The Lure of Comrade Mamdani

He says he respects differences. His radical utterances indicate otherwise.

By Mary Anastasia O’Grady. Excerpt:

"Before Castro’s communist revolution, Cuba had the fifth-highest per capita income in the Western Hemisphere, where it ranked third in life expectancy. Its literacy rate of 76% was the fourth highest in Latin America.

In the 1950s, according to a 2005 PBS documentary, “Cuba ranked 11th in the world in the number of doctors per capita. Many private clinics and hospitals provided services for the poor. Cuba’s income distribution compared favorably with that of other Latin American societies.”

Today the island has dire shortages of food, medicine, housing and doctors, crumbling hospitals, recurring blackouts and a shrinking population.

In the 1920s Argentina was one of the world’s top 10 economies. The Great Depression of the 1930s destabilized Argentina’s democracy, and the country began to turn away from market economics. Perón was a fascist demagogue who undermined republican ideals in the name of the people. He died in 1974, but repeated bouts of peronismo, during military and civilian governments, have long haunted the country. By 2023 the breadbasket of South America was a basket case. People were eating out of trash bins on the streets of Buenos Aires, a once-glorious city."