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Cuba Calculates Cost of 54yr US Embargo At $1.1 Trillion
First time accepted submitter ltorvalds11 writes Cuba says its economy is suffering a "systematic worsening" due to a US embargo, the consequences of which Havana places at $1.1 trillion since Washington imposed the sanctions in 1960, taking into account the depreciation of the dollar against gold. "There is not, and there has not been in the world, such a terrorizing and vile violation of human rights of an entire people than the blockade that the US government has been leading against Cuba for 55 years," Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Abelardo Moreno told reporters. He also blamed the embargo for the difficulties in accessing internet on the island, saying that the United States creates an obstacle for companies providing broadband services in Cuba. Additionally, he said that the area is one of the "most sensitive" to the embargo, with economic losses estimated at $34.2 million. It is also the sector that has fallen "victim of all kinds of attacks" by the US, as violations of the Cuban radio or electronic space "promote destabilization" of Cuban society, the report notes. The damage to Cuban foreign trade between April 2013 and June 2014 amounted to $3.9 billion, the report said. Without the embargo, Cuba could have earned $205.8 million selling products such as rum and cigars to US consumers. Barack Obama last week signed the one-year extension of the embargo on Cuba, based on the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, created to restrict trade with countries hostile to the U.S..
Russian propaganda. These are the same idiots who claimed Russia wasn't ever invading Ukraine.
"There is not, and there has not been in the world, such a terrorizing and vile violation of human rights of an entire people than the blockade that the US government has been leading against Cuba for 55 years,"
Ha ha ha ha! Funny guy. He needs to read a history book - or even a current weekly magazine.
Abretardo Morono - pushing the limits of ignorant hyperbole!
The righteous communists have a need to trade with the capitalist imperialists? Won't the ghost of Stalin provide for all?
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Works to something like $20 Billion a year. That's a credible figure. We do $650 billion with Canada in a year, and Cuba ain't that much smaller.
The problem with their argument is that whenever a US President tries to reduce tensions, they do something to ratchet them back up. For example, Obama was inaugurated in Jan of '09, announces easing the embargo by allowing families in the US to visit and send money more easily in April, and by December some poor schmuck (Alan Gross) is rotting in a Cuban jail for bringing computer equipment in for Jewish groups. It's true that if you're an evil dictatorship stopping your local people from doing that is not unreasonable, and it;s true our government paid for it, but it's also true that you could easily stop him seizing his computers and deporting his ass. Now if Obama ever does anything nice for Cuba (such as sticking his neck out on ending the embargo) people supporting the embargo strongly have a trump card: why would we trade with a country that is holding one of our guys in prison for the crime of helping people access the internet?
It would cost them literally nothing to let this guy go, but they insist on keeping him in prison where he can only prevent them from accessing that $20 billion a year export market.
Which means most independent observers have long concluded the Castros like the embargo, because it allows them to claim everything that is wrong with the country is Evil Foreign Gringo's fault. Which justifies things like arresting guys for bringing in computer equipment.
The sins of the father should not be carried by the son. I would continue the embargo for 7 more years and then force Cuba to allow US companies to open up shop there.
Why 7 more?
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I'm sure the United States would be more willing to consider ending the embargo if Alan Gross was freed from prison.
`more willing' in this case would mean saying 'No, no, no way' to ending the embargo, rather than 'No, no, no, no way'.
In other words, it is the political reality in the US that makes this impossible, not the imprisonment of a single guy.
If you really want to mess up Cuba - drop the embargo and flood them with goods.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
We're sorry but Cuban political prisoners were not available for comment. Electrical engineers had attempted to increase internet access in Cuba but fled to the freedom of the United States when they were told censorship doesn't allow true internet with scary freedom of speech. http://youtu.be/v5zmNRGAUQY
... a fucked up country full of paranoid war hawks and religious whack-jobs, that's about what you'd expect from america.
Happy September 11th. If I wished to say those things about the United States I'd even be able to do so as a citizen. If you're an American then congratulations, you're in one of the only countries that you can do that. If you're not American I don't intend to stifle your freedom of speech, I just dare you to say that about you're own country.
I wonder what the value of American-owned assets nationalized by Castro would be worth today had they never been nationalized. My guess is that it has to be at least Cuba's "cost" or worse.
It'd also be interesting to know the value of the lost productivity imposed by Cuba's communist economics.
The US Army is hardly the world's largest. Get a grip.
In terms of headcount, the US has the 3rd largest military, behind China and India. (North Korea is 4th) The US military employs 70% more people than the Russian military.
In terms of spending, the US has no close competition. The US spends 3.5 times as much as the next largest spender (China), and accounts, by itself, for more than a third of global military spending.
Cuba is a complex nation with both good and bad points and we should not adopt just the American view towards Cuba. First the revolution in Cuba went astray and many good people were killed or had their lives ruined. There is also no doubt that Cuba backed a hostile Soviet Union during the cold war. There is also no doubt that prior to Castro American organized crime ran rampant in Cuba and the public in Cuba was being raped by corruption. Some Cubans did better after the communist gained power just as some lost their lives, property or freedom. Meanwhile we all act like blissful idiots by avoiding the real issues. Island nations often lack enough natural resources to provide a decent life for their populations. The type of government does very little to change that. For example if Haiti were to go communist today they would still be a very poor nation. If Cuba adopted the government and laws of Sweden or Switzerland or the US Cuba would still be a suffering nation. Natural resources shrink when used. Every year Cuba has less natural resources. With strict birth control and population control such as allowing no immigration at all Cuba could shrink its population and there would be more natural resources per person which can cause more wealth per person. Civil unrest and revolution are all expressions of over population which we tend to see as poverty. Picture it this way. We give each form of government a resting place in its own paper bag. We place each paper bag in a coffin full of fish guts and seal the coffin. We come back after a month and each form of government will have the same wretched stink. The form of the government does not control the prosperity of a nation. If we try to judge nations by their ability to survive we would be talking about strong monarchies in Egypt or China where concepts of fairness simply were not in play and a monarch with crushing powers determined every little thing.
And you can somehow tell how much better off they'd be with the embargo lifted by walking around and looking at things? How did you come by this superpower?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Mainly foreigners who are accused of wanting to say it with guns and bombs, but there's no actual evidence and no judicial process or civilian oversight.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Well the US acted in 1960 to place the embargo, we're still waiting for them to actually think it through. It's funny that Cuba actually has a better medical system then the US, and it's state funded, probably what the embargo was about in the first place.
>Happy September 11th. If I wished to say those things about the United States I'd even be able to do so as a citizen. If you're an American then congratulations, you're in one of the only countries that you can do that. If you're not American I don't intend to stifle your freedom of speech, I just dare you to say that about you're own country.
My country has a government filled with extreme levels of corruption, the police is so corrupt as to be almost entirely ineffective - but when they do actually do anything it generally ends in unarmed poor (usually black) people being shot for daring to complain about it. the military is really only useful as an excuse for corrupt arms-deal contracts (mostly to buy equipment nobody is ever trained to actually be able to use), the president couldn't remove his head from his arse without major surgery, the opposition parties are no less corrupt and completely ineffective which has turned our once lofty intellectual political discourse into a farce of clowns throwing manure at each other.
Basically - we're exactly like America, only with a lot more poor people. Oh - and I have MORE civil liberties than YOU do.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Gross was a saboteur, trying to overthrow the Cuban government. His wife finally admitted as much, as I wrote above.
He was getting money under the Helms-Burton Act. The purpose of the Helms-Burton act was to overthrow the Cuban government. They were paying him to try the unworkable idea of setting up an alternate Internet, to help the Cuban Jews overthrow the Castro government. The Cuban Jews actually got along very well with Raul Castro.
The Cubans want to exchange Gross for 3 Cuban intelligence agents who are in prison right now. They came to the U.S. as undercover agents to monitor the Miami Cubans who were committing acts of terrorism against Cuba, such as blowing up a Cuban plane, and bombing tourist spots.
The U.S. has refused the exchange. The anti-Cuban hard-liners would rather leave Gross in prison than improve relations.
Cuba (Fidel Castro) doesn't want the embargo lifted. They know that lifting the embargo would be a threat to the command-and-control Communist regime. Censorship and the ban of capitalist media was unlike what's happening now in N. Korea. It was only recently around 2007 that the average Cuban can purchase an won their own PC. Even Internet access is still restricted.
My guess (and just a guess) Raul Castro will allow for greater reforms once his brother dies.
Life is not for the lazy.
And here we were taught by Under-development theorists (Marxists) that poverty was caused by exploitation by the capitalist countries (Core-Periphery) and that the solution was to have underdeveloped countries have less trade with capitalist countries. All sorts of regimes copied that (high import tarrifs, refusing outside companies from going in,etc...). Free market economists said that would create more poverty. Marxist economists and theorists said "bullsh1t." So. According to Marxist theorists and economists from the 1950s to the 1990s (out of grad school now - things may have changed) the Cuban embargo should have helped Cuba by saving them from capitalist exploitation.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
You really think that America is one of the only countries where you can say something like that?
Well our constitution was written much later - with a lot of inspiration from the US - which is why our bill of rights and the US one is very similar.
However there is also one or two items from more recent sources (for starters the entire International Convention on Human Rights).
There is also a few liberties we've taken from things like the German constitution - which deal with the realities of countries that had experienced gross human rights abuses - such as a right to dignity.
The right to dignity for example has several clauses - such as a positive obligation placed on the government to ensure there is quality housing for all citizens and a requirement that evictions can only be done with a court order. Another impact is that it informs the right not to be discriminated against - here a business cannot deny service to anybody on discriminatory grounds. Recently a wedding venue wanted to refuse a gay couple the right to marry there on religious grounds and lost their case - the constitutional right not to be discriminated against on sexual orientation means that if you operate a business you MUST serve ALL sexual orientations. There's no obligation to approve of gay marriage, but you cannot as a business discriminate against it (a church could refuse to host a service, but a church is not a business).
Not everybody thinks these are freedoms, some people would say the above example reduces the business owner's freedom for example - and it's true that this is a trade-off but the right not to be discriminated against protects freedoms (such as freedom of association and movement) for many, many people - if a small minority has a very slight decrease in freedom (while making money out of the people they aren't allowed to mistreat) then this is a worthwhile trade-off in my mind.
In some regards the fact that our constitution is only 20 years old has been advantageous - it means that we have all the rights the US has - most of which were not in their original constitution (Everything with "amendment" in it) right in the basic document, and we still have the option of future amendments if we need them.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The moral of the story is if you own some crappy little island right next to the US and you have crap for local resources, don't ally with some broke ass country like Russia.
And I wonder what kind of counter-claim of damages the USA can pretend they too suffered in the loss of trade. Probably just about the same amount in total.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Let's not forget that the best estimates for the death of communist regimes killing their own people is right around 100 million people. Both The Black Book of Communism and R.J. Rummel's Death by Government come up with roughly the same number of people killed.
Communism is incompatible with both human rights and a healthy economy, and never has, never can, and never will meet the needs of its own people or offer better lives than those under capitalism.
Embargoes have nothing to do with it...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Michael Totten did, and he found a police state overseeing wrenching poverty, complete with shortages for essentials and goods of retched quality.
In short: Communism.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
When someone has plans to point a nuclear missile at you in your back yard, you do what you can to protect yourself. The net result of the Cuban 'experiment' is a large number of well-educated people who have little or no resources to use that educational wealth.
The missile crisis happend two years after the embargo started, and one year a a failed invasion from the US. It has been hardened even after the fall of the soviets (Torricelli, Helms Burton). Even now, it is still actively applied against third countries. Claiming that the embargo was caused by the missile crisis denotes a profound ignorance of history, and a profound unwillingness to educate oneself.
Your asinine statement is predicated on the idea that international trade is a -requirement- for a communist nation to be successful. Globalism opens up greater opportunities, but by no means is it required for any nation to succeed. Even complete islands of people can function without Marxist ideology. And FYI, Cuba isn't an American welfare state. They can (and do) trade with the rest of the world and South America just fine. If Communism falls, it falls on its own face. Please see N. Korea and their Juche philosophy.
Damn, what they hell are they teaching you in school these days? FFS!! Please PLEASE educate yourself.
Life is not for the lazy.