Respectfully, you’re conflating UBI with communism. Cuba is irrelevant. UBI does not make us Cuba. No country has ever had a UBI, so there is no direct comparison that can be made, and UBI is most definitely not communism.
Most communist experiments, moreover, weren’t really communism. They were dictatorships. Not that I’m a communist. I think any pure doctrine is naive. Pure capitalism is wide open for corruption and the over-leveraging of power, and eventually leads to one corporation owning everything and everybody. Pure socialism and communism lack the incentives I’d like to see in society, and assume too much of the cooperative natures of human beings, in my opinion.
Every society in history, including ours, has been a blend of isms. It must always be this way, taken on a case by case basis, constantly reassessed and re-optimized as the nature of markets, resources, and technology evolve. In today’s America, the corporate world is capitalist and the safety regulations placed on it is socialist. The cars are capitalist and the roads are socialist.
I’m an engineer by education. When you design any product or system, there will always be kinks to work out. When one part fails, you don’t throw out the whole system and try and do the opposite. A sustainable American society moving forward, to me, looks like capitalistic structures wherever we want to incentivize innovation and can protect and foster competition, and socialistic policies wherever we want to protect human rights from the potential abuses that arise from capitalism’s singular focus on profits. I want to both grow prosperity and bring everyone along.
UBI, to me, is a tweak on capitalism that strengthens it and allows it to perpetuate. It’s capitalism that doesn’t start at zero for anyone. It’s a slice of buying power for every citizen to make sure our economy truly is a free market. It’s money for passing “Go” in Monopoly, which is what allows that game to continue playing. Without UBI, capitalism will continue to cannibalize itself, funneling the productivity of society more and more to the powerful few until we eventually get either revolution or outright slavery.