Meanwhile, catering to Castro does everything for Castro, emboldens Castro and makes the US into chumps. Simple choice.
We have not catered anything to Castro and that would be irrelevant anyway. I don't care what it 'emboldens.'
You utterly evaded the question though - what does the US gain from continued embargo on Cuba?
So raising the embargo means more money for Cuba to spend on military involvement in Syria.
It is obvious. Tell me otherwise because even now with the embargo, Cuba is in Syria.
So you think that keeping the embargo in place is justified because Cuba will have less for defense spending?
The knat's influence that Cuba has in military matters is laughable. The REAL defense threat from Cuba is NOT Cuba's military but the fact that they align with our enemies and they are a perfect place to stage from considering how close they are. Cuban Missile Crisis anyone?
Cuba going into Syria is unchanged by lifting the embargo - they would have done that either way unless you can provide some actual proof that such is not the case. Again, we are gaining nothing through an embargo - if anything it is not worth the time, effort and money to maintain the silly practice.
Maybe if you were around as I was when Castro became the dictator and these actions were taken by his revolution.
What’s often forgotten, though, is that the embargo was actually triggered by something concrete:
an enormous pile of American assets that Castro seized in the process of nationalizing the Cuban economy.
Some of these assets were the vacation homes and bank accounts of wealthy individuals.
But the bulk of the confiscated property — originally valued at $1.8 billion, which at 6 percent simple interest translates to nearly $7 billion today — was sugar factories, mines, oil refineries and other business operations belonging to American corporations, among them the Coca-Cola Co., Exxon and the First National Bank of Boston. A 2009 article in the
Inter-American Law Review described Castro’s nationalization of U.S. assets as the “largest uncompensated taking of American property by a foreign government in history.”
Today, the nearly 6,000 property claims filed in the wake of the Cuban revolution almost never come up as a significant sticking point in discussions of a prospective Cuban-American thaw. But they remain active — and more to the point, the federal law that lays out the conditions of a possible reconciliation with Cuba, the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, says they have to be resolved. According to that statute, said Michael Kelly, a professor of international law at Creighton University in Nebraska, settling the certified property claims “is one of the first dominoes that has to fall in a whole series of dominoes for the embargo to be lifted.”
In 1960, the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower punished Castro’s expropriation of American assets by sharply cutting the amount of sugar the U.S. was buying from Cuba. “We kind of went ballistic at the thought that anyone would take our property,” said Jonathan Hansen, a faculty associate at Harvard University’s Center for Latin American Studies. Tempers ran hot in both directions: In a speech, Castro vowed to separate Americans in Cuba from all of their possessions, “down to the nails in their shoes.” The standoff culminated in a near-total embargo on American exports to Cuba and a reduction of sugar imports to zero.
Other countries that had holdings in Cuba — including Switzerland, Canada, Spain and France — were more amenable to Castro’s terms, apparently convinced that there was no chance they’d ever get a better deal. But the Americans who had lost property wanted cash and submitted official descriptions of what had been taken from them to the Foreign Claims Settlement Commission at the Department of Justice.
Meanwhile, U.S. relations with Cuba deteriorated. Diplomatic ties were cut. An attempt by President John F. Kennedy to overthrow Castro failed, and a standoff over Soviet missiles in 1962 brought the world as close to nuclear war as it has ever come. The invisible economic wall, which by then had been expanded to ban virtually all imports from Cuba, had become part of something much larger.
Cuba, you owe us $7 billion
