The Truth About the Cuban ‘Embargo’

Posted By Humberto Fontova On January 29, 2015 @ 12:44 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments

Low information voters are bad enough. But maybe low information presidents, pundits, and legislators contribute to the problem. To wit:

“In Cuba, we are ending a policy that was long past its expiration date. When what you’re doing doesn’t work for fifty years, it’s time to try something new. (President Obama, Jan. 21, 2015.)

“The permanent (Cuba) embargo was imposed in 1962 in the hope of achieving, among other things, regime change. Well. Regime change — even significant regime modification — has not happened in Havana.” (Syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor/analyst George Will, Dec. 24, 2014)

“In the end, I think opening up Cuba is probably a good idea. The 50-year embargo just hasn’t worked. If the goal is regime change, it sure doesn’t seem to be working.” (Congressman Rand Paul Dec. 18, 2014.)

Given the breadth of policy-making, policy-influencing and policy-brokering represented by the figures quoted above you’d hope that one might have prevailed upon their huge staffs to actually research the issue at hand.

They apparently did not. So here I’ll volunteer my services in hopes of raising the information level on this issue:

On January, 21, 1962 at Punta del Este Uruguay U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk gave a speech to the Organization of American States explaining the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba and recommending that the members join the U.S. in voting for these sanctions. In this speech there is not a single word–or even an inference–that regime-change was the embargo’s goal. “The United States objects to Cuba’s activities and policies in the international arena not its internal system or arrangements.”

Indeed, Secretary Rusk went out of his way to stress that regime-change was NOT the embargo’s goal. In brief, the U.S. was trying to contain Soviet-Cuban sponsored international terrorism:

Every terror group from the Weathermen to Puerto Rico’s Macheteros, from Argentina’s Montoneros, to Colombia’s FARC, from the Black Panthers to the IRA, and from the PLO to AL Fatah received training and funding from Castro.

Granted, while most were not immediately defeated they were certainly contained. Then for three decades the Soviet Union was forced to pump the equivalent of almost ten Marshall Plans into Cuba. This drain on her resources certainly helped bankrupt the Evil Empire.

OK, we’ve dealt with false premise No.1. But amazingly, this extremely wearisome embargo debate always starts from—not one–but two false premises. The second one asserts that the U.S. imposes on Cuba something properly definable as an “embargo,” even after Democratic Presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama loopholed the original sanctions half to death with executive order after executive order. So let’s see:

Webster’s defines “embargo” as “a government order imposing a trade barrier.” As a verb it’s defined as “to prevent commerce.” But according to figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. has transacted almost $4 billion in trade with Cuba over the past 14 years (as a result of a Clinton executive order/loophole.) In fact, up until five years ago, the U.S. served as Stalinist Cuba’s biggest food supplier and fifth biggest import partner. For over a decade the so-called U.S. embargo has mostly stipulated that Castro’s Stalinist regime pay cash up front through a third–party bank for all U.S. agricultural products; no Export-Import Bank (U.S. taxpayer) financing of such sales.

Enacted by the Bush team in 2001 (to try and patch up a Clinton loophole) this cash-up-front policy has been monumentally beneficial to U.S. taxpayers, making them among the few in the world not stiffed by the Castro regime, which per capita-wise qualifies as the world’s biggest debtor nation, with a credit–rating nudging Somalia’s and a relentless record of defaults. The Castro brothers have gleefully stiffed taxpayers from the European Union to Canada, from Mexico to South Africa—in brief, the taxpayers of virtually every nation whose government granted trade credits to these kleptocrats. Standard & Poor’s refuses to even rate Cuba, regarding the economic figures put out by its communist propaganda apparatchiks as utterly bogus.

In executive order after executive order, President Obama has already abolished President Bush’s travel and remittance restrictions to Castro’s terror-sponsoring fiefdom and opened the pipeline to a point where the cash-flow from the U.S. to Cuba last year was estimated at $4 billion. In comparison, while a proud Soviet satrapy Cuba received $3-5 billion annually from the Soviets.

In brief, almost every year since Obama took office more cash has been flowing from the U.S. to Cuba than used to flow there from the Soviets at the height of their Cuba-sponsorship. In the Twilight Zone occupied by the mainstream media (including, apparently, George Will) this is known as an “economic embargo.” Mark Levin, on the other hand, recently exposed this farce to his listeners.

In sum, the proof is long in: record tourism and foreign investment into Cuba = record repression for the Cuban people. Plainly observable proof blew the “libertarian” pipe-dream to smithereens years ago. Alas, these dogmatists never bothered to poke their nose from behind their books on economic theory to observe the real world. Every shred of observable evidence proves that travel to Cuba and business with its Stalinist mafia enriches and entrenches these KGB-trained, heavily-armed and terror-sponsoring custodians of Cuba’s economy. Thus they remain the most highly motivated guardians of Cuba’s Stalinist and Terror-Sponsoring status-quo.

For anyone genuinely interested in the matter, proof of the so-called embargo’s success is as obvious as proof of Obama’s perfidy in everything from Benghazi to healthcare. Indeed, it clobbers you on the head. To wit: getting these sanctions lifted has been the Stalinist, mass-murdering, war-mongering, terror-sponsoring, U.S.-hating, kleptocratic Castro regime’s overriding obsession for half a century.

Actually think about I for a second: if Castro “secretly favors the embargo, because it gives him an excuse…blah…blah” (as Rand Paul bloviates) then why did every one of Castro’s secret agents campaign secretly and obsessively against the embargo while working as secret agents? Castro managed the deepest and most damaging penetration of the U.S. Department of Defense in recent U.S. history. The spy’s name is Ana Belen Montes, known as “Castro’s Queen Jewel” in the intelligence community. In 2002 she was convicted of the same crimes as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and today she serves a 25-year sentence in Federal prison. Only a plea bargain spared her from sizzling in the electric chair like the Rosenberg’s.

Prior to her visit from the FBI and handcuffing, Ana Belen Montes worked tirelessly to influence U.S. foreign policy against the embargo. The same holds for more recently arrested, convicted and incarcerated Cuban spies Carlos and Elsa Alvarez and Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers. All of these worked tirelessly to influence U.S. policy against the “embargo”– while working as secret agents.

I wonder why? Well, the gentlemen quoted earlier all imply that it’s because the Castro brothers (who have micro-managed a totalitarian fiefdom almost five times as long as did Hitler and over twice as long as did Stalin and Mao) are suicidal nincompoops.

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