Have you got a map handy, Old Guy? For any country with such a huge market of rich suckers so near and not be allowed to trade with it is a big problem. In spite of this and all the money the US Government has spent on trying to overthrow the Cuban Government, nothing of the sort has happened. Oh and part of that money I mentioned is used to convince the gullible that the Cuban system is unfair (presumably because it doesn't allow Corporate America to exploit them).

Nobody said that Cuba is a utopia, it's just a bit more egalitarian than most. For a country that is not particularly rich in natural resources, it's not doing too bad in world terms. And Utopia was no utopia anyway since it accepted slavery.

Cuba would of course be richer if it didn't have to spend a large part of its GNP on armed forces to defend itself from a large aggressive country to the North with a track record of invading neutral counties.

You could stop reading those newspapers and listening to those TV news reports if you want to have a balanced view of what's going on in the world.

North Korea is not the subject of this thread. Is changing the subject an admission of something on your part?