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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..
"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.
Well, RT is about as reliable as Fox News. If you assume that everything said is complete lies and the few things that are true are extremely skewed then you are pretty close to the truth.
With that said, the US embargo against Cuba has not exactly been beneficial to either of the nations. All this time since the cold war could have been spent bringing Cuba closer to the US. Just opening up a bit with regards to trading would have done a lot.
A better Cuban economy would benefit the US (How about cheap manufacturing on Cuba instead of in China?) and having a trading partner that close instead of a potential enemy there is a pretty nice deal.
In my opinion the stance US has towards Cuba is pretty retarded.
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.
>Communists in power don't force people to drink vodka & eat borscht you sniveling coward, they confiscate all your belongings, outaw dissent & condemn people to hard prison or insane asylums without fair trials.
No... that's what TYRANTS in power do. Just because we've had a lot of communist tyrants does not mean communism REQUIRES Tyrants (it doesn't) or that Tyrants are always communist (they aren't - in fact three of the worst tyrants of the 20th century were not - two were fascists [a form of capitalism] and one was a free market fundamentalist: Pinochet !)
There are variations of communist philosophy that are forms of anarchism - such as Anton Pannekoek's "Council Communism", Robert Hahnel's Parecon, Noam Chomsky's brand of Anarcho-syndicalism or the kind of libertarian socialism practised in Andalusia (Southern Spain) during the first 20 years of the last century - and would probably still be there if the scale of the world wars hadn''t overwhelmed them and gotten all of Spain under a different tyrant (Franco) with yet another economic philosophy that was fairly unique (close enough to capitalism for Spain not to be targeted during the cold war, close enough to communism for the Russians not to target them either - somewhat like facism but not enough for either side to care).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *