End the U.S. Embargo on Cuba | Hacker News Reader

End the U.S. Embargo on Cuba

nytimes.com

103 pointsrodrigocoelho32 comments

2nd generation Cuban American here. My family has a massive anti-Cuban government sentiment and pretty much all the older Cuban people in Miami feel the same. I don't blame them considering most had their homes and belongings taken from them by the current Cuban government.

As someone who is a little more removed from the actual suffering Castro caused I believe that if the embargo ended and the US and Cuba began trading again that the regime would lose a lot of strength just from the exchange of culture. Especially since the US and Cuba are such close neighbors.

What could possibly happen though is that the regime clamps down completely on trade and all the money being made goes straight to the higher ups in the government. Which is why most Cubans that moved away don't want the embargo to end.

Also a 2nd generation Cuban American, born/raised in Miami. I think you're right on the money with all your points.

I also believe the embargo has another dimension having to do with stability of the status quo on both sides of the Florida Straits:

-The Cuban government often uses the boogeyman of the United States to justify their policies (and their people's poverty) domestically. The embargo keeps the U.S. strongly in the boogeyman category.

-On the other hand, I would wager that the United States wants little to do with a destabilized Cuban regime 90 miles away from Florida. While they are probably pretty old by now, there are still some Cold War era militant groups in South Florida that wouldn't mind capitalizing on a collapsing Cuban regime (i.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_66).

I think the fear of destabilization so close to the U.S. also figures into the government's calculus, which apparently concludes it's best to keep the embargo untouched for the moment. However, as the article says, it is true that the situation is changing as the Cuban government makes some sink-or-swim adjustments to their system...

We trade with countless non democratic states yet do to a few factors such as Florida being a swing state Cuba is evil incarnate.

If after 50 years the embargo hasn't worked it isn't going to.

I think it's not about non-democracy, and more about setting precedents and reminders. Threats are only worth something if they are believed, and Cuba never did anything to warrant a lifting of the sanctions. The rationale is that lifting the sanctions would weaken the threat of sanctions against other countries.

While I would applaud a removal of the sanctions I can understand why it's such a hot potatoe. I think Cuba will have to wait until the next president, or make a relatively large gesture towards changing its ways.

Absolutely, Cuba was supposed to become an example of what it means to thwart US interests, in most simple and blatant terms. A quick video and an interesting article from Chomsky on this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_K5nLyvijw

http://www.chomsky.info/books/hegemony02.htm

If you think we're not trading with Cuba because of the lack of democracy, you probably don't know much about the embargo.

It hasn't worked?

No. There is still a Castro in office. If the point wasn't in a long term ending of the regime, what exactly was the point of the embargo?

Which countries have nationalized our companies and gotten away with it since Cuba did it?

Venezuela. Bolivia. Peru. Chile. Guyana. Jamaica.

The only thing the sanctions against Cuba did was drive them into the loving arms of USSR. Well played.

> our companies

Who is the "our" in our companies? I never owned a company in Cuba.

Iran. Which is why they have their own embargo.

Then why doesn't Bolivia?

Punishment.

One of my best friends went to Cuba this summer. He told me that if you wanna see the real thing you must go there pretty fast, things are changing, Castro is losing grip and Capitalism is growing slowly but steadily. Prices have grown and people are ready to embrace foreign investment.

I think it's a good time to end the embargo, given the fact that even in foreign policy Obama failed to deliver what was expected (in retrospect that nobel prize seems utterly ridiculous), I'd say that it would add some points to the US president a bold move like that.

In the "politics" section of my bucket list, aka "what political events I'd like to see in the world before I die", this makes a line-entry.

I'm the only person in my family who wasn't born and raised in Cuba. I've spent time on the island and it's been an obsession of mine for as long I can remember.

If you read the writings of American foreign policy makers from around the time the embargo was put into place, it's clear that the embargo exists for idealogical reasons more than anything else. The American government was afraid that if the Cuban Revolution was allowed to continue without stiff (and illegal) resistance from the US, that it would act as blueprint for successful socialist government in the region. They were afraid that its ideals would spread beyond the small island into Central and South America. And they had a good point. Even today, with the Cuban economy in a pretty dire condition, the Cuban Revolution is widely admired throughout Latin America. Imagine the movements the Revolution could have inspired in the last 60 years had the embargo not sapped the Cuban economy of so much potential. It should be noted, that the embargo is illegal under international law. Every time the subject comes up for vote in the UN, the only 2 nations to reaffirm the embargo are the usual suspects - the US and Israel.

On the island, the embargo provides the government with a convenient excuse for its poor economy. Unfortunately, it's a pretty good excuse, and the citizens understand that. I don't think the average Cuban is any more anti-American than the average American is anti-Cuban. Even though I grew up hearing stories about how shitty the authorities were in Cuba, it was hard for me to admit that it was a police state until I first visited. It's sad, but it is a police state, and again the US is partially to blame for inspiring so much paranoia in the regime. For as much as the US claims to fight against terrorism, it was responsible for terrorizing the Cuban people in countless ways, not least of which includes bombing a passenger airline (Cubana Flight 455). That said, from the point of view of American policy makers, I think that their aims in Cuba have been relatively successful. They didn't succeed in killing Castro or the dream of the Revolution, but they did ensure that Cuba was transformed into a draconian state with a crappy economy, thereby making it a poor model for other states in the region to follow.

For all its failures, the Cuban government has also had many successes. I think they deserve praise where it's due, because for the last 60 years they have been regarded as an enemy by their neighbor, the worlds most powerful state. Since everyone already knows about the shitty things the Cuban government has done, I'll lay out some of their redeeming achievements.

1. Cuba was the only government to send its military to help liberate Africa from colonial powers. They also sent military forces to help liberate South Africa, which is why Mandela looked up to Fidel Castro a personal hero and friend. While the US and most Western nations did everything they could the continue the status quo in South Africa, Castro stood firmly on the right side of history and backed up his words with money and men.

2. There are no homeless people in Cuba. I walk through downtown LA every week and I see more misery on one street than I've seen in the poorest cities in Cuba. To me this is inexcusable and a signature failing of the American way of life.

3. The World Wildlife Fund reports that Cuba is the only sustainable country in the world. I couldn't find the original report, but what this means is that its the only country that can take care of all of its citizens needs without compromising the needs of future generations. http://pages.vassar.edu/sustainability/video/history-of-sust...

4. Cuba has amongst the highest literacy and life expectancy rates in the world, both of them just a bit higher than those in the US.

>>2. There are no homeless people in Cuba. I walk through downtown LA every week and I see more misery on one street than I've seen in the poorest cities in Cuba.

My uncle visited Cuba and stayed for a month. My understanding is that there is plenty of misery in Cuba. The difference is that it happens indoors and out of sight, as opposed to outdoors and in front of everyone (i.e. homeless).

Is it the same kind of misery, though? If the situation in Cuba is as you describe, then at least the basics of keeping a roof over one's head is a solved issue (maybe not well solved) and other problems require a different kind of solution that is not yet a recognized problem by the government.

The same problems may be occuring in the US, but with the addition of the misery of no roof and no food.

It doesn't speak well of either country, really. But, Cuba has a solution to the problem of homelessness, implemented in a crappy way.

But the US is just flat writing people off.

I'm not thrilled with the US and I doubt I'd be happy living in Cuba either. But at least I wouldn't be homeless.

Given the serious crises in the Mideast, Eastern Europe and West Africa, the notion that ending the embargo on Cuba would be seen as a "significant foreign policy success" is wishful, naive thinking on the part of the editorial board.

I don't see how the one follows from the other. You're saying because there are big issues, solving what you seem to deem as a relatively small issue, therefore can't be deemed a significant success?

If so, I'd invite you to look into the 200 year history of US-Cuban relations, as well as the extent to which the embargo affects virtually everything for a population of 11 million people. It's extremely pervasive.

A change here would be quite a major foreign policy event. To get a sense of this, the UN general assembly condemned it for every single year without exception for decades now, with votes usually showing 180 or so in favor of condemning and 3 or so against (the US, Israel and something politically insignificant like Micronesia)

I born and live in Cuba. I will give some insights from a tech/developer perspective. I'm a young rails and ios developer who works mainly as a freelance, consultancy and lately running a local startup. Being a cuban developer isn't an easy task mainly by the following reasons, all of those due to the embargo (yeahh, i agree with the argument that this is a "convenient excuse for its (our) poor economy" but "Unfortunately, it's a pretty good excuse") and this is why for the most part:

- A lot of services are blocked too Cuba due to the Embargo (Google, Paypal and a lot of other companies services). I know that they can't do too much about that, only follow the law. For example this image is almost a day to day thing http://imgur.com/8l5rmxt Hopefully a lot of this stuffs can be solved using a VPN.

- Is extremely difficult to access paid services like rent hosting, buy domains, etc. Most of the time i ask for favors to friends of mine who lives in other countries to help me to paid those kind of premium services.

- The internet connection is extremely slow and in most cases limited by very restrictive firewalls. To put in perspective, 56 Kbps dial-up connections are still a very popular kind of connection here. Until the arrive of the optical fiber cable our main channel of international communications was a really expensive satellite link with a very limited bandwidth. Recently with the optic fiber cable arrive things are becoming much more easy but still very far from the ideal scenario.

As you can see, this thread-off, if not impossible to solve it means a huge competitive disadvantage if you are running a tech business, not to mention if you are going international. Even when i work as a freelance is difficult to explain to my employees that two or three days without internet can be a thing in some moment.

To be even more illustrative and pragmatic i will give some insight of my recent startup. I'm the co-founder and main developer at Isladentro http://isladentro.net . This is a mobile-first startup to promote and emerging sector of self-employee workers and local business (think of it as a cuban yelp). So far we have gained a lot of traction and have a lot of happy customers which by the way paid for the service, is a premium service. We have a lot to improve (yeahh is a crappy website but that was a MVP) and recently our customers ask to see their business on the web. Ohhh boy, what a difficult task. We need to run the most that we can using free services, the only paid thing is the domain name due to a favor.

For the most part this our stack at the web.

- Running a Heroku free dyno instance that supports the app. For the data we are using the free postgres plan with give us a very fair numbers of rows at the database.

- To avoid the dyno idle we use Pingdom to send a ping every 30 minutes. (Which by the way i can't use anymore because they send me an email two days ago that due to the embargo they are closing my account)

- To store the assets we are using Github Pages as our CDN. We store there all of our images and download links. Yes, i know that github isn't optimized for CDN performance and probably we are abusing their amazing service but this is the best that we can get and so far is running pretty good.

As you can see there are a lot of trade-off but non of this stop us. We are even planning a big re-write in the entire platform and mobiles apps and the business is generating revenue.

Hope that you gain the big picture of the trade-off a being a developer under the embargo.

Sorry by any misspell that i made. If some of you have any tech (yes, only tech ones please) related question about anything you can find me on twitter @cadizjavier

How did you get a computer?

Easy. Paying for it like most people do :) Is easy to buy any kind of hardware and devices in some classified sites.

Maybe the time is right. With Russia flexing its muscle you may never know when it could turn its attention back to Cuba.

Or China.

I'm not sure what you mean. You mean Russia aligning with China?

I would argue that China doesn't need Russia anymore. That was why there was alignment in the past, neither country could face the US alone.

At this point in time I don't think China needs (or wants) to align with anyone else.

I think the suggestion was that, although Russia has faded as a major geopolitical competitor to the U.S. (though, to be sure, it still causes ore than its share of headaches for the U.S.) Cuba could eventually fall into China's orbit and become a useful geopolitical tool for them, just as it used to be for Russia. I'm not sure of what China would gain from that, though. I'm mostly just trying to interpret the comment.

That's a fair point then.

This is my own person opinion, but I get the sense that China wants to expand its sphere of influence, but not in such a directly antagonist way to the US as Russia did.

While the US and Russia saw the entire world as a possible sphere of influence, I get the sense that China (at least for now) has a much more local focus.

Return of nuclear bases to Cuba can be tit for tat reaction to US arming Ukraine with nuclear weapons. there has been rumours going around about it. Insanity all around.

Oh! An NYT editorial. Things are about to change!

In case you want to bet on this, consider buying sherritt.com . This is probably the company that would benefit most from an end of the embargo, as it owns some mining and oil rights on Cuba.

Disclaimer: I myself bought this stock somewhat below 4 CAD. Now its at 2.67 CAD. :(

EDIT: Honestly, why the downvotes? I for one would be very happy if people shared more of their thoughts about how one could trade particular potential events. But maybe hackernews is the wrong community for that...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com