You know, growing food is really easy. Cuba is a big country. They really need foreign currency to buy FOOD?
That's kind of embarrassing.
Typical snotty infantile response. Irrelevant to everything I carefully laid out in my own comment. This is why I don’t hang about here…
Cubans have shown for 60 years, like Vietnamese before them, that they can survive on rice and beans
if necessary. Their creativity and determination in fighting back against Yankee imperialism’s embargo is legendary.
It was Stalinists who put up the Berlin Wall. Leave it to idiot American politicians to build a “Cuban Wall,” and act out the “definition of insanity” by doing the same stupid thing again and again and again, and expecting different results.
I raised most of the
real issues in my long comment #682:
***
Twelve U.S. Presidents have failed to bring “regime change” to Cuba. Not sabotage, invasion by Cuban exiles, six decades of American embargo, assassination attempts, not even the fall of the Soviet Union or the passing of the Castro dynasty … has succeeded in breaking the Cuban government’s anti-imperialist will. That ruling bureaucracy built sufficiently deep roots among the island’s people to resist Yankee pressure all these years. After the collapse of the USSR Cuba went through harder times even than today.
My guess — that is all it is — is that the present protests will not change anything, and much of the new generation will again rally to oppose U.S. imperialist pressure. Deep anger and national pride is stoked by the unfairness of the U.S. embargo. It is not just a propaganda gift to a ruling elite.
The U.S. embargo, which has lasted 60 years now, forbids American businesses (and foreign businesses which operate in the US) to invest in or trade with Cuba. A close look at economic changes in Cuba will help explain the present protests, and why Cuba may survive as a “socialist state” into the future.
First we must recognize that the Trump Administration seriously tightened the embargo, threatened further economic reprisals against third parties when it ridiculously added Cuba to its “Terrorist” list, and even forbid Cuban-Americans to send money to family members on the island. The Biden Administration has not only NOT returned to Obama’s policies but it has not to date changed one iota of Trump’s embargo intensification policies. Winning Cuban votes in Florida in ‘22/‘24 is apparently all that matters to the DNC.
Above all, however, we should recognize that it was the loss of foreign exchange from tourism due to Covid travel restrictions (European and Canadian tourism dried up completely) that provided the biggest blow to the economy. People must eat! Cuba must buy many items crucial to everyday existence with
foreign currency.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel argues “All this discontent, these feelings of dissatisfaction, what is the ultimate cause of all that? … It’s the blockade. This is part of the U.S. playbook to destabilize us, to generate chaos, to break our will and spirit.” Though technically not “a blockade,” the strengthened embargo and Covid remain the major factors that are bleeding the economy and causing protests, as they also are a reminder to Cubans of the unrelenting hostility of the U.S.A.
It would be great if China were to step in with big loans to get Cuba through this emergency period, but that has so far not occurred. The new leadership of the Cuban state and party bureaucracy has recently shown initiative in addressing one of the main factors of dissatisfaction in Cuba — the old guard’s allowing a “two-track” U.S. dollar / Cuban peso exchange rate that unfairly benefited those who could get their hands on U.S. dollars. With the resumption of tourism hopefully next year, this should go a long way toward improving both fairness and economic prospects in Cuba.
People in Cuba know full well how Cuban exiles live in the United States. A new “boat migration” is certainly possible. Cuban nationals understand American realities much more than we understand Cuban reality. Allowing free open trade and investment with & in Cuba is the only correct policy for the U.S. It is also the surest way to help Cubans win democratic rights on the island. It will put a new burden on the Cuban regime to defend itself in new ways, and open the road for more reconciliation with the new generation in the Cuban diaspora.
