Cuba Calculates Cost of 54yr US Embargo At $1.1 Trillion 540
First time accepted submitter ltorvalds11 writes Cuba says its economy is suffering a "systematic worsening" due to a US embargo, the consequences of which Havana places at $1.1 trillion since Washington imposed the sanctions in 1960, taking into account the depreciation of the dollar against gold. "There is not, and there has not been in the world, such a terrorizing and vile violation of human rights of an entire people than the blockade that the US government has been leading against Cuba for 55 years," Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Abelardo Moreno told reporters. He also blamed the embargo for the difficulties in accessing internet on the island, saying that the United States creates an obstacle for companies providing broadband services in Cuba. Additionally, he said that the area is one of the "most sensitive" to the embargo, with economic losses estimated at $34.2 million. It is also the sector that has fallen "victim of all kinds of attacks" by the US, as violations of the Cuban radio or electronic space "promote destabilization" of Cuban society, the report notes. The damage to Cuban foreign trade between April 2013 and June 2014 amounted to $3.9 billion, the report said. Without the embargo, Cuba could have earned $205.8 million selling products such as rum and cigars to US consumers. Barack Obama last week signed the one-year extension of the embargo on Cuba, based on the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, created to restrict trade with countries hostile to the U.S..
RT.com? (Score:3, Insightful)
Russian propaganda. These are the same idiots who claimed Russia wasn't ever invading Ukraine.
Re:RT.com? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, RT is about as reliable as Fox News. If you assume that everything said is complete lies and the few things that are true are extremely skewed then you are pretty close to the truth.
With that said, the US embargo against Cuba has not exactly been beneficial to either of the nations. All this time since the cold war could have been spent bringing Cuba closer to the US. Just opening up a bit with regards to trading would have done a lot.
A better Cuban economy would benefit the US (How about cheap manufacturing on Cuba instead of in China?) and having a trading partner that close instead of a potential enemy there is a pretty nice deal.
In my opinion the stance US has towards Cuba is pretty retarded.
Re:RT.com? (Score:4, Informative)
RT is directly controlled by the Russian govern.. well, Putin. I would say that makes Fox News slightly more trustworthy.
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Fox News is controlled by Rupert Murdoch, I haven't decided who is worse yet.
Re:RT.com? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you will find that far fewer Ukrainians have died because of Rupert Murcoch.
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Thankfully Murdoch would rather be the power behind the throne instead, because I'd rather not give him the chance to be in charge of a government.
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But far more Iraqi's did.
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RT is directly controlled by the Russian govern.. well, Putin. I would say that makes Fox News slightly more trustworthy.
In US, Fox News controls the government.
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The BBC is a good bet. The international site of CNN is fairly solid. And actually, MSNBC - while they're far more left-leaning than Fox - would be considered neutral by most of the rest of the West and fair far better on fact checking than you might expect. The "liberal media" generally leans right (as happens when consolidation allows it to be mostly owned by a few billionaires), so it ends up looking far more "biased" than it actually is.
Re:RT.com? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this +5? Yes, RT.com frequently publishes propaganda, but this story is available on any number of alternative news sites, and is based entirely on a report from the Cuban government itself. Unless you are suggesting RT.com has made the Cuban government write & publish this report, your comment is a fine example of an "ad hominem", and should be ignored as such.
Re:RT.com? (Score:4, Insightful)
The U.S. embargo against Cuba is Russian propaganda??
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Oh Jesus, here we go with the Communist boogieman. No junior, you were lied to, yes there were excesses in some places at certain times. Which surprise, surprise also describes the same time period in the West rather well. So no, no great Satan in evidence here, just an alternative social order with both good points and bad.
Source: Born there, came to Canada when I was in my teens. There is less difference than most people in the west think.
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Well I was born there as welll and I got quite the opposite picture.
Possibly your parents were communist activists.
What I remember are long lines for toilet paper, shampoo and shoes.
People imprisoned and killed on the streets. My Mom earning $3 per month.
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An embargo is usually in place to encourage a country to change a practice hostile to the US. When the leadership changes positions and is no longer hostile to the US, the embargo is lifted, unless things don't change.
This started about the time of the Cuban Missle Crisis. Cuba has maintained unfriendly to the US ties. This has not changed. Thus the embargo status has remained. Lifing the embargo for Cuba to rebuild missle bases aimed at the US is not going to happen. They are too close to defend again
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In 2009 Obama made massive changes to our policy losing restrictions. He reached out. A response thanking Obama, arguing for better relations and backing Obama in international forms would have worked. Cuba could have given Obama a diplomatic win and won an end to the poor relationship with the USA.
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Junior? I was born before JFK was assassinated & was an adult in Berlin days after the wall fell, bucko.
So, the men & women I met from a number of different countries who described in detail their experiences of Communist rule that I briefly relayed were all liars.
Source: Russians, Ex-eastern Germans, Cubans, Chinese, Romanians, Nicaraguans, Vietnamese. Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians.
No, we should all believe a sniveling coward without the courage to post in his own name that claims that all the per
Re: RT.com? (Score:5, Funny)
My conclusion is that Canada sucks as bad as the USSR.
Its a close call. Invading the Ukraine vs those stupid "Mountie" uniforms.
Re:RT.com? (Score:5, Insightful)
>Communists in power don't force people to drink vodka & eat borscht you sniveling coward, they confiscate all your belongings, outaw dissent & condemn people to hard prison or insane asylums without fair trials.
No... that's what TYRANTS in power do. Just because we've had a lot of communist tyrants does not mean communism REQUIRES Tyrants (it doesn't) or that Tyrants are always communist (they aren't - in fact three of the worst tyrants of the 20th century were not - two were fascists [a form of capitalism] and one was a free market fundamentalist: Pinochet !)
There are variations of communist philosophy that are forms of anarchism - such as Anton Pannekoek's "Council Communism", Robert Hahnel's Parecon, Noam Chomsky's brand of Anarcho-syndicalism or the kind of libertarian socialism practised in Andalusia (Southern Spain) during the first 20 years of the last century - and would probably still be there if the scale of the world wars hadn''t overwhelmed them and gotten all of Spain under a different tyrant (Franco) with yet another economic philosophy that was fairly unique (close enough to capitalism for Spain not to be targeted during the cold war, close enough to communism for the Russians not to target them either - somewhat like facism but not enough for either side to care).
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Re:RT.com? (Score:4, Interesting)
What country sized example of long term communist rule which doesn't turn into fascism or dictatorships are you referring to? I didn't see any. Note that I do not lump socialism in with communism.
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To be fair, all communism so far has been dictatorships from the beginning. Since communism is an economic system, there is no reason they have to be, however. A communist-republic is perfectly feasible. Just saying they don't turn into dictatorships, they already are.
Fascism I wouldn't say, as it ties too much into expansionism and racial conflict rather than social conflict, though it seems Putin is having a go at part of Fascist doctrine (the belief that strong countries have a right to claim ter
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However, I've seen what look like reasonably, happy, free, advanced countries under democracy and capitalism with some degree of socialist influence. Finding examples of such countries under any other system is a lot harder. I'm not saying a communist democracy is impossible, I'm saying that it seems unlikely and I haven't seen one on any significant scale. There's lots of really neat ideas for running countries and economies, and not all of them work. I classify communism as a really neat idea (I figu
Re: RT.com? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. Full blown communism requires tyrants. How else are you going to confiscate all the private property, and constantly suppress voluntary economic interactions?
Re: RT.com? (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like economic sanctions that prevent me from buying Cuban cigars in a voluntary economic transaction?
*see what I did there?* :)
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How have people voted this up? I'm not a political scholar, but the goals of communism are generally diametrically opposed to rule by a dictator.
Communism works on small scales. Family scales, generally. I'd give my sister money if she needed it. She'd give me something that I needed. We don't have an economic transaction--we do things based on our mutual benefit. We share because we know that in the future, it'll probably come out even.
It seems to me that real communism wouldn't require anyone to dictate a
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I agree that small scale communism has it's merits (kibbutzim being a good example where it works very well), but county size communism has failed every time, transforming itself over time into what should more properly be called fascism (rule by a small cadre) in many cases the boiling itself down to rule by tyrants. Thus IMO in the country sized communist systems, you're trying to draw a line where is no real difference.
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The problem with communism in practice is that there is no real separation of powers (deemed unnecessary by communists, since they have truth and justice on their side), so the revolution is invariably hijacked by power hungry opportunists - see Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. Remarkably (or perhaps not, as communism is a kind of ersatz religion), theocracies suffer from the exact same problem. The U.S. seem determined to show that Western democracies can play this game too once they decide expediency trumps con
Re:RT.com? (Score:5, Interesting)
Repeating a lie often enough does not make it true. [reason.com]
Pinochet was resistant to free market, through most of 1974 his own style of handling economic problems left in the wake of Allende meant putting the army in charge of alleviating penuries through requisitions, rationning and distribution, and it was a complete failure. Chile kept printing money just like under Allende, leading to 300% inflation in 1974 and 1975.
If Pinochet was, as you put it, a "free-market fundamentalist", then explain why did oil and copper industries remain state-owned all through his regime, and why did the fishing and forestry industries remain syndicate-run (CORFO) ? Why did he keep in place many programs of subsidies ? Why did he have several failing corporations bailed out (like the Osorno bank) ? Why did his constitution of 1980 keep copper resources as irrevocably public property ? Why was the Peso pegged to the USD, chinese-style, in the early 80s (leading to a monetary crisis and recession), instead of maintaining a free-floating exchange rate like Friedman advocated in his speeches and books ?
Oh, right: that's because Pinochet was NOT a free-market advocate. He was not even right-wing either - his wife was a senator in the Radical Party, an ally of Allende's Unidad Popular, and he was a close collaborator of Allende until the coup d'état. Instead, his pragmatism at least let him put people who mostly were free-market enthusiasts in charge of some of his government's economic policies. He, himself, had no such convictions, he was just an autoritarian voluntarist. But I guess that makes for an insufficiently romantic narrative to convince you.
Sergio de Castro Spikula was one such free-market enthusiast in Pinochet's government, and he had to bitterly fight (there even was one incident with a gun) with other members, like General Gustavo Leigh, Admiral José Toribio (president of the government's economic committee), or Raul Saez (the man who was responsible for planning the economy of Chile in the Junta), in order to get the reforms done.
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I'm pretty sure communism has manifested without tyranny. The issue is that human nature in practice doesn't let it scale to notable levels. Small communities being communist without tyranny happens ever so often. When you have the human connection face to face and there is not really any practical opportunity for some subset of the community to be overwhelmingly better off than the rest even if they had capitalism or tried, communism can work. However once one man is far enough from others to be somewh
Re:RT.com? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your second sentence already shows that you don't know what you are talking about. Socialism is when the workers own the means of production. The rest of your rant just makes it even more clear.
Re:RT.com? (Score:5, Informative)
Please. Fascism is NOT a form of socialism. It's incompatible with marxist doctrine, through and through. Rather it's the fabled "third way" that is neither free-market nor communism [liberty.me]. People who conflate fascism with socialism are just as wrong as those who conflate it with capitalism.
Re:RT.com? (Score:4, Insightful)
ISTM that ALL the prisoners in Gitmo are political prisoners. Clearly the ones held without trial are such. Possibly in some cases there are valid reasons, but that has not be publicly proven, so the defalut position is that they are innocent. I feel that I'm understating the case, but don't know how to properly put it more strongly. Let me try this....
If they have committed a crime, they should be brought to trial. If they have not committed a crime, they should never have been held captive.
Ignorance is self-righteous posturing (Score:5, Insightful)
"There is not, and there has not been in the world, such a terrorizing and vile violation of human rights of an entire people than the blockade that the US government has been leading against Cuba for 55 years,"
Ha ha ha ha! Funny guy. He needs to read a history book - or even a current weekly magazine.
Abretardo Morono - pushing the limits of ignorant hyperbole!
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When it comes to 'terrorizing and vile violations of human rights', though, that barely registers. Did this guy sleep through the entire 20th century?
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$20bn against $70bn does sound super effective. Now adjust for inflation over 55 years and I bet this past years "damages" were well over $20bn.
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I am genuinely baffled at how the embargo is supposed to support US policy interests(either idealistic, cynical, or both); but alleged damages that high do seem to suggest that the "It's pointless, they'll just trade with the EU and BRIC and things" theory is limited at best. I honestly would have expected a smaller effect myself. I just can't fathom why anyone thinks it's a worthwhile plan.
At this point the embargo is there solely for the "I'm right as long as I don't admit I was wrong" effect. In that regard, it is highly effective. The other possible explanation is to serve as a warning to others (i.e. nations with resources we might actually want, such as Bolivia, Venezuela, etc) such that they know any further steps toward socialism would lead to economic disaster even worse that what they have already endured.
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I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
The righteous communists have a need to trade with the capitalist imperialists? Won't the ghost of Stalin provide for all?
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The righteous communists have a need to trade with the capitalist imperialists? Won't the ghost of Stalin provide for all?
Only once the whole world is communist. In the mean time...
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
If Cuba had oil . . . the embargo would be over really fast.
Cuban cigar smokers in the US don't have a PAC to push through changes. They're just not a big enough special interest group.
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Cuban cigar smokers in the US don't have a PAC to push through changes. They're just not a big enough special interest group.
Rich people can get Cuban cigars without any problem whatsoever, embargo or not. Hell, JFK smoked Havanas during the Cuban missile crisis.
Normal rules and laws don't apply to the one percentile...
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No it wouldn't. The embargo is only about pacifying Cuban-American voters. If it was to battle communism then we wouldn't have normalized trade relations with Vietnam.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you understand how communism is supposed to work. Trade is desirable as long as the benefits are shared with the workers not just the private owners.
How can you hate something you know so little about?
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What I don't get is how a refusal to trade is a "human rights" issue. Nobody has a "human right" to force someone else to sell things to them (or to force someone else to buy their stuff).
There might be valid complaints about the embargo, but "human rights" isn't one of them.
$1.1 Trillion over 54 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
Works to something like $20 Billion a year. That's a credible figure. We do $650 billion with Canada in a year, and Cuba ain't that much smaller.
The problem with their argument is that whenever a US President tries to reduce tensions, they do something to ratchet them back up. For example, Obama was inaugurated in Jan of '09, announces easing the embargo by allowing families in the US to visit and send money more easily in April, and by December some poor schmuck (Alan Gross) is rotting in a Cuban jail for bringing computer equipment in for Jewish groups. It's true that if you're an evil dictatorship stopping your local people from doing that is not unreasonable, and it;s true our government paid for it, but it's also true that you could easily stop him seizing his computers and deporting his ass. Now if Obama ever does anything nice for Cuba (such as sticking his neck out on ending the embargo) people supporting the embargo strongly have a trump card: why would we trade with a country that is holding one of our guys in prison for the crime of helping people access the internet?
It would cost them literally nothing to let this guy go, but they insist on keeping him in prison where he can only prevent them from accessing that $20 billion a year export market.
Which means most independent observers have long concluded the Castros like the embargo, because it allows them to claim everything that is wrong with the country is Evil Foreign Gringo's fault. Which justifies things like arresting guys for bringing in computer equipment.
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Which is all the more reason to lift the embargo, so that this lie can not be told any more. Without the embargo the current regime would probably have a lot more trouble staying in power.
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Re:$1.1 Trillion over 54 years... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:$1.1 Trillion over 54 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, but it's still an utterly stupid policy.
If America had just allowed free trade with Cuba the inflow of US culture into the country would've long turned it into a pro-US state - it's the policy of isolation that's keeping it hostile in the first place.
There's no way a country that small, and that close to the US could hold out as a communist nation in the face of unrestricted trade with the US - it'd become so utterly dependent on the US that it'd simply have no choice but to bow down to US wishes and culture.
There are times where I do support the US (strikes against IS, stance on Ukraine) and there are times where I'll happily call it out as stupid (Iraq), this is one of those times where it's stupid, where the policy is wholly self-defeating, and where the only people that suffer from the policy are the largely innocent general populace of Cuba.
The fall of the USSR was a prime opportunity to turn Cuba around, Russia facing bankruptcy withdrew almost all funding for Cuba and left it in the shit. Had the US taken that opportunity to drop restrictions, and normalise relations then Cuba would be as ex-USSR and as pro-USA as Poland is nowadays. Instead, the US continued it's bone-headed embargos such that now that Russia is becoming a resurgent pain in the ass Cuba is more than happy to take money to facilitate the reopening of the USSR's largest external listening base right off the coast of the US on Cuban soil.
As foreign policy goes, the US' policy on Cuba is probably one of the single most stupid and short-sighted foreign policies there is.
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"...US culture..."
What is that?
Re:$1.1 Trillion over 54 years... (Score:4, Insightful)
I would presume that that question is an attempt to bait me into saying "freedom", "democracy" and so forth so that you can say hogwash and point to examples where American's freedoms have been curbed, or democracy has been a farce.
But I'm more pragmatic than that, American culture is imperfect, it has flaws, many of them, but there's also one thing that's clear - it's responsible for better levels of wealth, education, and freedom than you find in communist dictatorships.
So to answer your question, US culture is, simply put, not communist dictatorship culture, it's something that's objectively better for most people, it's not perfect, but it doesn't need to be - better is good enough.
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it'd become so utterly dependent on the US that it'd simply have no choice but to bow down to US wishes and culture.
So we should open trade with Cuba so they become a free and open vassal state to the US?
Re:$1.1 Trillion over 54 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of the policy is not economic or ideological, it is to punish a country that chose to stop being an US colony and actually exercise the independence that was only supposed to be on paper.
Cuba is hardly a model of economic progress or human rights, but that's not the reason.
Very much like Iran.
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I thought the reason for punishment was that the cold war balance of power was disrupted by Cuba in a way that many millions of people USA could have lost a nuclear war before the USA could fire their own missiles at the USSR. Did I get that totally wrong from this side of the Atlantic?
Re:$1.1 Trillion over 54 years... (Score:5, Informative)
Did I get that totally wrong from this side of the Atlantic?
Kind of. The embargo started two years before the missile crisis [wikipedia.org], so unless there was some time travel involved, the missile crisis did not cause the embargo. (Of course, it also didn't make it better.) It started also before the failed Bay of Pigs invasion [wikipedia.org] that forced Cuba to fully ally with the Soviet Union, which paved the way to the missile crisis.
The embargo was retaliation for the nationalization of american properties in 1960, which, to my recollection (but I hated history classes, so I'm probably wrong), occurred in response to the owners shutting down production to destabilize the newly formed government. During the missile crisis it briefly evolved into a full blown blockade. After the missile crisis, it has gotten worse ("due" to the continuing alliance with the soviets), until the fall of the Soviets... when it got even worse (Torricelli act, 1992).
I.
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Europe gets a lot of US culture and still dislikes it. House and Game of Thrones don't excuse all the other stuff I'm afraid. And anyway most of the actors are English.
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Right, but there's a massive gulf between European distaste for US culture, and say, Chinese or Russian distaste for US culture.
On one hand you have Europe, that makes a few measly complaints but on the most part doesn't care. On the other you have countries that want to whipe it off the face of the earth altogether and replace it with some kind of authoritarianism.
Having the latter a few miles off your coast is always going to be a much worse proposition than the former, yet it's one the US consistently an
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If you think China and Russia really want to wipe you off the face of the earth you have been brainwashed by the propaganda.
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But Mexico is not Cuba. Mexico has a population more than 10x larger than that of Cuba, and similarly covers almost exactly 10x more area than Cuba also. But regardless you're wrong about lack of pro-US sentiment in Mexico. Last I checked Mexico wasn't hosting listening stations for the Russians to snoop on you, Mexico wasn't threatening America, and Mexico was largely backing America and providing cheap labour for many of it's businesses.
Quite how you think having an opponent nation a few miles off your co
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Of course there's no evidence to support it because it's not actually ever happened (though there are similar examples showing it can happen). There is however evidence to support the contrary - that maintaining the embargo has maintained hostility and hasn't ever worked.
"As a rule, most countries with differing political and social polices tend to be hostile to us, regardless of our fiscal polices with them."
Are you sure about that? I think you may have a rather broad view of "hostile", because basically t
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As far as I know the Cuban government wanted to exchange this guy for Cuban prisioners kept by the US, the Cuban Five [wikipedia.org]. The US refused.
These Cubans went to the US to disrupt the operations of anti-Castro terrorist organizations based on Miami, and for that they were sentenced to 15 years in jail, the same sentence that befell the American guy.
So I do understand that Cuba wouldn't want to give up on their only bargaining chip to free its agents. It's a sad state of affairs, really. So much could be gained if
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The "they were only trying to stop fanatical anti-Castro terrorism" story is their version. The US version is that Cuban Five were also trying to infiltrate Southern Command, which is the US Military command responsible for everything we do in Latin America. Moreover the Cubans used intelligence from one of the Five to destroy that Cessna they blew up back in '98. The Cuban story isn't particularly credible. If you're Cuba you don't send five spies to the US without a side mission of "infiltrate the Souther
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whenever a US President tries to reduce tensions, they do something to ratchet them back up. For example, Obama was inaugurated in Jan of '09, announces easing the embargo by allowing families in the US to visit and send money more easily in April, and by December some poor schmuck (Alan Gross) is rotting in a Cuban jail for bringing computer equipment in for Jewish groups.
why would we trade with a country that is holding one of our guys in prison for the crime of helping people access the internet?
It would cost them literally nothing to let this guy go, but they insist on keeping him in prison
The article on Gross in Wikipedia is pretty good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A... [wikipedia.org] and the linked article in The Forward is pretty good too. Gross worked for Development Alternatives, a contractor for the USAID and other government agencies, possibly including the CIA, which was involved in some development projects in places like Afghanistan and Iraq where they were an arm of the U.S. military. The Venezuelan government accused them of giving support to the rebels trying to overthrow the Chavez government.
Unavailability (Score:2)
Is the embargo really affecting them? (Score:2)
I was in Cuba earlier this year. They seem to be doing OK for themselves.
Sure, there are towns outside of Havana and Trinidad where there isn't a lot to do, but I didn't see any real evidence of extreme poverty.
As far as I could see, the only thing the embargo is doing is preventing (most) Americans from visiting the place.
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Did you go outside tourist Havana? (Score:3)
Michael Totten did [city-journal.org], and he found a police state overseeing wrenching poverty, complete with shortages for essentials and goods of retched quality.
In short: Communism.
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“Contrary to the myth spread by the revolution,” wrote Alfred Cuzan, a professor of political science at the University of West Florida, “Cuba’s wealth before 1959 was not the purview of a privileged few. . . . Cuban society was as much of a middle-class society as Argentina and Chile.”
Ha! Alfred Cuzan was born in Havana in 1948 and became a naturalized American citizen in 1969. It seems overwhelmingly likely that his family, much like virtually all Cuban expats of that era, were part of the oppressive capitalist caste of Cuban society that was specifically targeted by Castro's policies. His impartiality is questionable, to say the least. Additionally, he references Argentina and Chile as
Does Castro have the money? (Score:2)
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The missile crisis happened in 1962 and the embargo started in 1960.
Value of nationalized assets? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder what the value of American-owned assets nationalized by Castro would be worth today had they never been nationalized. My guess is that it has to be at least Cuba's "cost" or worse.
It'd also be interesting to know the value of the lost productivity imposed by Cuba's communist economics.
Works both ways (Score:3)
And I wonder what kind of counter-claim of damages the USA can pretend they too suffered in the loss of trade. Probably just about the same amount in total.
Complex nation (Score:3)
Act first think later (Score:4, Informative)
Cuba could have lifted it ages ago (Score:2, Interesting)
The US has tried to lift the embargo several times. Every time Cuba does something to get it maintained. There was famiously a plane hijacking one of the times we talked about lifting it.
Beyond that, the embargo does not stretch to the whole planet. They can trade with Mexico, Brazil, Russia, China, etc. Just not the US. I think they can trade with any country and europe and probably canada. So... whatever Cuba.
Like most failed states, they're just blaming their incompetence on someone else.
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Underdevelopment Theory (Score:3)
Overall death toll under communism: 100 Million (Score:3, Informative)
Let's not forget that the best estimates for the death of communist regimes killing their own people is right around 100 million people [battleswarmblog.com]. Both The Black Book of Communism [amazon.com] and R.J. Rummel's Death by Government [amazon.com] come up with roughly the same number of people killed.
Communism is incompatible with both human rights and a healthy economy, and never has, never can, and never will meet the needs of its own people or offer better lives than those under capitalism.
Embargoes have nothing to do with it...
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The sins of the father should not be carried by the son. I would continue the embargo for 7 more years and then force Cuba to allow US companies to open up shop there.
Why 7 more?
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The US Army is hardly the world's largest. Get a grip.
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"The US Army is hardly the world's largest".
Not since Vietnam, when the drug addiction and officer-fragging led to a decision never to field a conscript army again. Nowadays the US Army consists mainly of those whose principles and patriotism are so lofty that they are blind to the harm their efforts can cause, and the majority who can't earn enough to eat any other way.
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The US Army is hardly the world's largest. Get a grip.
In terms of headcount, the US has the 3rd largest military, behind China and India. (North Korea is 4th) The US military employs 70% more people than the Russian military.
In terms of spending, the US has no close competition. The US spends 3.5 times as much as the next largest spender (China), and accounts, by itself, for more than a third of global military spending.
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Why has no one notices the submitter's username yet?
Perhaps because nobody thought that someone calling "them"self "L Torvalds 2" is any more significant than someone calling "them"self "King Adolf Godwin the Sixth"?
Re:Free Alan Gross (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure the United States would be more willing to consider ending the embargo if Alan Gross was freed from prison.
`more willing' in this case would mean saying 'No, no, no way' to ending the embargo, rather than 'No, no, no, no way'.
In other words, it is the political reality in the US that makes this impossible, not the imprisonment of a single guy.
Re:Free Alan Gross (Score:5, Informative)
Gross was a saboteur, trying to overthrow the Cuban government. His wife finally admitted as much, as I wrote above.
He was getting money under the Helms-Burton Act. The purpose of the Helms-Burton act was to overthrow the Cuban government. They were paying him to try the unworkable idea of setting up an alternate Internet, to help the Cuban Jews overthrow the Castro government. The Cuban Jews actually got along very well with Raul Castro.
The Cubans want to exchange Gross for 3 Cuban intelligence agents who are in prison right now. They came to the U.S. as undercover agents to monitor the Miami Cubans who were committing acts of terrorism against Cuba, such as blowing up a Cuban plane, and bombing tourist spots.
The U.S. has refused the exchange. The anti-Cuban hard-liners would rather leave Gross in prison than improve relations.
Re: (Score:2)
The whole embargo smacks of "well, we've always done it this way" at this point. I don't really see any point to the embargo. It didn't work 40 years ago; it's not working today (for whatever purpose the government thinks it's doing). Time to use more carrots and less sticks, imho.
Re:US is... (Score:5, Funny)
If you really want to mess up Cuba - drop the embargo and flood them with goods.
Re:US is... (Score:4, Insightful)
... a fucked up country full of paranoid war hawks and religious whack-jobs, that's about what you'd expect from america.
Happy September 11th. If I wished to say those things about the United States I'd even be able to do so as a citizen. If you're an American then congratulations, you're in one of the only countries that you can do that. If you're not American I don't intend to stifle your freedom of speech, I just dare you to say that about you're own country.
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>Happy September 11th. If I wished to say those things about the United States I'd even be able to do so as a citizen. If you're an American then congratulations, you're in one of the only countries that you can do that. If you're not American I don't intend to stifle your freedom of speech, I just dare you to say that about you're own country.
My country has a government filled with extreme levels of corruption, the police is so corrupt as to be almost entirely ineffective - but when they do actually do
Re:US is... (Score:5, Interesting)
Well our constitution was written much later - with a lot of inspiration from the US - which is why our bill of rights and the US one is very similar.
However there is also one or two items from more recent sources (for starters the entire International Convention on Human Rights).
There is also a few liberties we've taken from things like the German constitution - which deal with the realities of countries that had experienced gross human rights abuses - such as a right to dignity.
The right to dignity for example has several clauses - such as a positive obligation placed on the government to ensure there is quality housing for all citizens and a requirement that evictions can only be done with a court order. Another impact is that it informs the right not to be discriminated against - here a business cannot deny service to anybody on discriminatory grounds. Recently a wedding venue wanted to refuse a gay couple the right to marry there on religious grounds and lost their case - the constitutional right not to be discriminated against on sexual orientation means that if you operate a business you MUST serve ALL sexual orientations. There's no obligation to approve of gay marriage, but you cannot as a business discriminate against it (a church could refuse to host a service, but a church is not a business).
Not everybody thinks these are freedoms, some people would say the above example reduces the business owner's freedom for example - and it's true that this is a trade-off but the right not to be discriminated against protects freedoms (such as freedom of association and movement) for many, many people - if a small minority has a very slight decrease in freedom (while making money out of the people they aren't allowed to mistreat) then this is a worthwhile trade-off in my mind.
In some regards the fact that our constitution is only 20 years old has been advantageous - it means that we have all the rights the US has - most of which were not in their original constitution (Everything with "amendment" in it) right in the basic document, and we still have the option of future amendments if we need them.
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Re:US is... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Something really interesting must have happened in the past with events surrounding the Bay of Pigs invasion and its CIA backers.
"CIA SUCCESSFULLY CONCEALS BAY OF PIGS HISTORY
D.C. CIRCUIT SPLIT DECISION RULES CIA DRAFT HISTORY CAN BE KEPT SECRET INDEFINITELY"
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/... [gwu.edu] (May 21, 2014)
""expose an agency's decision making process in such a way as to discourage candid discussion within the agency and thereby undermine the agency's a
Re: (Score:3)
When someone has plans to point a nuclear missile at you in your back yard, you do what you can to protect yourself. The net result of the Cuban 'experiment' is a large number of well-educated people who have little or no resources to use that educational wealth.
The missile crisis [wikipedia.org] happend two years after the embargo started, and one year a [wikipedia.org] a failed invasion from the US [wikipedia.org]. It has been hardened even after the fall of the soviets (Torricelli [wikipedia.org], Helms Burton [wikipedia.org]). Even now, it is still actively applied against third countries [cubastandard.com]. Claiming that the embargo was caused by the missile crisis denotes a profound ignorance of history, and a profound unwillingness to educate oneself.