The Cuban Embargo Myth
First off, for the course of 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. To wit:
Nowadays the so-called U.S. embargo merely stipulates that the Castro regime pay cash up front through a third–party bank for all U.S. agricultural products; there is no Export-Import Bank (U.S. taxpayer) financing of such sales. Enacted by the Bush team in 2001, this cash-up-front policy has kept the U.S. taxpayer among the few in the world not screwed and tattooed by Fidel Castro.
Here are a few items regarding the so-called embargo studiously side-stepped by much of the MSM, the U.S. farm lobby, and Castro lobbyists:
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 2007, one of the world’s 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 predicted that Cuba’s abysmal business climate would remain that way for the next five years, at the very least.
Standard & Poor’s refuses even to rate Cuba, regarding the economic figures released by the regime as utterly bogus.
In 1986, Cuba defaulted on most of its foreign debt to Europe. Three 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. 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.
Last year the Castro regime suddenly froze $ 1 billion held in Cuban banks by foreign (mostly Spanish) businessmen. “Cuban banks informed depositors that they had no foreign exchange to back up the convertible peso in which many were doing business,” explained the Reuters Havana bureau. Spain’s criticism of the U.S. “embargo” has recently become much shriller.
The anti-“embargo” mantra from CNN, the U.S. Rice Producers Association, and Castro lobbyists also stresses that a flood of rich Western tourists will magically smother Cuban Stalinism, whereupon the island nation will quickly mutate into a bigger (and more historic and picturesque) Cozumel. This reasoning seems to go something like this: rewarding and enriching the KGB-trained and heavily armed guardians of Cuba’s Stalinist status quo will magically convert them into instant opponents of that Stalinist status quo.
As two decades of such tourism have amply proven, any trickle of foreign currency that reaches the Stalinist regime’s subjects (primarily from prostitution) is offset a thousand-fold by the millions ($2.4 billion last year, for instance) crammed into the regime’s military and secret-police coffers.
thank you for your continued writing. these are little known facts which highlight how dishonest the news media is ..not just in north america but the whole world.
here is a link you may find interesting and it does shed some light on the continued threat. Olavo de Carvalho has some excellent essays on the “socialist” manipulations in latin america.
http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/english/
The so called cuban missle crisis was fake.
Read Peter Wright’s book Spy Catcher.
Apparently it was manufactured to get concessions from the American government by the Russians. and by all counts they got all they asked for.
Well, well, well. Imagine that. There really isn’t any embargo, just a requirement that they pay cash for what they get.
This was published on BigJournalism
Given that Andrew Breitbart’s focus is media bias, I’m disappointed that Humberto can give such an absurd slant, and have it be gobbled up hook, line and sinker. That Americans (and practically everyone who reads it agrees that there’s no embargo, despite 50 year of evidence to the contrary) buy Humberto’s nonsense logic is a sad statement.
1. The US embargo of Cuba is called the embargo by everyone. Using the world Hollywood doesn’t mean it’s only referring to the city limits of Hollywood. Picking on Time for using a term everyone uses is beginning the ranting and raving. Cuba and Latin America calls this a blockade, with reason. By the end, I will give a better term than embargo, though, so bear with me.
This article uses the world Castro so many times, but Fidel Castro retired years ago. Oh, he gives speeches. Wow. OK. If you meant Raul Castro, there are still another 11.2 million people in Cuba, and, despite the best efforts of Americans to forget that they are still there, I remember them. It’s their Cuba also.
2. The tourism figures for Americans are overstated, but only a truly stupid person would see this as something to hold against Cuba. Americans are exercising their 1st and 14th amendment rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and equal treatment, as well as the right to be free of laws that restrict their liberty.
The one thing that I’ve been amazed that Americans have not protested is an invasion of foreigners (in this case from Cuba – I know of no other comparably arrogant and bossy immigrant group) who DEMAND that their (government subsidized) stay in America be accompanied by a nullification of the US Constitution when it comes to Miami-Cuban issues. I think there’s a name for people who want to put their own selfish interests ahead of the US Constitution, and it’s traitors. Say what you want about the government of any other country – the US Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and it should come before any immigrant group’s giant axe to grind.
Back to the numbers.
3. Who said that was the embargo’s purpose? Humberto, are you Rip Van Winkle? Did you just wake up in a Miami Condo after being asleep for 47 years, since that speech was given? Have you not heard of the 638 assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, which I have no doubt you supported as soon as you learned of them, and which have made Fidel Castro a global hero, and a symbol of standing up to the US?
(Should be a 4. Can’t count that high?)
4. I’ve heard that Cuba’s foreign debt is $18 billion, not $50 billion. You’ve said the stats are wrong (I’ve seen this in your other rants, I mean blog posts, so it’s odd that you build your arguments around Cuban stats, and says that, if effect, not to trust anything you say either). As for the rating agency, it’s a US rating agency, and if you haven’t learned that ratings are POLITICAL in nature, just like your Castro-Castro-Castro repetition, they are a tool of war to undermine the Cuban economy.
I think you are on the wrong side of history, Humberto. You are advocating a policy that has failed for fifty years, and united the entire world against the US. I has cost the US hundreds of billions of dollars in both spending and lost income to Americans, and cost Americans (mainly Floridians, and mainly Miami Cubans) tens of thousands of jobs.
It is not the job of the US to change the Cuban government. If the US really wanted Castro gone, it would have accepted his offer to kill himself in return for Guantanamo Bay, which we’ve had for 107 years, only to see it turn into a recruiting symbol for terrorists, according to the current Attorney General.
I agree with you about not calling it an embargo. It’s the fourth Cuban Civil War, with the rich vs. the poor, and the rich will not be happy until they have reconquered their place as the nobility of Cuba and put those poor people back into their proper place as serfs to cut the sugar cane. 450 years of Spanish and American dominance of Cuban affairs is just not enough. We’re just getting started!
…as serfs cutting sugar cane the general population would be in a better position then they are today.
…as for invoking the name castro …it doesn’t matter which one is referred too. they are the same.
..the embargo is not what failed. it was the lack a enforced embargo. so in reality it is only an embargo in name.
there is no good in socialized countries. SHOW ME ONE THAT IS SUCCESSFUL …just one.
Out of a nation of over 11 million people, Cuba found that Raul Castro, by sheer coincidence, was best fit to rule the country, amazing, what are the chances that such a concentration of unique intelligence and ability would concentrate in a single family like that. And he didn’t even have to run for office, it was simply self-evident that he should rule by the clear mandate of his unique aura of authority.
The reason so many Americans and Europeans go to Cuba is because they enjoy the tremendous benefits of a nation held hostage by a secret police state; when a country is desperately poor, so poor that people bind together coconuts to make rafts to take to the high seas and escape, then you can buy sumptuous meals and prostitutes at bargain basement prices. Like the fat, venal, unconscionable Russian commissars who became accustomed to living high off the hog in their dachas and retreats filled with all the delicacies and pleasures while the rest of the people fought for old bread and thin soup, so, too, the same defenders of the people in Europe, America, and Latin America can go off to Cuba and stuff themselves while getting their rocks off for under $20 combined ($30 if you want sisters) while the people they claim to adore are standing around starving. When you can simultaneously enslave a people while convincing yourself that you are ennobling them, then you have truly accomplished something…imaginative on earth.
“This article uses the world Castro so many times, but Fidel Castro retired years ago. Oh, he gives speeches. Wow. OK. If you meant Raul Castro, there are still another 11.2 million people in Cuba, and, despite the best efforts of Americans to forget that they are still there, I remember them. It’s their Cuba also.”
It’s people like you who are ignoring the vast majority of the Cuban population. When did they ever get to vote for (or against, more to the point) either of your Castros?
By the way, in case you didn’t notice, “Fidel” was recently pontificating about matters (for a supposedly almost dead bloke, the b*st*rd’s doing pretty well – he must have a Scottish doctor). In a democratic country, the opinions of a former prime minister or president are just that. In Cuba, the comments of “Fidel” somehow remain critically important. Care to explain?
I made four friends in Havana. All four had lost large fortunes when their family businesses were nationalized. One of them was persecuted and lost his professorship because he was politically incorrect. But all four agreed that the Cuban people as a whole are much better off under Fidelismo than they were under Batista, the previous American-backed dictator. Fidel has done a lot of good for his country and his crimes pale next to those of Batista, whose death squads assassinated more than 20,000 Cubans.
20,000!
The blood on Fidel’s hands is from millions, in Cuba, Central and South America, and in Africa!
Take off the blinders and look around, you’ll be amazed at what you will see.
The 4 friends you made in Cuba were employees of a special department of the Cuban secret service whose job is steering foreign visitors. My cousin used to work there.
All of the information they gave you was fraudulent, which should have been obvious to anyone with eyes – before Castro there was massive European immigration to Cuba, not flight from it on rafts.
I don’t get it — if Cuba got 200,000 legal American visitors last year, in what sense does a travel ban even exist?
Cuba is our neighbor. Their thinking is different from the ways of Americans. We get along with other more exotic cultures. Let’s behave like intelligent grown-ups. One problem is the Miami mafia. The Castros look like saints compared with these reptiles. Don’t just read about them, read what they say themselves.
VIVO: Nothing flushes you out of your libtardian sewer faster than an opportunity to defend the cuban stalinist murderer.The only “mafia” in question,is the mafia called the cuban communist party, that exploits and terrorizes the cuban people .”Exotic”What a weirdly dishonest way to characterize 50 years of state repression ,death camps, and economic failure.Practice what you preach and GROW UP! Communism is a virulent catastrophic failure that ending the embargo won’t save.
#6 SMARBA: As a public service to Brain-damaged useful idiots who have trouble spelling,SMEGMA is spelled S-M-E-G-M-A,NOT S-M-A-R-B-A !
1STAMEND: Love your handle,the Orwellian irony is delicious, especialy coming from a stalinist apologist for a regime that shoots, imprisons, and terrorizes citizens who try speak and write their opinions!
The problem is media bias. It’s right here in Jakarta too, the Jakarta Post published a terrible piece last month claiming Castro’s regime wasn’t racist. It took our local conservative expat blog to expose the distortion.
I see it (Ross’s Right Angle)has added you to its blogroll. We should keep in touch.