The embargo has had an exception for food and medicine for the past 30 years.
I’d guess the reason has more to do with minimal foreign exchange reserves to purchase vaccines from any country.
Honestly, the Cuban people can stop this embargo tomorrow morning by simply returning stolen property to it's rightful owners and deciding to chose democracy over the support of the Castro family.
Same way the patriots at the Boston tea party chose democracy.
The Castro family could have ended this suffering decades ago. They decided not to, preferring to see "their" people starve and die of preventable diseases.
Moreover even if the ‘rightful owners’ of property were found, it’s far from obvious how that would solve geopolitical difficulties with the US; after all, all sorts of governments which violate most Americans’ notions of property rights are on very good terms with it.
As for the possibility of spontaneously choosing ‘democracy over the support of the Castro family’, at best this is an almost vacuous statement akin to ‘if nobody were to litter there would be no more additional litter’. Even quite praiseworthy and courageous peoples have some difficulty overthrowing their governments (e.g. in Sudan, Myanmar, Hong Kong…); the ‘patriots at the Boston tea party’ made similar choices, but merely choosing revolt does not guarantee success.
Finally, on the embargo: the medicines exception of course exists, but US sanctions can, if desired, affect trade with most of the world economy, since most companies have some connexion e.g. to the US financial system. To the extent that is not the case in Cuba, that is because the implicit suggestion of the original quote, viz., that were sanctions loosened certain economic benefits would accrue in Cuba, has itself either been implemented or not been contradicted by some contrary policy.
Democracy and freedom are never granted; they are fought for.
> Finally, on the embargo: the medicines exception of course exists, but US sanctions can, if desired, affect trade with most of the world economy, since most companies have some connexion e.g. to the US financial system.
If they would rather trade with Cuba than the US, that's their decision.
What a brave thing to say from the confort of your sofa.
I mean you being American I imagine that should be read “they are fought for mostly by the French with French money and weapons in a proxy war against England”.
Lafayette sure helped the revolution a lot, but it's a stretch to claim that it was France who liberated the US.
You would need a lot of archeological findings to "find" all these extra french soldiers.
This is not quite correct; sometimes they are both fought for and granted—as, e.g., in every mostly agreed decolonisation, or the path from Groote Schuur to the interim constitution, &c. &c.
More to the point, that is precisely why I quibble with the claim that the people of Cuba ‘can stop this embargo tomorrow morning’; they could tomorrow start to fight for democratisation (which plausibly leads to the end of the blockade)—with no guarantee of success.
> If they would rather trade with Cuba than the US, that's their decision.
This is more goalpost-shifting; the initial claim here is ‘Cuba is also free to trade with 179 other countries in the world’, which it isn’t in the case where all the other countries decide not to trade with Cuba because of American pressure. Of course in this case it is also other countries’ decision quite how to respond to American pressure. Now it so happens that sanctions on Cuba do not seem to have as much extraterritorial effect as e.g. those on Iran, so the question does not in practice arise to the same extent as in this hypothetical. But your original point seems to be that a blockade by one country couldn’t be to blame for that much economic difficulty because other countries may not have instituted such a blockade themselves; this is, as a general point, wrong. (Incidentally, where does the number 179 come from? The UN alone has 193 members—and presumably one ought to add Taiwan &al.)
https://www.cato.org/commentary/madeleine-albright-back-she-...
Here is the opposite of current US policy of starving people in countries whose regimes we oppose:
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/herbert-hoover-ussr-gre...
We know what George Bush thought, of course and we probably know what most oil consuming countries would want --which aligns with GHW, but what is the responsibility of these sides? Is OPEC obliged to export because if they didn't millions would die? Would it be okay to invade at that point? How do we square things?
Or as Joe Biden put an embargo and withheld vaccine supplies to India as they were dying from Coronavirus even though the US had overcapacity and had already had more vaccinations in stock than the population. Should India attack the US for killing lots of its citizens?
Thousands risking their lives on makeshift rafts in the hope of making it to the US.
That sounds like a happy place.
Please do not use our suffering for gotchas on internet discussions. If you actually care, do something about it instead.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/11/how-fidel-castros-n...
They used to send homosexuals to labor camps
> Please do not use our suffering for gotchas on internet discussions.
Are you Cuban?
> Are you Cuban?
I'm a transgender woman who lives in a country with an active agenda against LGBTQ+ people today, and will not stand for my (and my friends') suffering being used to spread any propaganda that doesn't seek to liberate us.
Same leaders. Same party.
> I'm a transgender woman who lives in a country with an active agenda against LGBTQ+ people today, and will not stand for my (and my friends') suffering being used to spread any propaganda that doesn't seek to liberate us.
A house divided against itself, cannot stand. Let's defend the Cuban regime because... it doesn't help the cause of your country's LGBTQ+ people?
As this is exactly what is missing from the US, it's not hard to see how disastrous an economic and cultural colonization of Cuba by the USA would turn out.
Cuba is free to do that, but what about the countries? Or more specifically, the companies who wanted to also trade with US-based companies? In Europe, there were occasionally cases of US-companies who tried forcing European companies to stop trading with Cuba because of their own legal situation. Some succeeded, some not.
And when somebody stole property from American and Spanish families to make a new country claiming liberty, that was unfair and unacceptable and they must return it ASAP. Correct?