You can argue whether or not sanctions are an effective way to promote regime change, or if they just hurt the regular citizens of rogue governments. I think they are often quite ineffective.
But there's no defending the Cuban regime.
r/ShitAmericansSay
::walks away whistling hoping you don’t notice Iraq and Afghanistan’s blown up weddings::
Feel free to start a discussion on US aggression, if you honestly feel strongly about it.
Otherwise you're blatantly trying to whitewash decades of systematic oppression from totalitarian bloodthirsty regimes, and in the process support all the human rights violations they're continuously subjecting their population to.
...except they weren't criticizing. Much like in this case, their intention was to divert the attention on their cruel and inhumane practices by picking any distraction they could find out, with the goal of perpetuating their abuse without being subjected to criticism.
It's the same reason why nowadays you have Putin's regime posting bullshit about how the people of the UK and Germany are somehow suffering from hardship to deflect the attention from the impact that international sanctions is having in it's economy. The target and substance of their attacks is immaterial, and their goal is to divert attention.
As a u.s. citizen, this resonates. I'm deeply troubled by the fact that we've been led by war criminals in my lifetime who got off scot-free.
Mind you, I'm not defending Cuba's human rights violations - I agree that things should be done to mitigate those. However, we should clean our own house first.
It's also been posted elsewhere in this thread, that sanctions haven't appeared to be effective. I think it's hard to argue otherwise, especially if you believe that the awful-dictator situation still persists, as we've had Cuba under sanctions for a while now.
It is supposed to mean the rhetorical trick of using other’s faults to distract from and normalize one’s own wrongdoing.
It is not a general defense against accusations of hypocrisy leveled by a third party.
Think about it, Soviet Union was not just knowing what you did last summer; it knew what you would be doing a summer 40 years from back then.
How do sanctions help an average Joe stuck living under such a regime?
Now they are even poorer, have worse nutrition and medicine.
The US has zero moral authority to impose sanctions based on violations of human rights while simultaneously violating human rights on a global scale.
Additionally, we have seen the effects of sanctions, the average people suffer even more, and the regime stays the same.
Arguably the people of Cuba are worse off after sanctions than before.
It's not a bad thing either, you can live your life like a saint and still die young of cancer. I think we're focused on physical instead of mental health too much sometimes.
If people like to live a certain lifestyle and know the risks, just let them.
I find it highly amusing how "exporting people" is suddenly portrayed as being an achievement, as if being exploited as an indentured servant is something praiseworthy in the 21st century.
In other contexts this is referred to as human trafficking and exploitation, but being Cuba this is suddenly something to brag about?
I lived in a country where the national health service resorted to hiring cuban "doctors" to fill in vacancies in deserted areas. The Cuban regime ripped them off out of a big chunk of their pay, they had no right to work beyond the job program, the national certification board had to bend over backwards to allow cuban doctors to practice as all they had was a mere 4 year degree whose scientific basis was questionable, and their role in the healthcare service was basically triaging patients to hand over cases to other doctors.
The "Cuba exports doctors" myth doesn't hold to scrutiny. I guess that even Dr Nick Riviera is a godsend in third world countries where people have to walk for hours to get basic medical care, but let's not pretend that Cuba does not coherce undereducated professionals to play a role whose value-added is highly dependent on the development status of the country that pays for this service.
It's not an achievement.
It's a sign of how hard the USA-based bullying had come so that a country cannot export goods or services so it has to export people.
It's indentured servitude. It's exploitation that treats the fellow man as nothing more than an exportable good whose role in life is to be abused to cater to the whims of despots.
You cannot deflect the blame of these subhuman practices onto foreign regimes just because you feel a specific oppressive regime that you support could use some extra cash.
Well, except you are. You're trying to shift the attention away from Cuba's track record on human rights abuses by arbitrarily picking distractions that frankly you care nothing about, as if pointing out these distractions justified Cuba's long history of oppression and abuse.
That's trying to answer abuses with more and harsher abuses.
The irony of complaining about human right abuses in Cuba and at the same time operating Guantanamo on Cuban land...
Source: I was born and raised there my entire life, and just came from there last weekend.