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Originally Posted by aberkok
One of the main tenets of socialism is the alleviation of human suffering. This should not be ignored.
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Thank you and indeed your point can not be ignored.
From a US-capitalist/individualist perspective, such offers of aid make no sense without attempting to decipher what the offering nation-state has to gain by making them. That is, one
owns an asset and will utilize it (or invest it, in capitalist terms; in fact, one person even referred to it as "political
capital") to purchase something else. Without its purchasing power, aid offers make no sense to the capitalist. To the capitliast, human nature is fundamentally evil (before arguing that point read back through the numerous threads regarding the fact that communism looks good on paper but doesn't take into account human nature. If those people don't believe human nature is evil, then substitute whatever term they use to conceive of human nature in its place) and only an objective hand, the free market, can keep human interactions in check. Relinquishment of limited resources without compensation doesn't make sense within this paradigm.
To the communist, however, assets are not owned by individuals. To the extent that they are owned by anyone, ownership rests in the collective and
must be utilized for the benefit of the community. There is no concept of just compensation for the expenditure of an asset since the beneficiary already possesses a right to the asset. To a communist, it wouldn't be right to withhold aid from a suffering person perceived to be within the community. To such a person, human behavior is fundamentally good but the market corrrupts human interactions rather than regulating them.
I argue it doesn't make much sense to apply capitalist concepts and motivations to a communist nation-state or its leader. One could, however, argue that Castro is simply using communism as a tool to maintain control over a population. People have argued that in the past so I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't implicit in some of these statements. But that's really the only way one can logically argue that aid offers from communist nation-states are motivated by a capitalist rationale. So if you want to state the assumptions you make about human interaction at the offset, we could then see where you are coming from. But simply stating as a truism that people don't as a general rule offer something for nothing doesn't even begin to support your contention in this context, because that only violates the tenets of capitalism except these people aren't operating within your paradigm.
In order to ascertain one's motives for actions you have to understand where they come from--what they fundamentally believe in. So far these comments that aid offers are Machiavellian are presented from within a capitalist frame of reference so I have to question how closely you've approximated a communist's motive for making an offer of human aid.