Posted on 03/03/2002 6:26:29 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Edited on 04/13/2004 1:39:16 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
"The truth is Castro was lying both times."
Worth repeating, great post.
Dude, I'm goin to Jail!
Well, at least there you'll get some.
:-)
Bump!
On Trade, Cuba is Not China"
Senator Jesse Helms
The New York Times
June 24, 2000
Some lawmakers, including a number of Republicans, have argued in recent weeks that if Congress believes trade will promote democratic change in China, then why not adopt the same policy for Cuba? Here is why: Cuba is not China.
The argument that American investment will democratize China has itself been wildly oversold. Beijing is doing everything in its power to dampen the impact of private investment: placing stringent control on the Internet (all users must register with the Public Security Bureau), and most recently declaring that it will insert "party cells" into every private business that operates in China.
But regardless of how one feels about permanent normalized trade with China, there is simply no case to be made that investment would democratize Cuba.
Cuba has undertaken none of the market reforms that China has in recent years; there is no private property, and there are no entrepreneurs with whom to do business. The Fidel Castro regime maintains power by controlling every single aspect of Cuban life: access to food, access to education, access to health care, access to work.
This permits Castro to stifle any and all dissent. Any Cuban daring to say the wrong thing, by Castro's standards, loses his or her job. Anyone refusing to spy on a neighbor is denied a university education. Anyone daring to organize an opposition group goes to jail.
American investment cannot and will not change any of this. It cannot empower individual Cubans, or give them independence from the regime, because foreign investors in Cuba cannot do business with private citizens. They can do business only with Fidel Castro.
It is illegal in Cuba for anyone except the regime to employ workers. That means that foreign investors cannot hire or pay workers directly. They must go to the Cuban government employment agency, which picks the workers. The investors then pay Castro in hard currency for the workers, and Castro pays the workers in worthless pesos.
Here is a real-life example: Sherritt International of Canada, the largest foreign investor in Cuba, operates a nickel mine in Moa Bay (a mine, incidentally, which Cuba stole from an American company). Roughly 1,500 Cubans work there as virtual slave laborers. Sherritt pays Castro approximately $10,000 a year for each of these Cuban workers. Castro gives the workers about $18 a month in pesos, then pockets the difference.
The net result is a subsidy of nearly $15 million in hard currency each year that Castro then uses to pay for the security apparatus that keeps the Cubans enslaved.
Those who advocate lifting the embargo speak in broad terms about using investment to promote democracy in Cuba. But I challenge them to explain exactly how, under this system, investment can do anything to help the Cuban people.
The anti-embargo crowd should drop its rhetoric about promoting democracy and be honest: the one reason for their push to lift sanctions on Cuba is to pander to well-intentioned American farmers, who have been misled by the agribusiness giants into believing that going into business with a bankrupt Communist island is a solution to the farm crisis in America.
Whoever has convinced farmers that their salvation lies in trade with Cuba has sold them a bill of goods. Cuba is desperately poor, barely able to feed its own people, much less save the American farmer.
Castro wants the American embargo lifted because he is desperate for hard currency. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Moscow's subsidies ended, Castro turned to European and Canadian investors to keep his Communist system afloat. Now he wants American investors to do the same. We must not allow that to happen.
Unfortunately, some in Washington are all too willing to give Castro what he wants. At the least they should stop pretending that they are doing this to promote Cuban democracy and American values.
________________________
It is a great loss for the United States that Senator Helms, probably the greatest American stateman of the whole century, is retiring.
Helms has served his country well.
This is the most idiotic perception that most people commonly incur because they have never lived under a totalitarian Stalinist regime.
Millions of European, Canadians and Latin Americans have been traveling to Cuba. Europeans, Japanese, Canadians and Latin Americans (150 nations around the world) hungry for business went to Cuba and were defrauded by Castro to the tune of more than 20 billion dollars not including the 25 billions Cuba owes to the Russians. Year after year the Soviet Union poured into Cuba’s economic black hole 5 billion dollars in subsidies and almost as much in military help.
All that infusion of people and money did not result in an iota of freedom, democracy or economic development to Cuba and its people. Their approach of helping Castro through commerce and investments was the one that failed instead of the U.S. embargo. After all, these nations also deal with dollars and they produce and provide Castro with anything we produce.
To affirm that the result of the interaction with the American tourists and businesses would be in anyway different to those obtained by the other 150 nations that have been dealing for 43 years with Castro, is to believe that freedom, democracy, and business’ acumen is a virus that can only be transmitted by contact with Americans.
We (the U.S.) are humiliated that, despite all our wealth and might, we were not able to muscle that teeny little country off our coast. Having said all that, I know we are gearing up for the day Castro starts his dirt nap. We will be ready with cruise ships launched out of Key West from Day 1 of normalized relations. But I bet there are 6 or 7 Castros, just like there are alot of OBLs out there. LOL! He'll never die!
China may have defused the protests, but it has yet to report them in its own media - evidence, experts say, of the level of sensitivity among officials to any independent activity outside Communist Party lines.
"There is a real sense of crisis," says one laid-off Fushun worker who sells statuettes carved from black amber, a local stone. "In the Mao era, people had security."
As China shifts to a market system, hundreds of inefficient state-owned enterprises have closed. The Tiger Platform coal mine in Fushun laid off 24,000 of 30,000 miners two years ago. Economists in and out of China agree such industries must go. But the "buyout" methods are leaving millions of unemployed, like those in Fushun, facing a threadbare future, even as they watch on TV - and on the streets - a new generation of Chinese, sometimes old bosses and their families, flaunting flashy new cars and cellphones, and spending wads of cash on shoes that would buy groceries for two years.
As industries close, a generation of the proletariat,raised under communist ideology to believe they were the "masters" of the country, now feel at the mercy of bankrupt companies and cash-poor municipalities.
For years, idled workers were designated as xiagang, a category meaning "laid off but not officially unemployed." The factory had to pay them a stipend of $30 to $55 a month. But under a new policy of factory buyouts that began two years ago, workers got a lump sum calculated according to the number of years worked. Once the buyout is finished, the factory no longer has responsibility. In Fushun, 20 years in the coal mines yields a buyout worth about $4,400.
To a simple worker, such lump sums seem mind-boggling. Yet, the jobless are now finding that in the new China, they must pay roughly $1,900 a year in costs never before anticipated - heating and medical and pension insurance, formerly paid by the state.
"They've been raised to eat from the iron rice bowl," says a Western diplomat. "Now you are hearing the shattering of the last vestiges of that rice bowl." [End Excerpt]
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