Thanks for responding @yecier, I really appreciate it :=) No offense intended, but yours is the typical response given by almost all Cubans whose families have fled the revolution. I'm originally from Latin America myself (Suriname), and my sister and I are now residents of The Netherlands; my sister has just returned from a month's vacation in your beautiful country of origin, and knowing of this typical response, she made it a point to ask the people and workers she met there about their opinion on Cuban communism. The typical answer you get there goes something like this: yes, life is hard, yes the government takes almost all earnings (I've heard some 90 percent in taxes, comparable to the rate in America in the 1950's, 60's and 70's, something people tend to forget), but they all know a lot of the difficulties are caused by the decades long sanctions, and finally they're all damned proud of what they've been able to accomplish as a collective, as a people, like having the best level of literacy, like the fact that their healthcare and medical systems make America's look like total shit and so on...

You hear the same from citizens from the former Soviet Union after the capitalist oligarchs have taken over their countries; they wish they could go back to communism, when everything was fair and everyone had a chance to get a good education and healthcare. The joke that went viral there some decades ago goes like this: "what did capitalism achieve in few years that communism wasn't able to achieve in many decades? Answer: "Make communism look good."

Now, don't get me wrong here: I don't know what system will turn out to be "the best", but I do know it won't be the ideologically "pure" forms we learn about in theory-books. What I also know however, and this is just a matter of empiricism, is that capitalism is the worse and most unfair, least egalitarian and unjust system of the bunch. We have democracy in theory alone; in practice all real power resides with the people who've accumulated insane levels of material wealth, made possible by the capitalist ideology (yes, it's an ideology). Socialism and communism are its antidote in the sense that they promote democracy in the material sense, with democratic control over the means of production, of capital.

That's my two cents; spend them as you see fit ;-)