You're making up that you'd get thrown in prison for criticism, and what does it mean that "not everyone is on an equal footing"? Surely universal healthcare, free education to the highest level, state-subsidized housing and food put a lot more equal footing than comparable Caribbean countries such as Haiti or Dominican Republic
It kinda is, it just looks less violent. War kills about 100k people yearly, US + EU economic sanctions murder half a million every single year for the past 50+ years.
Soviets didn't have a "famine in Ukraine", they had a famine in the Soviet Union caused by the need for extremely rapid industrialization started in 1929. If it hadn't been for the rapid industrialization (which hinged on moving field laborers to factories in cities and was funded with the only product they could export: grain), the soviets would have lost WW2 and tens of millions more of people would have died.
The famine disproportionately affected Ukraine (and other agriculturally strong places in southern Russia and Kazakhstan), but the industrialization also disproportionately benefitted Ukrainians by liberating them from Nazism and saving tens of millions of their lives from Nazi extermination.
If you want some good insight on the soviet famine of the early thirties, I suggest you read Robert B. Allen's "Farm to Factory", it makes a very good economic analysis of it.
And you'd receive a universal and resounding "no". Cuba is its own independent country, with its culture and its ideals, much better than the USA. If you were a "super perfect" US president you'd be better off remodeling the USA to be more akin to Cuba lmao
The US and EU are killing Iranian citizens by the hundreds of thousands with the extreme sanctions the country is subjected to. The protests are happening primarily because of the currency devaluating due to sanctions.
Discussing the morality or immorality of the Iranian regime under such conditions and weeks before a US armed strike on Iran amounts to atrocity propaganda, and it's exclusively done to justify military invasion to progressives (probably like you). I know that your heart is in the right place by arguing against the Iranian regime, but doing it now amounts to running Zionist and western imperialist propaganda.
If you care about Iranians, you should focus on their most immediate and harmful threat: the one caused by the European and American regimes, under which you likely are living. Fight against the extreme sanctions murdering Iranians through lack of access to medicine and basic goods, and fight against the military invasion that threatens to turn Iran into another failed state as it happened in Iraq, Libya or Syria.
If one death is too much, march for the abolition of economic sanctions by Europe and the USA, they literally murder half a million people per year. Per The Lancet medical journal:
In their panel analysis, Francisco Rodríguez and colleagues once again demonstrate that sanctions do kill: economic sanctions imposed by the USA or the EU were associated with 564 258 deaths (95% CI 367 838–760 677) annually from 1971 to 2021, higher than the annual number of battle-related casualties (106 000 deaths).
In the 50 years of the study, that amounts to above 25 million murders worldwide. I strongly urge you to raise awareness about this.
I was responding to Zionist propaganda, you're the one who decided to jump in and take the bullet. Ask yourself why you do this, and if you doubt information, maybe consider looking it up yourself, search engines are mostly free. Instead of publicly asking "how could we know", you could do that yourself and get informed.
Who said I trust the Iranian government? It's simply obvious that Israel-associated media inflates the figures. Parroting Israeli propaganda uncritically is unwise.
If you gave a single fuck about Iranians, you'd know that the better and newer estimates hover around the thousands and not tens of thousands. For reference, estimates of dead Palestinians since Oct 7th due to violence and privation of food, water, energy and medicine, range in the half million.
How many tens of thousands of Iranians have been murdered by US+EU sanctions knowing that said sanctions murder half a million people worldwide EVERY YEAR?
That should be done with internal propaganda, Cuba will never join the US.