The murderous Castro dictatorship has no better friend than Canada, which has supported and helped keep the brutally repressive regime afloat for decades.
Avik Jain at Canada’s Macdonald-Laurier Institute:
Canada continues to prop up Cuba, destabilizing the Western Hemisphere
Despite warnings about non-essential travel from the federal government, Canadians have begun to return to Cuba. This is positive news for the regime in Havana.
With the loss of crucial foreign dollars since the start of the pandemic, Cuba’s fragile planned economy is in decline. Shortages have led to mass protests demanding democracy and economic reform. Many demonstrations have been held by the Cuban diaspora on Canadian soil, and some Canadian citizens have even been imprisoned on the island by its feared security forces.
Some 1.2 million Canadians visited Cuba annually pre-COVID – more than 40 percent of all of Cuba’s yearly visitors. This number represented over a billion dollars in earnings for the Cuban state, received in highly desirable Canadian and American currencies.
Most Canadian visitors stay in resorts, while some book rooms at small hotels in Old Havana. Hotels in Cuba are either fully owned or operated by the Cuban state, or run as joint ventures with foreign companies. No hotel is permitted to be fully foreign-owned, and wages are less than 10 percent of what they are in Mexican or Dominican resorts. Cubans employed in the tourism sector are lucky to take home $40 a month.
The Armed Forces Business Enterprises Group – commonly known as GAESA – is the military-led conglomerate involved in every sector of the Cuban economy that takes in foreign exchange. GAESA reaps almost all earnings from Cuba’s tourism industry, which is largely sustained by Canadians and other visitors to the island. GAESA also controls many agricultural and resource extraction industries that sell to Canada, Cuba’s third-largest export market.
While the Cuban government refuses to disclose its poverty index, economists estimate that up to 51 percent of Cubans live in poverty. Infrastructure is in a dire state; almost all households experience lengthy, daily losses of electricity and water. In a population of more than 11 million, there are less than 173,000 cars. To procure everything from diapers to Internet access, the average Cuban is subjected to draconian shortages and restrictions.
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The psychopathology involved here is no doubt multifactorial. It includes stupidity, poor judgment, juvenile fantasies, condescension (read bigotry), fashion victimhood, hypocrisy and so on, as well as the Trudeau dispensation, going back to Pierre the prick. And these are Canadians, who are supposed to be nice people. What the hell can we expect from most others? Exactly what we’ve gotten from them, that’s what.