One has to wonder where Cuba would be today if it had not spent the last 58 years being run by a murderously oppressive communist dictatorship. American tourists would likely be flocking to the island as they did before the scourge of communism corrupted that nation and turned it into a sworn enemy of the United States.
The truth is without a totalitarian communist dictatorship, Cuba’s economy would have been booming these past six decades. Two million Cubans would not have fled the island into exile and tens of thousands more would not be throwing themselves to the sea to escape tyranny.
Cuba’s apartheid regime likes to blame U.S. sanctions against its corrupt dictatorship for the lack of American tourism. In reality, American tourists will likely never flock to Cuba in any significant numbers regardless of whether the “blockade” (as the regime likes to call it) is lifted. Other than those who posses a morbid curiosity to see people caged like animals as if it were in a human zoo, a good number of Americans probably have no desire to take their families on a vacation to a totalitarian hellhole of a country that despises the U.S. and wants to destroy them.
Roberto Alvarez Quiñones in Diario de Cuba:
Without Castroism, how many US tourists would be visiting Cuba?
The question in the title is one that the newspaper Juventud Rebelde should ask itself. A few days ago it published a bitter complaint leveled by the regime: because of the “blockade,” and restrictions on travel, Cuba fails to take in $1.5 billion a year in tourism revenue; between April 2016 and June 2017, it supposedly lost 1.702 billion.
The question that begs for an answer, then, and which should be posed to Raúl Castro, his military cronies, and Juventud Rebelde, is how many US tourists the island could be welcoming if he and his brother had not implemented Communism on it.
Fidel Castro planted in Cuba’s national consciousness, with considerable success, the fallacy that the US “blockade” is responsible for all the country’s hardships. By repeating this lie so often, many ended up believing it was actually true. This is a law of propaganda and psychology that the Nazis’ Goebbels exploited very ably.
Castro I, failing to follow through on his allegedly socialist, democratic and pluralist agenda, or to hold elections, or to restore the Constitution, resorted tothe claim that “History will absolve me.” He only honored the promise made to Celia Sánchez in the Sierra Maestra, in June of 1958: “When this war is over, a much longer and bigger war will begin for me: the war that I am going to wage against them [the Americans]. I realize that this will be my true destiny. ”
By quashing the private sector and imposing a Marxist-Leninist system, the commander crushed the only force that creates wealth in this world. And Cuba, one of the nations with the highest standards of living in Latin America before 1959, lost the capacity to support itself.
The Cuban economy, absolutely parasitic, became a kind of mendicant, kept afloat only by money given to it. It survived thanks to subsidies, oil and cash; and, now, with remittances from “enemy” territory.
Moreover, the commercial and financial embargo was provoked by Castroism: it was a response, in 1960, to the expropriation of American property. Food and medicine were first excluded, and in February 1962 the administration of John F. Kennedy made it comprehensive.
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