Good article in Hispanic Business today about the US embargo of Cuba. It’s appropriately entitled:
Trade-off in Cuba: U.S. Could Profit, but So Could Castro’s Regime
An excerpt:
Rick Viera, a local resident who left Cuba at the age of 9, said freeing trade with Cuba will only allow Castro to stay in power longer.
He doesn’t buy the argument advanced by some proponents of free trade with Cuba that the citizens of the communist country would benefit from lifting the embargo. Viera said Castro would intercept farmer dollars and goods from the United States and divert them to his cronies.
“All we’re doing (if the embargo is lifted) is extending the life of the regime,” Viera said. “The regime is not going to do anything to allow freedom. My thought about the Cuban working man is, yes, he needs all the help we can give him. But it’s a totalitarian government.”
Kirby Jones, president of the Orlando-based U.S.-Cuba Trade Association, disagrees with Viera.
In the roughly six years since the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act was passed allowing agricultural exports to Cuba, food items from the United States have been sold to the country’s 12 million inhabitants, said Jones, a frequent visitor of the country.
“What we’re talking about is sales of grains and rice and soy beans and corn and tens of thousands of tons of chicken,” Jones said. “It’s not putting anything in Castro’s pocket. In fact, they are buying these products from U.S. companies. It’s a stupid argument and I’m tired of hearing it.
“This trade has been going on for almost six years. Tell me what Castro is going to do with 4,000 metric tons of chicken on a boat? The same people who are criticizing it, their relatives are eating American rice and American chicken.”
Let me connect the dots for you Mr. Jones, you idiotic douchebag. The only entity permitted to buy your American products in Cuba is the castro regime. There are no private businesses that are going to purchase and resell American beans or poultry or anything else. Only the government monopoly. And when the regime does buy American goods it resells them at whatever price it wants because there is no competition. The regime then uses its monopoly profits from the sales (Cubans buy the goods largely with money they receive in remittances) to fund the repressive apparatus. You see, that’s what they call it a TOTALITARIAN DICTATORSHIP, come mierda.
Do you know what else the castro regime does with the stuff? It puts it on the plates of foreign tourists that come to Cuba. They pay an even more handsome price for it. And the tourism sector, like every other major sector of the Cuban economy is government controlled.
To say the regime does not profit from agricultural trade with the US is a blatant lie and you it sir. I hope your masters in Havana are happy. You have served them well.