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But the contrast between haves and have nots is particularly striking right now. Based on 11 days and nights in Havana, I would guess that 1/3 of Cubans are literally starving, 1/2 are barely scraping by, and 1/6 have money to spend, usually from relatives abroad, or small businesses.

Almost all the bars and restaurants in the city are shut down, but a taxi driver took me across Havana one night, to a cluster of beach restaurants. Here was some of the last remaining food, alcohol, electricity, money, and debauchery in Cuba.

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It comes from Orwell, in 1984:

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.”

Super Malo is asking a question: does 2+2=5? Is the Cuban Communist Party right when it blames foreign enemies and internal traitors for everything? When it blames “bad weather” for failed harvests and the lack of food?

In his diary, Winston Smith writes about what telling the truth does to tyrants:

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

I originally had an assignment from Harper’s, but once I cleared my calendar and planned out my trip to Cuba, they canceled. Turns out they had, whoops, “already assigned Cuba to someone else.” In other words, a more favored writer was chosen by a more powerful editor.

I went to Cuba anyway, and I’m glad that I did.

On my return, I fired a proposal at Rolling Stone and somewhat amazingly, they said yes. At 5,000 words, this will be a massive feature article, possibly in the November issue. My intention is to write about Cuba‘s economic and political collapse, corruption, repression, and resistance, diplomacy and graffiti, and the sheer suffering of this moment.

Now all I have to do it write it.

Venezuela was the largest supplier of the oil that ran Cuba’s ancient power plants. By February, President Trump had a full oil embargo in place. He not only turned off the Venezuela supply, but strong-armed Mexico into ending “humanitarian” shipments of free oil, and used the US Navy to turn back a Russian oil tanker.

Electrical blackouts occupy more hours of the day than electrical supply. I was staying in one of the most privileged neighborhoods in Cuba, in the central neighborhood of Vedado, next to hospitals and huge tourist hotels that are given a prioritized electrical grid. I only had one 12-hour blackout, and then daily short ones of 2 to 4 hours.

That was an excellent supply of electricity, perhaps the best in Cuba. In outer parts of Havana, electricity can be as rare as a few hours a day, and reports from secondary cities and the countryside indicate that 20 to 24 hours of the day there is no electricity. This has continued for months. Many provincial Cubans have been reduced to cooking in the street over small wood fires.

In Havana, you can see that many people have switched to battery powered lights, and those who can afford it have a small generator or solar panels, and large lithium wall batteries. All those goods are imported, and only available to those who have relatives abroad.

The farther you range from Central Havana, the darker Cuba gets. But even in my neighborhood, I was warned constantly about a new class of desperate, knife-wielding criminals, and the empty avenues and pitch-black streets were terrifying.

This video shows a stretch of one of the most famous avenues in Havana, Presidentes, lined with elegant buildings, none of which you can see.

In the next issue of this Havana at Midnight series, I’ll explain why virtually everyone I interviewed in Cuba nonetheless supports the oil embargo.

“Don’t give them one gallon of gasoline,” a woman told me.

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I have returned from Cuba with my brain, stomach, and heart scrambled. The overwhelming rush of 12 nights in desperate, darkened Havana occupies me like a fever. I have seen and learned, weeped and raged, and heard things I never expected in Cuba, from passengers in shared taxis to prominent intellectuals in their living rooms. I’ll be digging into this content for a long time to come, but first, I am desperately sorting my impressions and notes, pictures, and videos.

In 35 years of visiting the island, I have not seen it this bad since 1991. All social systems have collapsed, from public health programs to the supply of basic food stuffs. Oil has been cut off for six months, and Havana is a ghost town. Ration stores are empty, I experienced 12 hour blackouts, and in hospitals they have to keep the mattresses locked in a special supply room, so no one steals them. A brutal new reality is shaping Cuba.

Yet a transition already seems underway. Small stores are everywhere. Millions of Cubans have left the island in recent years, and now many of them fly back-and-forth routinely, importing the scarce goods that are keeping Cubans alive. Unlike in 1991, there is actually plenty of food, but it is only available in these expensive private stores and is virtually all imported. Even as most Cubans struggle to survive, quite literally, a new wealth, and even Miami-style glitz is creeping in at the edges.

In the weeks ahead I’ll be unpacking the Cuban crisis and exploring the cruel reality of daily life in Havana. I’ve prepared a series of short videos on transportation, the economy, food, and hospitals. Watch this space for more coverage.

Watch this space for posting, although it won’t be easy while I am there.

This is my 26th visit to Cuba. I first went in 1991. I’ll be looking for sociopolitical cues and economic news. Street gossip and funny bits. Corruption and the secretive elite around the third generation of the Castro clan. There are hints of US diplomacy and smells of rotting garbage, I’ve got intros to 2 philosophers, a fashionista, a graffiti artist, and a popular influencer girl who just got out of jail for questioning the government. There is 1 hour of electricity a day and not much to eat. I’m carrying too much cash.

In other words, just like old times!

See you in 13 days.

I’ve often been fascinated by the psychology of the follower. Authoritarian movements depend on a large pool of willing followers. Psychology is crucial for understanding that dynamic. The love of certainty and the feeling of belonging to an in group like patriots or true citizens is deeply motivating.

But there really is a top level conspiracy, above that, a series of systems and incentives that exploited the followers. Some people just make money off Donald Trump. Think about all the decades of lies, from Obama being a Kenyan, to claiming we didn’t kill 170 girls in an Iranian school.

Fox News made money off Trump. The National Inquirer made money off Trump. Jeff Bezos made money off Trump. Bezos recently said Trump was right about a lot of things, and is “more mature, more disciplined” than in the past.

Everybody who works for him makes money off him, later. All they have to do is pretend the lies are true.

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Citation

Bezos on Trump: https://www.politico.com/news/2026/05/20/jeff-bezos-praises-trump-amid-scrutiny-00929877

Here are some slogans. Tell me which decade of American history they come from: are these from the 1920s, or the 2020s?

• There’s a plot to replace white people with immigrants, and it is funded by wealthy Jews.

• White identity is just about preserving a civilization.

• Too many Blacks are moving into the neighborhood.

• Foreigners bring in diseases.

• They practice bad religions, and eat dogs.

• Immigration causes crime, takes our jobs, and costs us money.

• “The pioneers who built America gave their own children a priority right to it, the control of it and its future.”

• “There is a secret government within the government.”

• Quick, buy this special clothing. But only from our authorized store!

Yup, same same.

In the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan recruited millions of members with these statements. They are all routine again today on the American right, encouraged by Donald Trump, and amplified by people like Tucker Carlson. Remember that Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was arrested at a Klan rally in 1927.

For more than a decade now, we have argued over whether Donald Tump himself is racist (yes, in my opinion), whether his administration and the structures of our society are effectively racist (um, yes), and whether the ascendant form of white Christian nationalism in this country is inherently racist (again, yes).

In other words, why America so Klanny?

You have your cruel xenophobes like Stephen Miller, cynical dividers like Steve Bannon, and amoral profiteers riding racial resentment to position in Washington. Since circa 1970, the G.O.P. has made scaring voters about “those people” into a mainstream tactic. (Before that, it was a Democrat thing.)

We are a Klan Kountry, and always have been.

The original Ku Klux Klan was created in the 1860s, to terrorize freed slaves and preserve the racial hierarchy of the defeated South. A determined north quickly suppressed that version of the Klan, but its values continued to burn for decades, in the forms of segregation, Jim Crow, and thousands of lynchings. For half a century, racialism was so integral to this country that there was effectively no need for a Klan—white legislators did the work for them.

Then something changed—immigration. New types of immigrants were altering the look of the country. Henry James was alienated by the Talmudic beards of Jews on the Lower East Side, whom he feared would dilute the Anglo-Protestant nature of the country. Immigrants from Southern Europe had the wrong religion, in the form of Catholicism. They were diseased and swarthy criminals. Especially the Italians, but even the Irish were portrayed as genetically inferior criminals (read “How the Irish Became White”).

At the dawn of the 20th Century, the wealthiest men in America funded “race science” institutes, and backed eugenics policies like forced sterilization. Madison Grant, a Yale-educated zoologist, wrote a best-selling book, The Passing of the Great Race, which proved the superiority of Nordic whites. Blacks and Asians were inferior, obviously, but even southern Europeans had low, sloping foreheads that made them lazy and oversexed. Hitler called that book “my Bible.”

But the common man needed something more visceral than pseudo-scientific theories about skull shape. The Klan of the night riders rose again.

Timothy Egan, in his book A Fever in the Heartland, describes the deadly mixture of bigotry, status worry, and corruption that drove the swift rise and abrupt collapse of the second Klan in the 1920s. Millions of Americans joined, in thinly-veiled secrecy, and millions more associated with the Klan, which sent 10,000 members to march in Washington in 1928.

The new Klan was more successful in the north than the south, with twice as many members in Illinois as Alabama. In a mixture that Egan calls “half Freud, half history,” it was most popular in small towns, places hot with bigotry and boredom. People flocked to the excitement of Klan rallies, with their invented hoo-ha of mysterious rituals, fabulous titles, robes and hoods, secret handshakes, and euphemistic “illuminations” of crosses. There was a lot of social pressure to join—all the good Christians were in it. The neighbors, the mayor, the sheriff, and your old high school teacher were all Klansmen or sympathizers. Protestant pastors across America endorsed the Klan, converting the status anxiety of whites into a moralistic blood lust. Just as Americans needed to have faith in something greater, Egan notes, they needed to hate something smaller.

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The new Klan was strongest in the midwest, but it flourished in Oregon too, where Black people had been banned at statehood in 1859. By the 1920s, Oregon had more Klansmen per capita than any state but Indiana—15,000 just in Portland, and chapters all over the state. Ten thousand people rallied with the Klan in Astoria in 1924, where the mayor was a sworn member. The governor, Walter Pierce, was also Klan-approved, bragging that “Every one of my ancestors has been a Protestant, for 300 years.” Pierce tried to block land sales to Japanese immigrants and close all Catholic schools. A Portland pastor, Ruben Sawyer, filled Oregon churches with anti-semitic rants. In Portland, six thousand people heard him claim that Jews controlled a secret government within the government, and that “In some parts of America, the kikes are so thick that a white man can hardly find room to walk.”

But the 1920s Klan had an Achilles heel: its moralizing Christianity. The Klan leaders recruited heavily with Christian imagery, and a patriotism soaked in Protestant salvation. And they recruited women in huge numbers by supporting prohibition and claiming to protect their virtue within a bodyguard of Christian manhood.

But what if the Klan leaders turned out to be monsters, instead of Christians? What if they denounced alcohol by day but were drunkards at night? What if they were financially corrupt grifters who scammed millions of dollars from the movement? What if they were really violent abusers of women, and rapists? And yes, even pedophiles?

Sound familiar?

Egan focusses on one 1925 case, where the most popular Klan leader in America was convicted of raping, and then poisoning and killing, a young woman. The spectacular trial in Illinois, with detailed testimony about the drunken antics, yacht parties, and sexual corruption of the supposedly Christian Klansmen, caused a sea change in attitudes.

The same thing happened in Oregon. Out in La Grande, the Klan chapter president raped his assistant, then killed her accidentally while giving her an abortion. The American people saw the Klan for what it was—a cover for lying hypocrites and the alcoholism, financial corruption, and rape they practiced.

In the late ‘20s, membership in the Klan began to collapse, chapters went into bankruptcy, and by the 1930s, scattered chapters existed mainly underground.

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Lesson: huge, angry political movements can be ruled by grievance and insecurity, but their leaders are inevitably con artists. They will fall. Eventually. But also swiftly. And then within a few years, everyone will deny having ever been in the movement.

The bad ideas don’t go away. They can be revived a century later. But the anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-semitic white nationalists will lose, and their anti-American ideas will disgrace them forever.

Martin Luther King Jr. went to Memphis to ask that the striking garbage workers, and other Americans, should have

decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community.

For this, they called him a communist. He was shot the next day.

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Imagine asking for those things now—decency, fairness, affordable housing, health care and education, a fully-funded Social Security system. Jesus would approve that list.

Today they call you a woke socialist, or maybe a trans communist, or an anti-American libtard tyrant, or even a domestic terrorist.

We need, and deserve, universal health care, progressive taxation, affordable higher education, and the “conditions in which families can grow.” It’s not communism. It’s not un-American. It’s a pro-social, practical investment in our entire nation, like what works in every other developed economy in the world.

Instead of $1+ billion a day bombing Iran, we could fund daycare. It’s our right to live better than this.

King in Memphis:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070118131113/http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12380

King not a Communist:

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/communism

Cost per day of Iran war:

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/06/politics/us-war-iran-cost

Note this is a very conservative estimate, early days of the bombing were thought to cost $2 billion each, and many sources now estimate ongoing costs at over $1 billion per day.

Please read it.

I use this chapter to argue that Brazil is one model for a corrupt, politically violent, authoritarian future in the United States. This study of an assassination in Rio is typical of my work, in that I think a foreign example is critical for understanding ourselves. Here I unwind the tangled political and financial interests that produced the tropical Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and which led eventually to the killing of one of his critics.

But it is also typical of my work, in that most Americans don’t really see the USA through a foreign mirror. We are unique, special, individual, the first, the best, right?

No. Instead I argue we are tossed by the same global winds driving Bolsonaro to stage a coup attempt, Duterte in the Philippines to kill his own people, Erdogan in Turkey to nationalize nostalgia and persecute his opponents. Our own militias and secret police are their militias and secret police, even if ours hide behind American flags.

So here’s my question: is this why I have not been able to sell my book to a major publisher? Too much focus on distant case studies? The foreign reporting is interlayed, every other chapter. Most chapters are about the US of A, from Michigan lockdown protests to Idaho militias to the Antifa street battles of Portland.

Is the murder of a Brazilian politician interesting to you? Or extraneous?

A wiser author might cut the foreign chapters, leaving a more USA-centric book for publishers.

But then again, if it doesn’t have foreign chapters, what’s the point of a Patrick Symmes book?

Answer in the comments.

Brazil Chapter

426KB ∙ PDF file

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Two bits of context: readers of the book at this point will already know that the Brazilian milicias described here are private armies, controlled by the wealthy and powerful. I mention “Inglehart timelines,” referencing an earlier chapter about social change occurring over generations.

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My accent is more Ricky Ricardo than Rico Suave. But I tried.

Part 3 of a series on Argentina and Donald Trump’s Latin American power grab.

There is credible evidence that Donald Trump attacked Venezuela because Nicolás Maduro mocked his dance moves. (Citation below). But our toddler in chief probably bought into Argentina for the opposite reason, namely that Javier Milei praised him.

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Milei is the actual conservative slasher of government that debt-king Donald claims to be. The big-haired Argentine president has been in office two years, swinging his famous chainsaw. Milei deregulated, privatized, closed entire bureaucracies, and ended most import licensing, trade barriers, and protectionism. He eliminated rent controls, which almost tripled the number of apartments on the market in Buenos Aires and reduced average rent by 40 percent. His biggest success was simply killing inflation—which he did by slashing government spending by one third.

But this libertarian / conservative fantasy failed to produce much else. There are fiscal positives—a small government surplus, inflation at a tenth of what it was, mild economic growth (4% in 2025). But these have not yet compensated for the cuts to social spending, particularly the loss of government jobs, pensions, and unemployment schemes that were promised over decades. One third of the population is living below their poverty line, which is insulting to such an ambitious and talented nation. A neighbor of mine in Patagonia is a PhD scientist who uses satellite data to improve forest management, directly supporting private enterprise. After decades of public service, Milei cut his paycheck in half. Hospitals are bare. Schools are broke. Unemployment is stubborn.

The failures, in other words, have outnumbered the successes. The economy teetered on the brink of collapse during 2025. The currency started to decline. The government was insolvent, and a massive international debt payment was due. Some prominent Wall Street debt vultures were about to lose a lot of money. By fall of 2025, the think tank experiment on Argentina was failing.

Into this breech stepped Donald Trump—or rather, the American taxpayer. With Milei predicted to suffer in legislative elections, Trump suddenly decided to buy $20 billion worth of Argentine currency, pumping up the peso. (He threw in another $20b in guarantees). This allowed Milei to promise estabilidad—a word almost unknown in Argentina—and earn victory in those elections.

It’s not Deta Force in Venezuela, but Donald interfered in a foreign election, bailed out some private equity guys, and now we own Argentina’s economic fate. We have invested in one of the worst performing economies in the world, when compared to its resources.

Argentina has had 21 different IMF loan packages over the decades. It defaulted on its debt in 1958, 1967, 1975, 1985, 1989, 2001, 2014, and 2018. Longtime ABC journalist Joe Goldman wrote that Argentina’s relationship with the IMF was “a heroin addict’s relation with their street drug dealer.”

Now we are the drug dealer.

Donald is learning all the wrong lessons from Argentina. Unlike Milei, but like the great Argentine strongman Juan Peron, Trump is really a statist. His oil-coup in Venezuela is enough proof of his oligarchic plans, but Trump has also intervened heavily in the American economy. He has effectively confiscated critical industries, demanding a “golden share” of Nippon Steel, locking Westinghouse into subservient deals, buying direct stakes in five rare earth mining businesses, and most famously requiring Intel to surrender a portion of its stock for permission to export semiconductors to China. Trump has also tried to set interest rates and direct the stock market. Today he is brokering deals for Venezuela’s oil.

Is this populism? No. It is cronyism. Getting the state heavily involved in capitalism doesn’t help ordinary people, it provides more opportunities for “rent seeking.” It creates more places for insiders to squeeze the economy, to bring favoritism to bear. Patronage networks (money flowing downward toward ordinary people) are opportunities for control, and inevitably lead to corruption (money flowing upward).

In the 1950s Peron system, the Argentine elite were condemned, but safe, because they had access to that patronage system, through any mixture of competence, connections, and corruption. Peronism was really a top-down, oligarchic socialism. The ordinary workers were herded into vast official trade unions, which belonged to vaster conglomerates of labor, that were all controlled by a single government entity—in other words, captive unions. For their contribution, the laboring classes briefly did well under Peron—free healthcare and education, weekends and pensions, six weeks of maternity leave and affordable child care.

Few Argentines seemed to care how Peron achieved this revolution—if capitalism worked, fine, if not, and everything went belly up, the government was expected to be the employer of last resort. The official working class was kept working, as the elite racked up decades of debt and new bailouts by foreign suckers. The beef stayed cheap, loyalty was rewarded, and Argentina stagnated under corruption and favoritism.

It is a closed mentality, small and un-American. But it is one that fits perfectly into Donald Trump’s politics, ego, and 1950s view of the world. America will be lesser for it.

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Trump on the “violent defiance” of Maduro’s Dancing.

So Here they are, Tom, the ones who built a boat from nothing and made it to Florida. My article in Outside magazine was called “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.” I spent eight days in that little boat, and met some of the bravest and strongest people I’ve ever known.

My article:

https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/water-activities/sailing-haiti-miami/

Part 2 of my Argentina Post, on the economic costs of Trumpism and the doomed idea of tariffs.

I started writing this in my cabin outside a small town in Patagonia. That is the southernmost part of Argentina, and I have been going there for 35 years now.

Argentina is deeply attractive—the quality of life in a warm, educated society, with a culture rich in everything from food to the beloved tango. (Not mention soccer!) A strong populist tradition has driven many admirable advances, from functional hospitals to free university—even for foreigners. Vacation time, retirement pay, worker safety, minimum wages, and organized labor are all part of the national culture, however limited by economic realities.

Limited because this country produces very little.

If you ask ChatGPT to name ten Argentine brands of global importance, it can only come up with four. There are big agricultural exports—I’ll return to soy in a moment—but industry is weak. Tariffs protect the incompetent and crappy. Argentine brands don’t have to compete with international rivals, so they don’t. The quality of domestic products is low—I bought a bucket that broke apart the first time I used it, and then an axe that, on first strike, split itself into pieces, instead of splitting the log I was aiming at. Both were “Industria Argentina.”

You can order from Amazon, Shein, or Temu in Argentina—but only 12 times a year, total, and strictly enforced. Tariffs, import fees, fees on the fees, and special taxes routinely double or even triple the cost of items, which can take months to clear customs.

Tariffs are one reason the Argentine economy constantly underperforms. Another is the “strong money” idea. This is the popular delusion that you are better off when your currency sounds stronger than other currencies. A big, expensive peso makes Argentines feel rich, and it is said that elections in Argentina are won by a “weak dollar” policy.

But this has always suffocated Argentina. When I first came here in 1990, the peso was pegged to the dollar at 1:1, making the country insufferably expensive for a foreigner, but also stagnant in Buenos Aires and nearly somnolent in the countryside. Unemployment in the 1990s was routinely higher than today. The country’s agricultural products were too expensive for international markets, and its industrial products were as outdated and obsolete as the Ford Falcons still seen everywhere in the streets. Argentina never stopped the policies that the Asian Tigers or America left behind long ago.

A currency devaluation in 2002 reversed the situation. Amid a collapsing economy and mass unemployment and discontent, the agricultural sector soared on new sales abroad. The downsides were bitter for several years, but the economy began to recover with a new advantage: well educated people working at good prices. The film industry took off—Buenos Aires was cheap, and full of skilled artists. The educated population attracted publishing, translation and call center work. Tourism exploded, flowing into every corner of the country and becoming a serious driver of economic growth for the next twenty years. Just five years after the devaluation, the Economist referred to a “new Golden Age” in Argentina. Real estate took off, partly as a hedge against terrible inflation. Much of Buenos Aires was rebuilt or spruced up. The avenues that were empty in 1990 are thronging today.

Guess who took exactly the wrong idea from this result?

Donny, that’s who.

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Next: Part 3, Trump Sends Cash, Not Commandoes

Immigration was always the issue. “Build the Wall” was always going to require “Subdue Minneapolis.” It is the logic of survival. An autocrat must always find new enemies. The foreigners may be enough to start, but eventually, internal enemies must be found.

Listen to the crowd, its enthusiasm, its roar, its individual voices egging him on for more. And remember, this video was released not by his enemies, but by Trump himself.

Build the Wall Chant/It’s Vital

It’s time to ask the important question, “WHY ARGENTINA SUCK SO BAD?”

Here’s the 1st of a 3-part answer, looking at tariffs and the Latin American interventions of Donaldo Trump.

Part 1: The Tariffs Problem

Argentina is one of my great obsessions in life. It’s a tough place to live, but as a visitor I always appreciated the rich culture, the high level of education, and the common history with the United States. That commonality ranges from the waves of European immigration that shaped Buenos Aires as much as New York, to the great vistas of Patagonia that reminded me so much of our American West.

Like America, Argentina had massive territory, excellent river transport, mineral-rich mountains in the west, huge plains of deep topsoil perfect for wheat and cattle, a culture of cowboys, and a position of strategic safety behind oceans that also gave cheap access to global markets. Like us, they had a war of independence against European masters, and a continent of rich opportunity. Historians have long studied those similarities, because the end result has been so different.

So why does being Argentine suck so bad?

The joke answer, as Argentines tell it: God is creating the earth, and when he gets to Argentina he lays out the farmland, the minerals, the rivers, the ocean, the forests, and he’s piling oil, gold, and silver onto it on when the Angel Gabriel interrupts. “Whoa, there, God,” Gabriel says. “Hold on. You are giving them too much.”

God replies, “Wait till you see the people.”

A genuine answer: the original sin of Argentina has always been concentration of wealth. Unlike the USA, with its Jeffersonian dream of yeoman farmers and small scale land grabs, Argentina’s founders kept all the land for themselves. In the agricultural economy of the 19th Century, generals and aristocrats received title to estancias the size of provinces, while ordinary people got little or no land. By 1914, average farm size in the fertile Argentine pampas was twice that of our extended Midwest. In the 1940s, the largest farm in America, the King Ranch of Texas, was half the size of the largest farm in Argentina.

And also: tariffs. Through the 20th Century, Argentina tried to wall itself off from the word, choosing preservation over change and adaptation. The country pursued two related strategies: tariffs, to keep out foreign competition, and quotas and cheap industrial loans to keep Argentina producing.

Argentina started well, with big agricultural revenues from exporting beef, wheat, and eventually soy. Thomas Puey, on his Substack Uncharted Territories (links below), notes that the Asian Tigers also relied on agriculture, at first. At the end of WWII, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and other countries were 1/2 to 1/4 as rich as Argentina. But unlike Argentina, they aggressively redistributed farmland, creating many small owners with a direct incentive to increase production. And once domestic food needs were met, those governments switched to developing industry. Like Argentina, they used subsidies, tariffs, and cheap loans to grow infant companies. But in Asia, this support was temporary, with industries that couldn’t compete allowed to die. The result was rapid growth in profitable enterprises, rising living standards, and national economies that today far surpass Argentina.

Everyone uses these tools, really—the US had high tariffs in the agricultural 19th Century, and in the 1930s used mass employment strategies and industrial subsidies. We still intervene with bailouts to protect favored industries, but also allow the creative destruction of capitalism to consume the weak.

Argentina never really quit the old strategy of protectionism, subsidies, and tariffs, which were a major fixture of the economy across the 20th Century, and still are in some forms. Critically, farmland was never redistributed. Even a 1950s “populist” like Juan Peron actually increased land concentration. And booming exports—beef in the 1950s, soy today—were confiscated with periodic special taxes, at rates that made it pointless to expand, invest, or improve production. Tax breaks and government loans for favored industries became a patronage system that encouraged corruption. State-owned companies with special subsidies and privileged exchange rates prevented fair competition. There was public pushback, but mostly asking for increased subsidies for urban workers.

This was the Argentina I first arrived in, in 1990.

Next: Part 2, 35 Years of Social Strength & Fiscal Failure, Seen From a Cabin.

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Citations:

See Puey’s history of the nation and its resources below.

Below that, he “gives good chart” on the striking economic failures of a tariff regime that creates corruption and favoritism.

Uncharted Territories

Argentina Could Be a Superpower

Encuentra este artículo en español debajo del inglés…

Read more

a year ago · 378 likes · 104 comments · Tomas Pueyo

Uncharted Territories

Why Is Argentina Poor?

Encuentra este artículo en español debajo del inglés…

Read more

10 months ago · 168 likes · 49 comments

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As usual for Outside magazine, I wrote about politics and environmental issues, and they filed it under Adventure Travel. Maybe it should be called misadventure travel. I interviewed the regime’s enforcers, or colectivos, and probed the oil industry for leaks. I went to pro-government rallies and into desperate slums where I had no business.

Venezuela is rich in natural wonders, but what I actually got was a pistol at midnight in Maracaibo. I still see that gun all these years later.

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The article:

https://www.outsideonline.com/adventure-travel/destinations/south-america/hugos-world/

The Outside podcast about my article, and a slide show:

Hugo’s World

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