Cuba

La Belle and I were talking earlier today about Cuba. She says the owners of a newspaper in town have a sailing vessel and go to Cuba sometimes on journalistic permits. They say it's a beautiful place. I've heard the same thing from other people who have visited the island. And I was saying that I was amazed at what I'd read recently about how advanced Cubans are in spite of the decades old blockade and the animosity of U.S. governments. What I was reading is that Cuba compares with the U.S. in literacy and life expectancy for both men and women and also in infant mortality, and that it has 260 doctors per capita (with health care for all). And it manages this on a pittance compared to our wealth. (Real GDP per capita for Cuba: $2,300; for America: $34,142)

Of course, we (the U.S.A.) are currently running up the old Fidel demon flag for the umpteenth time. Only this time, they're throwing Venezuela into the bargain.

I see this evening that Eli at Left I has a post today about Cuba:


Treasury Secretary John Snow, speaking (no surprise here) to "100 Cuban-American businessmen in vote-rich southern Florida" (as Forbes puts it), announced today "tough action against 10 business groups that promote travel and trade with Cuba."

The supposed rationale for the embargo, the "legal" reason, is "trading with the enemy" - Cuba is a "threat" to "national security." Of course this is complete nonsense. The real reason is that the U.S. doesn't want an experiment in socialism to succeed; they want to be able to continue pointing to Cuba as an economic failure. Curiously, whenever Cuba talks about the effect of the embargo on the Cuban economy (billions of dollars over the years), the U.S. always poo-poohs this as an "excuse" and claims the embargo has no effect. If so, then why this new crackdown? Why does Snow talk about "cutting off American dollars headed to Fidel Castro" and "[putting a] stop to another illegal pathway for U.S. dollars to Castro's wallet"? The U.S. loves to anthropomorphize, so it's never clear if they are using "Castro" as a synonym for "Cuba," or trying to imply that Castro is somehow personally enriching himself. If the latter, it would be the coarsest slander (especially coming from the notoriously self-enriching Bush administration), since there isn't the slightest evidence that Fidel Castro is anything but the hardest working political leader in the world, totally dedicated to the welfare of his country without a trace of self-aggrandizement (go to Cuba and you'll see plenty of pictures of Che, and other dead Cuban heroes, on walls, but none of Fidel).

For those who haven't thought too much about the embargo (also called the "blockade" by many of its opponents) against Cuba, it's worth thinking of the high-tech analogy. Imagine if Microsoft set out to crush a smaller rival, a much smaller rival, one so small you've probably never heard of them, let's call them CubaSoft. Now imagine they're doing so in the absence of any law which will restrain their behavior. Imagine if they went to their customers and said, if you buy any software from CubaSoft, we won't let you buy any of our software. Imagine if they went to software stores (back in the day when software was actually sold in stores) and said, if you sell CubaSoft software, you can't sell our software. Imagine if they prevented MSN subscribers from visiting the CubaSoft website, and prevented Hotmail users from sending email to CubaSoft. Imagine if they threatened to pull their sponsorship from a software developer's conference if they allowed anyone from CubaSoft to register. None of these analogies is exxagerated in the slightest compared to what the U.S. is doing to Cuba. Now think about how incredible it is that Cuba has managed to stand up to this constant pressure, the price they are paying for doing so, and the absolutely despicable nature of the people who maintain this policy, claiming that they are doing the Cuban people a favor by making them suffer.

One thing Eli misses in this is that the "vote-rich" (read heavy political contribution) Cuban-American Florida businessmen were put out of the corporate corruption business when Fidel nationalized Cuba's resources. Well, they were put out of business in Cuba - they set up shop in Florida. See my post on "Big Sugar".

I've had occasion to post some things about Fidel lately. Actually, since the late 50's I hadn't really paid any attention to Fidel. I remember when I was very young hearing about a great hero revolutionary in Cuba - Fidel Castro. And the next thing I remember hearing about him, he was Satan incarnate. You may recall that just this Sunday, Patsy Tim Russert set Bush up with a nice "Fidel is a madman" lead. We're getting desperate to get rid of Venezuela's Chavez - a democratically elected socialist leader who has control over a big percentage of the oil we import, and Cuba is being leveled in the same sights. Expect the rhetoric to gain in both frequency and intensity.

Now I'm sure somebody's going to tell me to take my commie ass to Cuba if it's so much better than America. Which isn't what I said. But since I haven't been there, how do I know? What I do know is that if we don't do something soon to turn this country around, we're going to find ourselves in a world of hurt with millions of unemployed people who have no health care and no hope, and many without homes. Bad place to be.

As La Belle said earlier, when our own people who have been abandoned by the government get desperate, they won't have to go far to attack us.

...but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.