Not all Canadians can trade with Cuba with impunity:
"A federal jury in Philadelphia last month found a Canadian
businessman living in the US, James Sabzali, guilty of violating the
US embargo by selling water purification materials to Cuba through a
middleman. The Canadian government denounced as “objectionable and
unacceptable” the conviction of Sabzali for sales he made in Canada
that are entirely legal there.
Sabzali is the first foreign national indicted for “trading with the
enemy.” He and two American partners are appealing the verdict. If
the verdict is upheld, they will face prison terms of four years or
more.
Any Canadian or European businessmen who had previous dealings in
Cuba could be similarly prosecuted if they established residence in
the US. The prosecution was carried out under the terms of the “Cuban
Democracy Act,” a 1992 law signed by the elder George Bush that
prohibits overseas subsidiaries of US corporations from trading with
Cuba."
Forgive me, in my remarks about the happiness I perceived whilst in Cuba I did not intend to paint Cuban life as some idyllic communal existence: Life is hard, many want away, and there are easily as many anti-Castro Cubans as pro-. (Similarly, calling Thailand a country with a “happy” people is of course not to ignore the desperate poverty and suffering in many of its cities.) But to paint Cuba as some Orwellian nightmare is also inaccurate. The average Cuban’s lot is in some ways worse, in some ways rather better than the average Jamaican, Haitian or Mexican but we don’t hear of “40 years of Mexican misery, forcing millions into America”.
I went to Cuba expecting a Soviet-style police state. I found a healthy, ferociously intelligent and politically clued-up island. The only way I might convince you that Cubans are not, in fact, bursting to start competing with each other to see who can afford the biggest television is for you to go there.
But then again, this thread is all about allowing one’s government to prevent one from doing so.
Did he? The last executions I heard about in Cuba were three terrorists who hijacked a passenger plane. The US made a big fuss about human rights, which would be fair enough if it were not for the fact that this way of dealing with terrorists is not very different to the US way.
It was my understanding that Fidel is bigger on locking people up for dubious reasons than on shooting them. I reckoned that counted as a plus point for a Communist dictator. Not so much of the East-German style “disappearances”. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Oh please, do you really think that Cubans are different from anyone else? Of course they want to have the best of everything, and that’s why you see doctors working as cab drivers in the tourist industry, because that’s where the dollars are, and in Cuba if you have dollars you can have anything. Consumerism is alive and well in Cuba.
There’s certainly a lot more to this story than in the link you provided. Try this link , from that article:
My reading of that seems to indicate that half of the offenses occurred while he was living in the US, and that he was dealing on behalf of a US firm, both prohibited under US law.
I think BobLibDem hit it on the head with “election politics” – who’s gonna blow their chances of election on an issue with so few supporters?
It has long bothered me, as others have noted, that Cuban poverty is ascribed to the US embargo. Plenty of other countries can trade with Cuba. And don’t other countries make automobiles? Why does every news story seem to show ancient American cars on the road and the “genius” mechanics keeping them going? What about the European car industry? Or Japab’s? Or Russia’s, their economic paryner for all those years? Or Canada today? Something doesn’t add up.
I heard on the radio today that Castro is 77 yoday. You can practically hear American businesses salivating about the inplications. How is it possible for Castro not to have provided for government after his death? Or has he done so, and American wishful thinking is simply ignoring it? You never hear about that in the news.
He has designated his brother Raul Castro as his successor, however he’s no spring chicken either at 72. In recent months Castro has been conducting a purge of government officials and replacing some of the aging ministers with younger, and one assumes more ideologically pure, or at least more loyal party members, so it seems that he is laying the groundwork for a government after his death. Most Cubans however are looking for changes after Castro’s death, whoever follows him have better be prepared to deliver.
Well it’s a bit of a difficult one. They’d have to enter the free market system with little baby steps, because just opening up all the doors would mean that a bunch of US companies would essentially buy Cuba for a song and a dance, and Cuba would be back where it was before the revolution: a US colony in all but name. And in third world countries, that sort of arrangement always makes a small elite ridiculously rich while most people see no benefits whatsoever. Just look at Venezuela.
Zorro, I can’t find on online reference so don’t ask for a cite, but IIRC foreign ownership in Cuba before Castro was negligible for all industries except sugar, and in that industry it ran at less than 40%. Of course given the size of the Cuban economy that does not mean that foreign interests did not exert undue influence in Cuban economic affairs, however that situation did not change in 1959, the only thing that changed was who was exerting the influence.
As for ridiculously rich small elites, you do realize that the situation in Cuba is exactly like that, don’t you? The Miramar district in Cuba looks like any ritzy neighborhood in the world, that’s where the communist elite lives.
But Puerto Rico has been American territory ever since the Spanish-American War and it still has not been culturally Americanized. That is, not from what I can see – I’ve never been there. Perhaps some Puerto Ricans, or recent visitors, can correct me on this point?
I don’t understand. How does the embargo protect the financial interests of the Bacardi and Fanjul families? I mean, they might have lost property when Castro came to power, but that was then, this is now. If the embargo ended, wouldn’t those families be especially well positioned to do profitable business in Cuba? Even with Castro still running the country?
Well, a lot of posters had a lot of good points about this matter that I hadn’t thought about- a great way to fight ignorance (by giving tons of prespective on the matter). I originally believed the embargo was somehow preserving something good in Cuba, but I guess lifting the embargo would be a better idea if it could offer a better standard of living for Cubans (dunno how).
I just heard a clip of a call from a Miami radio host impersonating Hugo Chavez and calling Castro on the phone. Castro falls for it and then the impersonator calls him a murderer and then Castro lets loose all sorts of profanity. It’s funny to hear a 77-year-old Head of State using that language.
Because we have taken a stand against an ideal…Communism is against the very laws of God…you do not sanctify it by tolerating it. The same can be said for any moral issue…
If the embargo were to disappear, cheap (really cheap) rum and cigars would immediately flood America. Why spend money on a bottle of Bacardi when you can get another, more authentically Cuban brand for half as much?
God must have really hated the early Christians then, because according to Acts they held all property in common. :rolleyes:
The Marxism of the USSR and Cuba - overthrowing the current government by force and forcing the new system on everyone - is deplorable. But most Christian theologians throughout history have spoke of a ideal community of believiers that sounds a lot like Communism…