Cindy Sheehan and Code Pink are hoping that this new Congress will ease the trade and travel sanctions , but I really can’t see why we should as long as Fidel is alive. Cindy and Co., claim:
“The restrictions have been around way too long, change is way overdue,” Benjamin said, adding that the Cuba sanctions made the group’s trip very difficult.
“We had to jump through hoops to put together this delegation,” she said.
Well, Cuba seems to be doing just fine without us. We do supply some food and medical supplies, but beyond that, nothing. The rest of the world is free to trade with them, so why is it that we should lift our santions?
Don’t you know, P? Libs love to coddle, succor, and surrender to Comunists. They hate all forms of Capitalism because they are such guilty failures at it.
You asked, so here are some reasons why we must life the embargo and travel ban:
1) It is an utter failure. 47 years after the embargo was put in place to punish Castro’s turn left, we still have a Castro in power.
2) It violates the basic right of Americans to travel. They get around this by saying travel is ok, but spending money there is illegal… Americans should be able to travel to a place 90 miles from its border, which shares much in common with us. And if Cuba is such a failure, the US should encourage us leftists to go there and see for ourselves.
3) It is morally and ethically undefensible. The United Nations has voted every year that the embargo is illegal, this year 183-4 (we had Israel, Marshall Islands and Palau on our side). The embargo is estimated to cost Cuba billions of dollars a year, besides the headaches of trying to secure parts for old American machines or goods that are only manufactured by US owned companies. Cuba is forced to transport things like Rice and grain from China and Vietnam, rather from the port of Miami and New Orleans. Cuba is not allowed to sell anything to the largest and most natural market. Cubans can not import many items like automobiles because ships are prohibited from entering U.S. ports for six months after making deliveries to Cuba.
4) The embargo costs American businesses billions of dollars of lost business. Already, despite all the restrictions (like having to pay cash), Cuba has jumped to the top 20 in export markets.
5) The American people support normal relations with Cuba (66% to most recent polling) and the (Republican) House of Representatives has passed positive legislation numerous times in recent years – only to relent under Bush’s veto threat.
6) Cuban Americans are often not allowed to visit family members if they go ill or have died (they can only visit once every three years, thanks to Bush). And, per Bush’s rules, aunts, uncles and cousins no longer count as family members to be visited.
7) The embargo gives the Castro brothers an excuse for shortcomings of the Revolution.
2, Ah, yes, another liberal rewarding the failure of Socialism and wishing the US to become another Socialist hellhole.
If (Democrat) Kennedy had only fulfilled his promise to support the good guys who tried to invade Cuba and restore Democracy, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I’m sure the Left would called them right-wing reactionaries or thugs or something similar. It’s only the Communist “insurgents” and terrorists who hate America that the Left calls “freedom fighters”.
Dear Leftside; Once more, instead of reviewing facts to establish a position, the position was decided upon, and then facts were found, generated, or merely asserted, to support the political position.
1. Lift the ban because: It has been an utter failure (hasn’t had a significant effect). If that’s the case, then neither lifting the ban nor maintaining the ban will make much difference. As the embargo continues to demonstrate our objection to Cuba’s policy of systematic violations of human rights and the jailing of all opponents and critics, then the political value and benefit of retaining this (as you assert) ineffective economic ban far outweighs the benefits of it’s discontinuation.
2. Lift the ban because: It violates the basic right of Americans to travel. Sounds okay, but there is no recognized basic right to foreign travel. There is no basic right to foreign travel in the international declaration of human rights, nor in the US Constitution–and certainly not in Cuban law.
3. Lift the ban because: It is morally and ethically [sic] undefensible. That the United Nations has voted something as illegal has absolutely no bearing in a moral or ethical determination. The UN is comprised of many nations; each voting their own political and economic interests. A majority vote represents a lot of things, but it should in no way be confused as a basis for either a moral or an ethical determination. You argued initially that the US economic ban is ineffective, and then you cite economic impacts and natural markets. . . . Ironically, you argue the morality of trade sanctions toward a Communist government–which neither subscribes to the economic theories and concepts of free trade and free markets, nor endorses the idea of an inherent moral or ethical judgement–-Marx and Socialism preach that morality and ethics are always to be viewed on a relative basis. To Communist Castro, morality and ethical determinations are always predicated upon their benefit to the majority, in a collective sense only. The rights of the individual, and the few, are always subordinate to the greater good for the many. If Castro won’t endorse you philosophically, why should the anyone else?
4. Lift the ban because: The American people support normal relations with Cuba. Well, this of course brings us back to the old adage: figures can’t lie, but liars can figure. I know of no such poll results as the one you cite. That aside, public opinion polls are interesting, but they have never been proven to make good public policy. This is a disingenuous argument of convenience. ~80% of Americans are in favor of permitting prayer in school. This majority opinion would not result in liberals arguing that the polls demand the immediate repeal of the last 10 years of judicial rulings separating church and state. If opinion polls really carried that much moral authority, the ACLU would have been out of business a long time ago.
5. Lift the ban because: Cuban Americans are often not allowed to visit family members. While this is unfortunate ramification of our trade embargo, it flatly ignores the fact that most Cuban-Americans would rather endure such personal hardships than lift the current US trade sanctions with Cuban–unless the Cuban government first agrees to concessions granting Cuban’s greater economic and personal freedoms, both at home and abroad–none the least of which would be that so called, right to travel, you previously asserted.
6. Lift the ban because: The embargo gives the Castro brothers an excuse for the shortcomings of the Revolution. This is a political trade-off at best, and a rather poor one. If the US does not lift the ban, Castro will continue to blame the shortcomings of Cuba’s Socialist revolution on the US. If the US does lift the embargo, Castro will proclaim the US capitulation as both a victory and a ratification of his government. If the US trade embargo is truly as ineffective as you have asserted, then Castro will still blame the US for Cuba’s bad economy after the ban has been lifted–-because the embargo has made no real difference in the first place. In truth, Cuba’s economic problems have a lot less to do with US trade than they do with the lack of economic and personal freedom afforded to the Cuban people by Castro’s Socialist government. Underscoring this, is the fact that Vietnam’s economy is still in the dumpster even after 10 years of a “favored nation”trade status with the US. The only bright spots in Vietnam’s current economy have been those areas that have permitted limited privatization–and capitalist incentives.
The trouble with most Socialists advocates and apologists, policy to them is all about feelings and intentions and has nothing to do with results or outcomes. Logic and facts, when used at all, are applied as a rationalization to buttress a prior decision made wholly independent of any studied reason. Consequently, it’s not uncommon, as presented here by Leftside, to have both conflicting and countermanding arguments–-because facts were only selectively employed as a convenience, and not a basis, to their policy position.
Well said Doug..please don’t expect leftside to actually give any detailed rebuttal to that:wink:
Wow.
You guys help prove me right. As much as I hate to say it the Democrats will most likely stay in power. (Approximately 12 years???)
“Most Cuban-Americans would rather endure such personal hardships than lift the current US trade sanctionsâ€
The Cuban-Americans I’ve met are complete morons who hate President Castro so much that they have abandoned rational thought.
Honestly;
PCD and Robert decided that the American Embargo of Cuba was a good thing long before they ever researched any of the underlying issues. They picked their side and they will support it regardless of facts. They are just like my Brother the Democrat. It’s very sad.
7-The Cuban-Americans I’ve met are complete morons who hate President Castro so much that they have abandoned rational thought.
How so Zelda..to hear Andy Garcia talk, there is nothing noble about 5 years olds being dressed in military uniforms and indoctinated into Fidels “system”. Why are they not being rational? I think Garcia’s interview here summed it up best:
H: While the events depicted in the movie occurred almost 50 years ago, you portray Batista, Che Guevara, and Fidel in a similarly negative light, a vision that may not be shared by a younger generation who has come to see, particularly Che, as a great visionary. Do you think this movie will change that?
AG: I don’t know. Most people I ask, ‘Do you know who you have on your T-Shirt?’ They will answer, ‘Yeah, it’s Che Guevara, he was a revolutionary guy.’ That’s as much as they know about him. When you confront them and say ‘Do you know he executed over 2,000 people in Cuba?’ They’d tell you they didn’t. This is historical fact, but people have limited knowledge about him. He talked about the necessity to execute, and about revolutionary justice being ultimate justice so you don’t need a trial to convict someone. This figure has been romanticized over the years and unfortunately people don’t take the time to read and learn about it.
H: Do you believe there is also a skewed, romantic vision of Cuba that is predominant outside the island?
AG: Yes, people think of Cuba as a social paradise. They argue that it has free education. Well, yes, only if you call indoctrination free education. If you believe that education is reading only the books they provide you. You can’t read Cabrera Infante or Faulkner because its illegal and you can go to jail. People believe the propaganda that the [Cuban] government has spread. People say: ‘They have free medicine.’ Well, they have free diagnosis but no medicine for the people. There’s a lot of [misconceptions] that people in the Americas and around the world believe based on the propaganda that comes out of Cuba. As an exile you know the lack of civil liberties that Cubans have, but people in America don’t know that. The majority of people here know very little about American history, let alone Cuban history.
H: It seems like foreign policy towards Cuba has become a waiting game for Castro’s death. Do you think there is more the world should be doing right now to remedy the conditions in which the Cuban people live?
AG: The entire world trades with Castro. I think America is the only country that enforces an embargo against Cuba. And it seems to me –this is just personal opinion- like every time there is talk of lifting the embargo something happens over there that makes the U.S. reconsider lifting it. I don’t believe he wants the embargo lifted, because once he has no embargo, then he has no enemy. That’s just my personal political theory. Also, the problem with an embargo-free Cuba is that it doesn’t solve the problem of Fidel’s embargo over the Cuban people that prevents them from participating in a market economy. The lifting of the embargo wouldn’t directly help the Cuban people. If they can only do business with the government, then how do the Cuban people benefit from that? Why don’t they benefit from the business that Cuba does with European nations? Those countries do business with the Cuban government, but Cuban citizens don’t have access to those business opportunities:And the benefits go to the government who can decide how much they trickle down to the people, which as you know, is nothing. The only way lifting the embargo could help stimulate the economy is if people are allowed to freely participate in a free market society so they can deal directly with investors coming in from the outside, or get hired by those investors. So there are two embargos that need to be lifted, the first is the embargo Fidel has over his own people, and obviously the American embargo. Until then nothing will happen. I don’t think Fidel wants the embargo lifted because it’d put pressure on him to open up the process. He blames the American embargo, but he also keeps it in place. Without an enemy, who’s going to like me?
H: Is a return to the 1940 constitution [which promoted a democratic state] a reality for post-Castro Cuba?
AG: I certainly hope so. It’s a simple move. All you have to say is: we want to go back to the promise of what the revolution was. The revolution has not fulfilled its original promise, which was to restore the constitution. It went in a different direction completely. So, yes, it is possible, but you’ll need a complete change in leadership. You can bet the house on the fact that the Cuban people would want that. But the question is: Will there be a government that wants to go in that direction, and have an election and restore democracy? It doesn’t mean you have to abandon social democracy. That was part of the Cuban constitution and of the revolutionary process. There were social programs established before the revolution, but the one thing that is not negotiable is freedom, democracy.
H: Do you see yourself returning to Cuba one day?
AG: Every day.
Please explain how he is wrong
We should have absolutly nothing to do with cuba and castro and time to go tell CODESISSYPINK to GET A LIFE and you can bet that idiot JIMMY CARTER is there with CODESISSYPINK to urge better relationship with busy whiskers castro:mad:
Mr. Van Dunker.
1) The embargo has been ineffective in its stated goal: to make Cuba unlivable and promt regime change. It HAS caused $80 billion in damages, which is no small potatoes for a country of 13 million. What “political value” does the US get from it? The lack of concessions by the Cubans is the same reason we neve dropped the embargo – pride.
2) I’ll let you explain how your conservartivism allows for the government to restrict someone’s ability to travel. But relevant case law (Kent v Dulles) holds that “The right to travel is a part of the ‘liberty’ of which the citizen cannot be deprived without due process of law under the Fifth Amendment.”
3) Of course there is no International Law dealing with the ability of a state to blockade another. But if the US justifies its Iraq War legalities by UNSC resolutions, then Cuba can invoke an even more clear international rebuke. And just because Cuba does not buy into neo-liberalism does not mean that it is against beneficial trade. Finally, working for the common good is the definition of ANY government (except Republicans perhaps).
4) Here is your stinkin gallop poll results (58% of republicans said lift it!)
5) A near majority 45% oppose the Bush Admin. travel restrictions. But who cares, exiles can CHOOSE not to go there, but they should not have power over my ability to go there for my Honeymoon.
6) (Hardest to understand) Cuba’s economy is #1 in the Hemisphere right now, so they don’t need anything. But lifting the embargo would certainly unleash an unprecidented boom, which no political party has ever wanted to take the blame for. But that is shortsighted thinking. Similarly Vietnam is hardlyin “the dumps.”They are a model for poverty reduction and have been second only to China since 2000 in GDP growth (they’re growing by 8 percent now). It is the hyper-capitalist Asian nations that are in the doldrums.
You were talking avout facts?
Mr. Garcia is misinformed.
Che did not kill 2,000 people despite what anyone says. Reliable sources say “a few hundred” were summarily killed after military trials during and after the Revolution. Che personally pulled the trigger on maybe a handful. There is no proof otherwise, despite what exiles try to say to discredit a hero to young people everywhere.
To say any author is banned in Cuba is simply false. The American Library Association went to Cuba and found most of the so-called banned books in the libraries and no evidence of censorship. Look it up. And for a country with “no medicine” I wonder how they live as long as we do – and have a lower infant mortality rate (as well as about every disease).
He makes some sense when he agrees with me on the excuse the embargo provides Casto, but he turns conspiracy theorist, blaming Castro’s secret ways for the US Government not lifting it. Later he turns around and says the Cuban people won’t benefit from the emabrgo’s lifting. And I am accused of twisting logic. He is probably just unaware that most Cubans have gotten a basic double in their wages in the last few years.
Garcia would “bet the house” on the fact that Cubans want to dump their entire leadership and follow (presumably) a bunch of exiles (sounds familiarly naive). Too bad he said this before another Gallop poll, this one performed in Havana and Santiago de Cuba (2nd city), found that the more Cubans approve of their leaders than disapprove – 47 to 40 it was.(95% approved of their health and education – and this didn’t even count the more supportive rural areas)
11- Mr. Garcia is not confused about anything. Me, unlike you, was born in Cuba and fled. He, and his family, left their country for freedom, but with the hope of returing some day.
Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s “labor camp” system”the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che’s imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for “two, three, many Vietnams,” he also spoke about martyrdom and managed to compose a number of chilling phrases: “Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become :”" and so on. He was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy”a tragedy on the hugest scale. The present-day cult of Che”the T-shirts, the bars, the posters”has succeeded in obscuring this dreadful reality.
The modern-day cult of Che blinds us not just to the past but also to the present. Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too.
I wonder if people who stand up to cheer a hagiography of Che Guevara, will ever give a damn about the oppressed people of Cuba.
Gays and AIDS victims were never ‘incarcerated.” As far as gays, these camps you are apparently referring to (UMAP) were set of for 2 years for people against or unfit for war, who needed to complete mandatory service to their country in other ways. Yes, some gays were included as Cuba had the same retrograde policies about gays in the military we have today (Cuba has advanced since however – not that I imagine anyone cares here).
Yes, AIDS patients were quarantined in hospitals in the early days of the epidemic. Millions of victims around the world can only regret that other countries did not take similar measures in the early days. Today Cuba has the lowest AIDS rate in the region, and one of the lowest in the world.
There are many so-called dissident leaders leading free lives in Cuba… 250 of them met without hassle last year for a conference in Havana. Raul Rivero is a free man living in Spain – he was released a year or 2 ago. I know his work very well, and can honestly say he is a drunk important to no one except in the eyes of the US and certain exiles. He is guilty of working for publications funded by foreign governments, like most other so-called “political prisoners.”
So called “independent libraries” are neither independent nor libraries. They are political projects fomented by Washington without justification. The American Library Association went to Cuba and found nearly all of the so-called banned books on the shelves in actual libraries, which were found to be free and open to all – and a priority of the Revolutionary government, which has opened more libraries than all the previous governments combined. They found the “independent libraries” never open, without readers and basically a political charade that makes for good sound bites.
Today Cuba has the lowest AIDS rate in the region, and one of the lowest in the world.
And lowest number of mental patients and prisoners? Maybe that’s because Castro emptied out the jails and asylums in 1979 and Peanut Brain Carter let them all come here.
I would have sent them all right back.
Viva La Revolucion! I am a HUGE Che fan! I had his posters in my rooms all through Liberal School (college)! Of course my fellow Che followers and I don’t have any real understanding of what he did (I think he hated Capitalists or something) but it doesn’t matter because his posters look cool and it’s really awesome when we shout “Viva La Revolucion” and scare people!
Why are different issues so often confused?
Issue 1. Fidel Castro is a big idiot. Cuba sucks to live in for 99% of the population. Che Guevara was a murderer.
Issue 2. America’s response to Fidel Castro has increased his ability to stay in power. It has been a failure and has NOT weakened his power or helped the Cubans who are still in Cuba.
Issue 3. Fortunately; Fidel Castro will die someday and American foreign policy towards Cuba will change.