Cuba - given its position, climate, etc - should be absolutely thriving. What you're seeing there is a collapse, it has just reached its bottom (and there's no crazy politician who wants to build a huge ass rocket - yet).
The same argument could be applied to all of my examples, I think they all have people who argue that their current states are worse than they could be. That's why I defined "working" as "functioning" not "as good as it could be," or even "well-managed."
In a world with (and a history of) many countries full of mass starvation and homelessness, my definition of functioning is anything above mass starvation and homelessness.
No, that's absolutely incomparable. Cuba is a shithole from hell comparable only to places such as North Korea, Bolivia or Venezuela (coincidentally also socialist states, huh), none of the other places are.
The rest of the world doesn't have such problem, I wonder why... Might have something to do with the crazy socialist politicians putting Soviet nukes there, perhaps?
I didn’t say it wasn’t vindicated in doing so, but you ain’t measuring two programs relative performance by running one on a beefy machine and the other on an emulator either.
Just don’t conclude more from it than you can.
But this stuff doesn't really happen in free democracies, does it? We're comparing socialism to other systems and this is a feature of socialism (as proven by the other crazy socialist states, it's not just Cuba) - that makes it a part of the equation.