As all good true believers know, the only reason that Socialism has thus far always failed in practice is that real Socialism has never yet been implemented. And thus we have my home town of New York, until now the world capital of capitalism, about to put into office a self-proclaimed Socialist, or maybe Communist, to give Socialism just one more shot.

How could large numbers of seemingly intelligent people believe that this could work? One reason is a remarkable lack of news coverage of the economic status and trajectory of the places that avowedly practice Socialism. My mission here at Manhattan Contrarian is to fix that.

Consider Bolivia.

Less than three weeks ago, on October 10, I had a post about Cuba with the headline “What The Hell Is Going On In Cuba?”

The post noted that it is difficult to get real information from Cuba, and that there had recently been almost total silence about that island from the mainstream media. But if one researched some out-of-the-way sources, it turned out that there is some sort of sudden economic collapse going on there.

Besides economic production declining significantly, and pervasive shortages of basic goods, there was also information from a source in Spain (El Pais) that Cuba’s population had suddenly dropped by close to 20% over just the past two to three years. Moreover, the 20% who had departed were not randomly distributed, but rather were concentrated among those in their prime working years, meaning that Cuba had suddenly lost around a third of its working age population.

In the short period since that post, the collapse has accelerated.

Have you seen any economic news coming out of Cuba recently? With barely a couple of exceptions, if you read the U.S. Corporate Media, likely you have not.

Searching for the most recent articles on Cuba’s economy from mainstream sources just now, I find nothing in the Washington Post about Cuba’s economy since May 2022; nothing from the New York Times since a piece in April rehashing the usual litany of Cuba’s long-known economic failures; silence at CBS since a piece in April quoting a Cuban official as “blam[ing] the U.S. for exodus of migrants, economic issues”; nothing from CNN since a March article discussing “power cuts and food shortages.” And so forth. OK, Cuba’s economy has performed poorly for decades, ever since Castro’s revolution 65 years ago. We already knew that. But are there any important new developments we should know about?

I last wrote about the economic situation in Cuba about a month ago. The news I could find then already made the World Bank “data” appear ridiculous.

Since then, more facts have dribbled out to make Cuba look like a full-on disaster.