[sangnoir]

Why are you talking in hypotheticals when Mandela became president of South Africa in 1994?

Your false dichotomy is empirically false because apartheid was ended without creating a 'communist paradise'.

Even if we were to accept your limited worldview/binary choices; it is not clear how a state with codified racism (apartheid) is superior to an egalitarian communist one.

[random778]

How do you think things would have played out had he become president 10 years earlier, 5 years before the revolutions of 1989?

[_yosefk]

An egalitarian communist state has never existed, it's always a state where the ruling party does as it pleases while the majority has no rights whatsoever. (Whether this is superior or inferior to an apartheid state is a tough question.)

[Synaesthesia]

That's not true, Cuba is egalitarian, to a far greater degree than the Soviet Union was. Revolutionary Spain was very egalitarian. The Soviet Union can't really be called socialist, it was more of a totalitarian dictatorship.

[_yosefk]

Grandparent said "communist", not socialist, so while many people argue about the difference it doesn't seem relevant here.

Revolutionary Spain did not survive long enough to discuss IMO.

Cuba... egalitarian in what way? Is there anything the government does that the citizens can legally undo without overthrowing it? (Note that a benevolent dictatorship can exist, in theory, and among other things it can be a communist - or a racist - dictatorship; nothing prevents from the dictator to grant freedoms to the subjects, the point is that nothing prevents him from taking them away, either. If you don't refer to rights in the sense of things the government cannot prevent you from doing but instead refer to "egalitarian" in some sense of Cuban citizens living substantially different lives than Soviet citizens, I'd be curious to hear what exactly you mean.)