Blaming America First, From Ninety Miles Away

Since The Resident’s unexpected and unethical decision to unilaterally discard a half-century of history and reopen diplomatic relations with the Castro brothers’ prison colony known as Cuba, a particularly destructive claim has resurfaced, one that merits careful analysis and rejection.

For decades now, the Left has spouted a peculiar claim – that Cuba is poor because of our 54-year-long embargo against the communist country. If the reader has compassion for the suffering denizens of that miserable island, this has to be a strong argument, but it’s wrong – utterly without merit, in fact – for several critical reasons.

The claim can be dismissed easily with the first and most obvious comparison: Haiti and the Dominican Republic are also on a nearby island with the same weather, the same shoreline, the same convenience or inconvenience to other nations, the same potential for agricultural, tourist, industrial and commercial growth; the U.S. has no embargo against them.

They’re not thriving; they’re full of poverty and despair as well. If we had never had an embargo against Cuba after the Castros took over, it would most likely have turned out much like Haiti, different in language perhaps, but just as impoverished and weak – once you move out of camera range of the coastal resorts, anyway.

But that's not enough to satisy the Left; they'll still make the accusation. As long as the Left claims Cuba’s suffering is our fault, we need to explore the claim in more detail, so let's consider it from several perspectives:

The United States boycott against Communist Cuba officially began in 1960, after Cuba nationalized most American-owned land and businesses and evicted (or worse) their owners and management.

It has rarely been an absolute boycott; the USA does do some limited trade with Cuba, but it has been a reasonably strict import/export embargo for most of these 54 years. The Left would have us believe that that’s the reason for Cuba’s poverty.

But no other country really embargoes Cuba. Nobody but us. The European Union, an economy about the size of the United States, trades happily with Cuba, to the tune of some 2.7 billion Euros per year. Canada, with some 85 Canadian businesses operating in Cuba, does about a billion USD per year of business with Cuba. Cuba does about 2.2 billion USD per year of trade with China, and about 7 billion USD annually with nearby neighbor Venezuela. The number with Brazil is rapidly climbing, at around two/thirds of a billion USD today; it goes on and on.

In fact, there are about 200 countries on earth, and the United States is only one. If the USA boycotts a country, why can’t the country in question just focus on more trade with others to make up for it?

That’s exactly what happened. Cuba tries – to some extent – to build foreign trade. But to export more, you have produce things that other people want at the price you charge. And to import more, you have to be able to afford it, through having built a continually growing economy.

There’s Cuba’s problem. They love having the US embargo to blame, but the fact is, the US embargo is not responsible for Cuba’s inability to have more trade with other countries. The Cuban economy is a stagnant kleptocracy, so there’s a severely limited pool of commercial opportunities.

If trade would help them, then surely trading with everyone else in the world would have done it. The lack of American trade isn’t Cuba’s problem.

It has now been over fifty years since the government of Cuba nationalized almost all businesses on the island… but the same people who were in charge of the criminal government then are in charge today. It was the Castro brothers themselves who took over foreign-owned hotels, foreign-owned factories, foreign-owned farms, even foreign-owned schools!

Cuba and its supporters claim that if only more foreign investment would return, Cuba would thrive, and its poverty-stricken populace would climb back up to a real middle class position again.

But why should they? Why should anyone dare to buy a factory, lease some land, build a mall or tourist hotel, when this fear still exists? Why throw the dice like that?

Every potential investor must ask himself the question: “What if Cuba just takes my business away, like they did before?” It’s not like it only happened 50 years ago, a crime committed by criminals long since dead. No, the villains who nationalized the country last time are still in charge – Raul and Fidel Castro, still at the top, after all these years. If they did it once, why should we believe they wouldn’t do it again?

For a foreigner to invest in commercial activity in Cuba, he must be brave indeed – or just incredibly ignorant of history.

As Americans, we like to believe that trade is reasonably fair – that commercial activity is rightly transacted between two willing partners. Both sides have to consider it a good deal, or there is no reason to go through with the trade.

All economies have some restrictions, of course – a need for building permits, tax collections, export licensing. But the people are usually still free to decide for themselves whether to do it or not in the end.

But not in Cuba. Cuba is a total command economy. The government chooses your school, your home, your career, and your healthcare. The government sets your wages and keeps its share – which it believes should generally be over 90%, so that’s how much it takes. So the worker, after his long day in the tropical heat, only keeps some ten percent of his meager wage in the end. Will his heart be in it? Will the worker be a dream employee, talented and eager for the chance to shine?

Even in leftist economies like Brazil and China, the worker has the chance to move up in the business, to rise up and earn ever-better salaries and join the middle class or even, eventually, the rich. But not in Cuba, where the marxist-leninist utopian philosophy still rules supreme, where all but the most corrupt and connected apparatchiks must starve in absolute equality, the lowest common denominator of shared economic misery.

What kind of foreign businessman truly wants to seek out a trading partner in a country like that? The Cubans and their supporters would have us believe that more trade partnerships from the United States would make all the difference in Cuba… but it wouldn’t; it couldn’t.

The Castro brothers would never allow such trade to make a difference to the workers we employed; the Castro brothers would greedily enjoy their 90% share themselves, to keep all those profits from “warping” the spirits of their comrade clerks, cooks, assemblers or farmers with unhealthy feelings of the bourgeoisie.

If Cuba were to overthrow their marxist-leninist economics tomorrow, and replace them with a Reason/FEE style economy along the lines of Austrian economics, they’d be a booming economy with a thriving middle class within a decade’s time… with or without the United States’ participation. But sadly, such a wise transformation is not in the cards.

In the end, despite all these good current reasons to avoid doing business with Cuba as long as the Castros rule, there remains one more above all others: the memory of what Cuba did, not just to themselves, but to the world, back during the Cold War.

In the 1950s and 1960s, as the Castros won and consolidated their power over the island, Raul Castro was ruthless as Fidel’s enforcer, killing – or giving the orders to kill – many thousands of innocent people… civilians, bureaucrats, farmers, peasants… anyone who got in the way of the Communist Revolution.

And then, throughout the entire period of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule over the Soviet Union, the Castros used Cuba as a breeding ground for revolutionaries, sending thousands of communist soldiers all over the world in Brezhnev’s service, to foment new revolutions wherever the seed might find fertile ground.

Is it to be wondered why many in South America – and many in Central America, and many in Europe, and many in Asia – might not actually want to do business with Cuba today?

Many of these potential business partners, officials and customers still remember when their own nations suffered under civil wars instigated by Castro’s men and Brezhnev’s guns. Many remember who sent those “advisors” to their countries, and would sooner die than enter into a form of trade that would further enrich these bloodthirsty demons.

No, it’s not the US embargo that keeps these principled businesses around the world from rising to the bait of modernity’s amoral plea. They remember, and they have no interest in such blood money.

Many who oppose the United States ban on Cuban trade call it a failure, because the embargo hasn’t caused a revolution in Cuba – because the embargo hasn’t yet driven the Castros from power, as if that was its only purpose.

But such a claim is a rewriting of history. Yes, we’ve always hoped that the embargo might help to push the Castros from power, but that was never the main reason for it.

The embargo was instituted as the last option short of war, in response to the genuine need to somehow punish Cuba for confiscating billions of dollars worth of US property – land, factories, hotels, homes, and other holdings – during the revolution and its aftermath. Some estimates put it as high as $75 billion, hard as that is to believe.

Cuba was a thriving island – yes, it had poverty… yes, it had troubles… and yes, Batista was corrupt and authoritarian – but Cuba was on an upward trajectory until the days of the Castros.

The military success of The Movement - the Castro brothers, along with the monstrous Che Guevara and their other Marxist allies – stopped Cuban advancement in its tracks by turning the country communist. No matter how much trade they accomplished, no matter how many foreign holdings they nationalized; the Castro brothers, in a perfect “reverse Midas effect,” turn everything they touch into stagnation and suffering.

The United States instituted the embargo on principle – on the position that an honorable nation, even in a world as flawed as our own, must not stoop so low as to trade with the murderers of The Movement. No trade is worth that; we must wait until either the Castros are overthrown or they die of natural causes.

One must assume the latter date is not too far off; after all these years, the United States should certainly be able to wait.

Modern liberalism always builds its arguments on faulty premises – they set up a straw man for every argument, preferably a convenient position championed by the Right, on which they can pin the blame.

Long ago, as Cuba stayed locked in time, a prisoner of the 1950s while the rest of the earth was developing by leaps and bounds, the Left crafted the meme that the American embargo was the cause of Cuba’s stagnation.

Principled conservatism, the ethics of free market capitalism, just had to be the cause of all poor Cuba’s woes. If only we Americans would leave our principled conservatism behind, and instead embrace the idea of command economies and socialist trade. If only we Americans would do more business with Cuba, oh, that would make all the difference.

But as every year goes by, as every decade passes us, the lie becomes an ever harder sell.

We have seen plenty of other countries trade with Cuba, but the lives of the Cuban people don’t change. We have seen plenty of businesses buy and sell, plenty of cruise ships full of tourists visit, even the occasional American film maker blatantly tours Cuba to give the Cubans a share of Hollywood largesse. And still the Cuban people suffer.

Would our trade, once unleashed, dwarf that of Europe, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, and a hundred other countries? Would our trade produce a different outcome for that poor suffering island than the trade of all these other neighbors has? Would our trade turn Cuba from being just another Haiti into being another Key West? Would our trade transform Cuba from being another Dominican Republic into being another Cayman Islands?

No. The jury is in – and the truth of the matter has been evident for decades. No amount of trade, however great, from whatever partner nation(s), will ever make a substantial difference in the lives of the people of Cuba, as long as the Castro brothers rule, because a lack of commercial transactions just isn’t their real problem.

Cuba’s problem is a lack of freedom, a lack of independence from secret police. Their problem is the near-total taxation, the rampant political imprisonment, the intentionally endemic poverty, and an absolute Marxist government.

Trade – on Cuba’s terms – won’t change that. Only revolution or natural causes can.

If America is still the nation it once was – the City on a Hill that our Founding Fathers envisioned – we will honor the memory of the many millions, all over the world, who have been injured or killed by the Castros, and we will continue our honorable embargo, rather than be shamefully lured into the darkness, by a temptation of shimmering gold that drips with blood.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicago based international trade compliance trainer. A former minor activist in the Republican party (a local precinct captain in Cook and Lake Counties, a county chairman of the Milwaukee County GOP in the mid-1990s), he was also a member of the Captive Nations movement that stood up against the Cuban export of terror in the 1980s, and served a term as president of the Ethnic American Council, which sponsored and advocated for anti-communist freedom fighters during the Cold War. We must never forget the lessons of that period.

Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the byline and IR URL are included. Follow John F. Di Leo on Facebook or LinkedIn, or on Twitter at @johnfdileo.

Cluelessness on Cuba (Humberto Fontova)
12,26,2014

Excerpts

http://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2014/12/26/rand-pauls-cluelessness-on-cuba-n1935926/print

First off, if Castro “secretly favors the embargo,” then why did every one of his secret agents campaign secretly and obsessively against the embargo while working as secret agents? Castro managed the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in recent U.S. history. The spy’s name is Ana Belen Montes, known as “Castro’s Queen Jewel” in the intelligence community. In 2002 she was convicted of the same crimes as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and today she serves a 25-year sentence in Federal prison. Only a plea bargain spared her from sizzling in the electric chair like the Rosenberg’s.

In fact, few U.S. foreign policy measures in recent history have been as phenomenally successful as our limited sanctions against the Stalinist Robber-Barons who run Cuba. First off, for three decades the Soviet Union was forced to pump the equivalent of almost ten Marshall Plans into Cuba.

This cannot have helped the Soviet Union’s precarious solvency or lengthened her life span. Secondly, the U.S. taxpayer has been spared the fleecing visited upon many others who reside in nations who eschew “embargoing” Cuba.

Per-capita-wise, Cuba qualifies as the world’s biggest debtor nation with a foreign debt of close to $50 billion, a credit–rating nudging Somalia’s, and an uninterrupted record of defaults.

In 1986 Cuba defaulted on most of her foreign debt to Europe. Seven years ago France’s version of the U.S. government’s Export-Import Bank (named COFACE) cut off Cuba’s credit line. Mexico’s Bancomex quickly followed suit. The Castro regime had stuck it to French taxpayers for $175 million and to Mexican taxpayers for $365 million.

Bancomex was forced to impound Cuban assets in three different countries in an attempt to recoup its losses.
A bit later we heard from another Castro sucker: “The Cuban regime has a long track record of failing to pay back our loans,” lamented South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Trade & Industry, Geordin Hill-Lewis. “In 2010, South Africa had to write off R1.1 billion in bad Cuban debt, and on Friday we wrote off another R250 million in bad debt. The time has come for South Africa to invest in strategic partnerships that deliver prosperity for our people.”

in 1960 stormed into almost 6000 U.S. owned businesses (worth almost $ 2 billion at the time) and stole them all at Soviet gunpoint. A few American business-owners resisted. One of these was Howard Anderson who owned a filling stations and Jeep dealership (not a casino or brothel, which were relatively rare in pre-Castro Cuba, by the way.) I’ll quote from Anderson v. Republic of Cuba, No. 01-28628 (Miami-Dade Circuit Court, April 13, 2003). “In one final session of torture, Castro’s agents drained Howard Anderson’s body of blood before sending him to his death at the firing squad.”

The Inter-American Law Review classifies Castro’s mass burglary of U.S. property as “the largest uncompensated taking of American property by a foreign government in history.” Rubbing his hands and snickering in triumphant glee, Castro boasted at maximum volume to the entire world that he was freeing Cuba from “Yankee economic slavery!” (Che Guevara’s term, actually) and that “he would never repay a penny!”

This is the only promise Fidel Castro has ever kept in his life. Hence the imposition of the Cuba embargo, not that you’d know any of this from the mainstream media.

The burglarized (and often brutalized) American owners filed those property claims against Castro’s regime with the U.S. government. They’re worth $7 billion today—and must be settled before the so called embargo is lifted.

This settlement provision for lifting the embargo was codified into U.S. law in 1996 by the Helms-Burton act, which means only Congress can lift the embargo, obviously after a vote. But the votes are not there.

Shouldn’t Rand Paul know this?

In 1967 libertarian icon Murray Rothbard seemed highly bereaved and aggrieved to hear of Che Guevara’s whacking. Here’ his encomium to the Stalinist who outlawed private property under penalty of torture-chamber and firing-squad:
“Che is dead, and we all mourn him. Long live Che! Why? How is it that so many libertarians mourn this man?...What made Che such an heroic figure for our time is that he, more than any man of our epoch or even of our century, was the living embodiment of the principle of Revolution… we all knew that his enemy was our enemy–that great Colossus that oppresses and threatens all the peoples of the world, U. S. imperialism.”

Ron Paul regards Murray Rothbard as one of America’s “greatest men” and “greatest heroes of freedom.” Rand Paul, considers it an honor to have met Murray Rothbard and a “privilege” to have once driven him to the airport.

So let’s hope simple “cluelessness” motivates Rand

This is an “Embargo”?
By: Humberto Fontova
Friday, March 02, 2007

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/Printable.aspx?ArtId=25773

Congressional leftists and globocapitalists try to further erode our economic sanctions against Cuba.

A legislative scheme is gaining steam in Washington, greatly aided by lobbyists for Archer Daniels Midland, to “make it easier” for Cuba to “buy” from U.S. vendors. Despite all the scribbling and gabble about the “U.S. embargo of Cuba,” or “Blockade” as termed by The Congressional Black Caucus and Castro lobbyists (but I repeat myself), the U.S. has done over a billion dollars worth of business with Cuba the last few years and currently ranks as her biggest food supplier and fifth biggest import partner. Much of this business is with ADM.

Nevertheless, ADM executives and Castro lobbyists (but I repeat myself) whine that restrictions on doing business with Cuba are “too onerous.” These “restrictions” stipulate one thing primarily: that the Castroites pay cash for U.S. imports. Well, as Strother Martin asked Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid as they descended that Bolivian hill: “Do you wanna know why?”

Glad you asked. Following please find a list of items many in the Mainstream Media and Castro lobbyists (but I repeat myself) are frantically trying to erase or obscure:

In its first year in power the Castro regime received $200 million in subsidies from U.S. taxpayers while denouncing U.S. economic ties with Cuba as “Yankee imperialism!” The following year Castro’s KGB -trained security forces stormed into 5,911 U.S owned businesses in Cuba and stole $2 billion from outraged U.S. businessmen and stockholders at gunpoint. Rubbing his hands in triumphant glee, Castro boasted at maximum volume to the entire world that he was freeing Cuba from “Yankee economic slavery!” (Che’s term, actually) and that “he would never repay a penny!”

This is the only promise Fidel Castro has ever kept in his life.

“Okay, fine,” said a bewildered U.S. in 1962. (between 1950-1960 a befuddled U.S. made several back-channel contacts attempting to ascertain the nature of Castroite grievances and trying to mend fences. Argentina’s president, Arturo Frondizi, was the conduit for many. Every overture was haughtily rebuffed.) “Well, If that’s the way you Cuban Communists feel,” finally said an exasperated U.S. “Then fine, consider yourselves formally emancipated.”

Thus the original embargo.

Far from a “Blockade” as the World Council of Churches and Castro lobbyists (but I repeat myself) label it, Cuba, even then, remained perfectly free to transact with most of the nations of the world. But the deals with the Eastern Bloc were the sweetest.

The Soviets sent the equivalent in economic subsidies of eight Marshall Plans to Cuba, which was not a war-ravaged continent of 300 million people but an island of 6 million people who shortly before had enjoyed a higher-per-capita income than half of Europe. These Cuban citizens had owned more TVs’ per capita than any European country, had enjoyed the services (some free, most extremely cheap) of more doctors and dentists per capita then citizens in the U.S. or Britain and had never emigrated from their homeland. Instead, in the 40’s and 50’s when Cubans could get U.S. visas for the asking and Cubans were perfectly free to emigrate with all their property and family, fewer Cubans lived in the U.S. than Americans in Cuba. At the time Cuban laborers earned the 8th highest wages—not in Latin America—but in the world.

By a process that defies, not just the laws of economics, but seemingly the very laws of physics, 40 years later Castroite Cuba emerged from this Soviet largesse with among the lowest per-capita incomes in the Hemisphere, a lower credit rating than Somalia, fewer phones per capita than Papua New Guinea, fewer internet connections than Uganda, and 20 per cent of her population gone—all at total cost of their property and many at extreme cost to life and limb. An estimated 70 thousand perished by exposure, drowning or the jaws of sharks while desperately fleeing a nation formerly richer than Japan and swamped with European immigrants.

“Typical Communist mismanagement,” say most about Cuba’s wretched economy. Actually, given the goals of Cuba’s rulers, (undisputed political and economic power) the Cuban economy is expertly managed.

In 1984 ADM chief Dwayne Andreas became U.S. chairman of something called the U.S.-USSR Trade and Economic Council. Just from 1991 to 1993, the U.S., Dept. of Agriculture Department extended $5 billion in credits to the Soviet Union and the newly designated states resulting from her break-up.
A study by the Cato Institute in 1995, attempted to asses the cost to the U.S. taxpayer of this bit of ADM lobbying but was foiled. “The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Commodity Credit Corporation refuses to disclose the amount of ADM exports to the Soviet Union and Russia that might have been covered by U.S. government credit guarantees on which those countries later defaulted,” it reads. But the report does disclose that 43 per cent of ADM’s profits come from products subsidized by the US. taxpayer and that from 1980 to 1995 ADM profits cost U.S taxpayers $40 billion.
In 1998 a lobbying group called Americans for Humanitarian Trade with Cuba found Dwayne Andreas on its board. A few years later he also co-chaired the U.S.-Cuban Trade and Economic Council. Andreas, (now retired from ADM) is among the primary benefactors of the World Council of Churches whose manifesto advocates that: “Economic sanctions should be used to enforce compliance with international law and humanitarian principles. We call on the international community to apply immediate and comprehensive sanctions. We promote an end to all investments.”

The WCC’s humanitarian admonition applied exclusively to segregationist regimes. South Africa, you see, did not buy U.S. grain. They grew their own. Now regimes that are Stalinist, deadbeat AND segregationist—well, we must lavish them with commerce.

Jimmy Carter, who as President backed unholy tariffs against foreign ethanol imports to the enormous satisfaction of ABM and who upon retiring as gentleman farmer, sold ADM his peanut warehouses, proclaimed that: “the embargo against Cuba is the stupidest law ever passed in the U.S.”

Yet President Jimmy Carter, imposed more economic sanctions against more nations than any American president in modern history. These sanctions were against, Rhodesia, South Africa, Uruguay Paraguay, Chile, (the Shah’s) Iran and (Somoza’s) Nicaragua. Carter was extremely selective in imposing his sanctions, let’s give him that. He was careful to punish only U.S. allies.

Last month, one of the world most respected economic forecasting firms, the London- based Economist Intelligence Unit, ranked Cuba as virtually the world’s worst country business-wise. Only Iran and Angola ranked lower. This firm predicts that Cuba’s abysmal business climate will remain that way for the next five years, at the very least.

Dun & Bradstreet also rates Cuba among the world’s worst, right below Belarus. Moody’s rating is off the bottom of the chart as “very poor.” Their reasoning: Standard & Poors refuses even to rate Cuba, regarding the economic figures released by the regime as utterly bogus.

Today Cuba’s foreign debt, including to the former Soviet Union, approaches $40 billion. In 1986 Cuba defaulted on most of its foreign debt to Europe. France’s version of the U.S. government’s Export- Import Bank, (named COFACE) recently cut off Cuba’s credit line. Mexico’s Bancomex recently did likewise. This came about because the Castro regime stuck it to French taxpayers for $175 million and to Mexican taxpayers for $365 million. Bancomex was forced to impound Cuban assets in three different countries in an attempt to recoup its losses.

Yet Castro lobbyists on the hill insist that more trade with Cuba—on their terms—will be a boon and blessing to the U.S.
________________________________________
Humberto Fontova is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit www.hfontova.com

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.