Having overseen similar policies in Gaza, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Haiti and others the United States seems to be adopting starvation of a population as its go-to tool for those who wish to maintain their own sovereignty. That is, following their kidnapping of Maduro and their soft-coup in Venezuela they have upped the ante in their embargo of Cuba by threatening those who trade with the island, effectively cutting its 11 million people off from fuel. The Cubans are already rationing fuel in hospitals, schools and so on. All flights are now grounded. Emergency plans are being enabled to try to continue feeding people. Mexico is dispatching humanitarian aid. Soon we'll hear the tired old bullshit failed state narrative. The usual suspects will declare it complicated. It isn't.
Harry Truman was asked how he would have handled Cuba after Castro's victory. Paraphrasing from memory..."I would have picked up the phone and said 'It looks like you've won yourself a revolution. We both know you're going to need a lot of things to get things rolling. So figure out what you need and we'll try to get it to you." If only...
Unfortunately, the Americans never learn that their "regime change at any cost" policies almost always blow up in their faces later on, and cause immense suffering along the way. Ever since the 1940s, America's most fundamental foreign policy has been: "Communism bad, anything else better." It is as wrong as it is simplistic. To this day, the best way to discredit someone in the US is to come back to McCarthisme. That's why Trump spent the whole 2024 campaign calling Harris "Komrad Kamela". And millions of Americans were ignorant enough to believe it (even though she was no more of a marxist than I am). Because of that "anti-communist at all cost" philosophy, American foreign policy is never very good, but under the direction of someone as low-IQ as Trump it becomes almost a caricature of its own failures.
True, but this applies to everyone. Didn't the Cuban revolutionaries consider the potential downsides to setting up a regime hostile to capitalism 90 miles away from its biggest practitioner? Didn't they anticipate that embargoes might ensue? Weren't they unwise to require the goodwill of a country they denounced? Or does the responsibility for having foresight fall solely on the U.S.? I'm glad to see the sick system collapsing in Cuba. I do hope the Cuban people can be spared and that a fruitful relationship can be established between the U.S. and Cuba in the future.
Castro went with the superpower that wasn't going to try to overthrow him. He might possibly have ended up like Tito and Yugoslavia. Communist, but not necessarily a Soviet puppet. Of course, the binary thinking of time required pants=shitting, pearl clutching and jingoistic chest thumping anytime communism raised it's ugly head. Never mind that communism is most appealing to people who have nothing to begin with and that if they had better lives they would regard the communists as harmless crackpots or irrelevant trolls as they do in Japan. But keep on thinking in those binary terms. It's always more comfortable than nuanced thinking.
I mean, they could've just remained a kleptocratic puppet state of the USA and it's exported crime... but, nooooooooo! They had to go self determine and shit. 70 years later and 'merica is still acting like a narcissist who got dumped threatening not just their one time play thing, but anyone who even hangs out with them. Ya know why Cuba is such a tourist destination for the rest of the world? No Yanks on vacation.
Yes they should have had foresight that the better part of a century later the USA would still be trying to prevent anyone at all being allowed to trade with them because the seppos would still be butthurt over cold war era ego bruising.
The truly maddening thing is that Vietnam showed how to best deal with this. If the US had just normalised relations with Cuba 50 years ago, then it would likely be a much more free and prosperous society now. It might have even accelerated the breakup of the USSR. Positioned to take advantage of the 1980s US economic boom, Cuba would have likely been an early example of breaking away from Soviet influence and enjoying more western aligned growth. Would have been something for the USSR states like Ukraine and East Germany to look jealously at. But no, despite their constant claims that capitalism and democracy are clearly the best, small dicked fuckwits had to spend decades beating Cuba down for trying something different. Completely undermining their claims by making it look like they were too scared to actually let the systems compete.
As I recall, Castro originally thought the US would support him. And if we had, like Bailey said, sixty-odd years of stupidity could have been avoided. But, you know, short-term thinking . . .
Yeah Obama started down that path but it was then abruptly reversed by Trump in his first term (and then to a lesser extent Biden after that) So….there’s availabile diplomatic solutions, especially ones that don’t involve starving out a population
2 paragraphs. 7 sentences. 139 words. And that is "too long, didn't read" for TheLonelySquire. Really says something about his reading abilities! It does make it easier to understand him, though...
A lot of them did quite well by aligning themselves with Batista and are hoping to this day that the US will invade, install a new puppet regime and give them back what they lost when Fidel took over.
Oh, I'm quite sincere. The Cuban people have suffered a lot: political repression, economic stagnation, poverty. That will all change when the regime goes down.
I’m always curious to see how that would unfold. Every Cuban American family seems to have a claim worth millions upon millions of dollars.
And if you cause thousands of them die of hunger along the way, that's a price you're willing to pay.
If their government were to agree to the conditions, I'm sure we could help the people immediately. But their deaths seem to be a price their government is willing to pay.
Why should the government agree to our conditions? Are they threatening us? Sponsoring terrorist groups? Supporting despotic regimes? And yet we are starving them, while pouring trucks of money into the Saudis. Explain why the Cuban government is worse than the Saudi one. Go ahead. This should be very interesting.
What do you ordinarily call an entity which threatens large numbers of people with death unless their government agrees to conditions they set?
Only Libertarian governments who gift Elon Musk a bedazzled chainsaw get bailouts. Commies have to go eat shit.
The Saudis couldn't either if the USA was actively opposing them. They'd look like Iraq or Afghanistan. So, yeah, you have nothing.
