism, not the outside sanctions. The Cuban system might have had collapsed without the sanctions, the existence of the Enemy supported the system.
Xx236 09:29, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Supporters of the Cuban government argue that the human rights record, living standards and health care in Cuba are better than those which existed under Fulgencio Batista, and would have continued im 

message: http://assembly.coe.int/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc05/EDOC10765.htm
It's a draft version.
Xx236 07:51, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Council of Europe - report about Communism