Vox-tastic! Cuba retains Castro's 'genuinely impressive social safety net' (oh, there's also 'vicious suppression')

Doug P. | 4:03 PM on November 26, 2016

The Voxxy hot takes were bound to be plentiful after the death of Fidel Castro was announced. Matt Yglesias has already offered his two cents about Castro’s “domestic record,” and the WSJ’s James Taranto spotted that being expanded upon at Vox:

Vox on Cuba: "It retains a genuinely impressive social safety net." https://t.co/QMnQTVDFGC

— James Taranto (@jamestaranto) November 26, 2016

How’s this for “you’ve got to take the bad with the good” in just a couple sentences:

It retains a genuinely impressive social safety net, with universal health coverage of a kind that’s remarkable in a middle-income Latin American country. And it retains classic Eastern Bloc-style surveillance, jailing of dissidents, and vicious suppression of dissent.

Apparently the “impressive social safety net” hasn’t been enough to keep countless people from risking their lives to escape Castro’s Cuba.