Recently I started a post and I was attacked not only in my ideas but also in the way I expressed them. I’ll be more carefull this time.
A few days ago a very important event took place for the first time in many years (39 years) an american commercial airplane landed in Cuba, also americans helped in the recent hurricane. It seems the embargo is being lifted.
What is your opinion? Mine is that the cold war ended last century, Cuba represents no threat (it no longer wants to export the revolution to foreign countries, and even if she wanted I don’t think it would be a succes) The only thing that stands in the way is the human rights violation. Although the cuban regime is bad it’s better like, for example, china (which is about to enter in the world trade organazation). Don’t you think it is time to end with what not only is an wrong policy but also an ineffective one.
One vote here for lifting the embargo and letting Cuba play with us. I mean, why not? [shrug] I got nothing personal against Fidel. And if we’re letting China play, why not Cuba?
However, I couldn’t find “an american commercial airplane landed in Cuba”–did you mean this? The plane that presumably took the ADM and Cargill guys down there and back again?
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/americas/11/21/cuba.usa.sales.reut/index.html
I also couldn’t find “americans helped in the recent hurricane”. Cite?
Or “It seems the embargo is being lifted”. Cite?
Cuba is buying American grain, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the whole embargo is being lifted, boom, like that. I think it’s a temporary humanitarian-type thing, so they can buy some supplies, but I don’t think it means the whole embargo thing is over.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/americas/11/09/cuba.usaid/index.html
I dunno…if we lift the embargo then Cuban baseball players won’t have to defect in order to play MLB. Then they’ll play for the Cuban team during the Olympics and probably beat us. That’s no good.
Other than that, I’d probably say lift it.
This question is closely allied with the current thread Is USA’s Cuban policy a vendetta against Castro?
So far, no one on this board has shown much support for the embargo (or the utterly stupid Helms-Burton law that extends it to alienating any friends of the U.S.).
The recent humanitarian aid (shipments of grain) are the sort of thing that the U.S. has done frequently in the past: have the government purchase food crops from farmers who are desperate in a time of shrinking markets and distribute the food to some hostile country in a gesture of good will. (In times of actual emergencies, the U.S. has usually provided humanitarian aid to “enemies” regardless of market forces.)
Within the U.S., there is only tepid support for Helms-Burton and the rest of the embargo. Several congressmen from major farming states have already indicated that they would like to see this current grain shipment repeated next year (and for the foreseeable future) with an eye to opening up Cuba as a market.
The Bush Administration has, thus far, rebuffed any suggestion that the grain shipments will ever be repeated. I guess whether we stop letting the Cuban emigrés dictate foreign policy the depends on how badly Bush feels he needs their vote in Florida.
I said it in the other thread, and I’ll say it here-the whole Elian thing really illustrated just how out of touch the radical Batista-Cuban exiles are.
It’s also probably something of a hissyfit.
As others have already mentioned, a huge reason for keeping the embargo in place are the powerful Cuban-American advocacy groups and their influence on American foreign policy vis-a-vis Fidel’s Cuba.
No doubt the CANF – Cuban American National Foundation – started by the rabid anti-Castro, Jorger Mas Canosa, and now run by his son, Jorge Mas Santos, is at the forefront of that movement.
As you can see from their own website **What does CANF Advocate?**, their agenda is completely opposed to ending the embargo while single-mindedly pursuing the toppling of that regime.
I think the biggest irony in all of this is that had the embargo ended a decade or so ago, at about the time of the crumbling of the Steel curtain – odd are very good to excellent that Cuba would have already made the transition towards democracy. A big part of the Castro mystique and his iron-fisted grip to power, is precisely his ability to rally Cubans against the perceived and real injustices of the embargo. IOW, had the flow of American wealth and technology been allowed to continue, capitalism would have helped to erode the very system it is pretending to fight with the embargo.
As it stands now, IMHO, the only beneficiaries of this policy are the Canadian and European countries that have made a head-start in investments and the regime itself.