Cuba’s communist dictatorship describes U.S. sanctions as a “blockade” and the media often repeats this propaganda, but the real blockade on Cubans is being carried out by the Castro regime.
The Center for a FREE Cuba explains:
The internal blockade tightens in Cuba while Latin America’s left wing presidents and dictators look the other way
Cuba’s internal blockade is being tightened by the Castro dictatorship, which is making it clear that maintaining a small number of people in absolute power is its priority. This means preventing Cubans from having the chance to take charge of their own lives and raising living standards through freedom and the rule of law.
Afro-Cuban American scholar, Amalia Dache, an associate professor in the Higher Education Division at the University of Pennsylvania who “engages in research within contested urban geographies, including Havana, Cuba; Cape Town, South Africa; and Ferguson, Missouri” explained in July 21, 2021 the reality of the US embargo and the Castro regime’s internal blockade.
“No. It’s very hard for me to say that as someone who still has family living in Cuba. But lifting the embargo would not magically improve their lives. Here’s why: To understand the US embargo, it’s important to know about the internal blockade the Cuban government imposes on its own people. For example, the US embargo does still allow for food and medicine sales to Cuba. The Cuban government buys $100 million worth of chicken from producers in the United States annually. It sells that chicken to the Cuban people at a marked-up rate, sometimes at double the cost, and uses the profit to fund the regime. Other countries trade freely with Cuba, but because the government is heavily involved, the internal blockade keeps those profits from reaching the Cuban people. Poor neighborhoods — Afro Cuban neighborhoods — get the worst of the shortages. The police and military get money for new cars and surveillance technology.”
On the evening of January 9, 2023 Cuban officials announced that next month in Cuba gas prices will be raised 528%, fares for trains and interprovincial buses will increase in cost by 180%, This comes on top of Prime Minister Manuel Marrero’s announcement in December 2023 that the MIPYMES, an acronym for new private businesses, will be subjected to higher taxes, higher import fees, and a 25% increase in the electric bill. It had appeared that Havana was following a Russian “privatization” scheme to create regime connected oligarchs, but now the Cuban dictatorship seeks to maintain government control over these entities in mixed enterprises.
For the coup de grace Marrero announced, without giving details, that changes would be made “so more of the money Cubans abroad send to their relatives would go through the Cuban official financial system. If successful, those efforts could further damage the private sector, which has been tapping into remittances entering the country through alternative channels to finance their businesses”, and to eliminate the black market currency exchanges. This is another effort to centralize economic control and eliminate the black market in Cuba, and Cuban economists in and out of the island are predicting dire results, reported Nora Gamez Torres in the Miami Herald.
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The most powerful person in that photo is over 90, and the least powerful is the youngest. But it’s OK, because it’s not the person that matters–it’s the, you know, continuity of the nightmare, aka “revolution.”