Question...
The US is the only country boycotting Cuba. Canada, Europe, Russia gladly trade with Cuba but it’s our fault their condition ?
Prior to Castro Pan Am had hourly flights between Maimi and Havana.
Castro hoodwinked the MSM and most of our population and pols into believing he was better for Cuba than Batista.(including teeny bopper me).
As soon as he came to power he started purging opponents. I knew a girl in Miami who’s uncle was executed.
Cluelessness on Cuba (Humberto Fontova)
12,26,2014
Excerpts
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