Posted on 11/27/2001 11:06:18 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. General Assembly, for the 10th consecutive year, voted overwhelmingly Tuesday for an end to the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, with Havana saying not even most Americans approved of the 4-decade-old sanctions.
The vote was 167-3, identical to last year's record vote. Those opposing the resolution, in addition to the United States, were Israel and the Marshall Islands, the same countries who supported Washington in 2000.
Nations abstaining were Latvia, Micronesia and Nicaragua. All three nations abstained last year, in addition to Morocco.
Despite strong U.N. support for American positions since the Sept. 11 attack against the United States, sympathy for Cuba's financial plight and condemnation of the blockade remained unchanged.
The 15 members of the European Union all voted in favor of the nonbinding resolution because of U.S. laws that seek to prevent foreign firms from having commercial dealings with Cuba. Belgium, speaking for the EU, said Europeans deplored the consequences of the embargo on the Cuban people.
Speaker after speaker, especially those from developing countries, said the unilateral embargo was a violation of the U.N. Charter, and affected international trade.
The resolution, as in previous years, referred to the 1996 Helms-Burton Act that allowed U.S. citizens who were Cuban citizens before President Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution to file suit in U.S. courts against foreign companies or individuals who ``traffic'' in expropriated property.
U.S. representative James Cunningham said the trade embargo was designed to promote democracy in Cuba and that the United States had moved dramatically to allow Havana to buy food.
``Cuba, long out of step with the trend of democratization in the world ... has proven itself even more out of step with its recent hideous remarks on the U.S. reaction to the September 11 terrorist attacks,'' he said.
Havana's foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, last month denounced Washington for waging an ``ineffective unjustifiable bombing campaign'' in Afghanistan.
But Perez, in his address to the assembly Tuesday, detailed the U.S. prohibitions and said Cuba would be willing to reach an agreement ``for the nearly 6,000 U.S. companies and citizens'' whose properties were nationalized after the 1959 revolution.
However, he couched his unusual offer by saying that ''Cuba-recognizes their rights -- and would be willing to reach an agreement that also takes into account the extremely burdensome economic and human hardships inflicted on our country by the blockade.''
And he said that putting Cuba on the State Department list of terrorist states was particularly outrageous.
``This is an outrage to the Cuban people, who have in fact, as everyone knows, been the victims of countless terrorist acts organized and financed with total impunity from U.S. territory,'' Perez said.
``The blockade does not enjoy majority support in the United States,'' he said.
Actaully not a bad idea; in theory.
I'm still waiting for the the masses in the PRC to throw the commie thugs out on their *collectivist* ears after all these years of collecting US greenbacks via the enormous trade we've done with that regime.
At what point do the average chinese citizens begin demanding of the PRC their share of the fruits of the prosperity?
They might not; *if* those masses are in fact, hard-core Communists.
The Cuban people need to let the American people know what it is they desire & cannot have due to their thug; while that damned bunch of stooges at the UN can take a running leap into the Hudson river.
Embargoes have never work. This is to pacify the U.S. hyphenated Cuban-Americans (voters) who themselves will try and make a beeline to Cuba to take over once again when Castro is no more.
You are correct. We are the only country not trading with Cuba. But, and here is the interesting part, Castro still gets a lot of good from the U.S. Some business people in the Free Zone in the Republic of Panama order all kinds of goods from the U.S., bring it to the Fee Zone, and reship it to Cuba. In the eyes of the U.S., it is not illegal to ship U.S. goods from a third country. In the end, the goods appear to go to the "in" crowd as apposed to the Cuban on the street. But the point is, U.S. goodies are shipped to Cuba. And yes, we should do what W. Germany did to E. Germany. Do it directly rather than through a third country.
All I'm saying is that there are better ways to achieve the objective we all want than an embargo, which Castro uses to claim the US is the enemy of the Cuban people. Let the Cuban-Americans flood the island with greenbacks remitted to their relatives. Let the Cubans see wealthy Cuban-American tourists. Let them see up close and personal there is a better way of life than communism.
As for the UN. Don't get me started. During the Cold War, the UN proved a reliable ally of communists and dictators, less than useless in bringing down the Berlin Wall. The UN will not bring freedom to Cuba.
I know this is the romantic idea and seems right. But you can't give them what Castro won't allow. He just confiscates anything they manage to save or build, because as he says it "enriches" them. He has neighborhood groups set up to report on their neighbors, often they get to keep what is taken away. Nice, huh?
Cuba Wages Offensive on 'Over-Sized' Houses -- ``The day money is the factor behind distribution of the nation's properties is the day we will be divided into social classes. We will not allow that,'' said Juan Contino, who heads the movement of Cuba's state-affiliated neighborhood groups, the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR).
Cubans crave tourists' dollars --He considers the behavior of some tourists "contemptible," but says he'll tolerate them "because they have a lot of money."
Reagan was right. Communism is an evil system with no soul that kills economies and breeds poverty. Cuban communism will collapse also.
And that is why I believe we should not subsidize it.
Exactly. With every nation in the world trading with Cuba other than Micronesia and Israel, the economic situation there is clearly the fault of Castro's failed policies. Castro keeps the profits from tourism (Forbes Magazine reported he had $1 billion parked offshore) instead of sharing them with the people in his socialist paradise and continues to make 7 hour speeches blaming the US for poverty. Cuban people are hip to him, really they are. I wish they had guns so they could force him out.
As an interesting sidebar to this article, Leslie Stahl on 60 minutes did a piece on capitalism in Cuba a few nights ago and said that Micronesia and US were only countries not trading with Castro. She failed to name Israel. She also failed to mention the obvious conclusion that Castro has plenty of opportunity to solve poverty in his country, but does not.
There's a very fine line between helping people, & interferring in their soveriegn right to live their lives as they see fit.
My beloved nation has a track record of really botching things up in the past by neglecting to account for this point.
Batista, the Sha of Iran, Marcos & on & on...
Selling wheat to Russia doesn't subsidize Russia, in fact it sucks greenbacks out of Russia. But not selling wheat to Russia in the 1970's cost a lot of US farmers their farms.
The communist regime fell not because we sent Coca Cola to them, but because of the extraordinary human cost and economic disaster that formed the core of the system. The dismembering of the Soviet block was precipitated by the strong policies of Ronald Reagan. If the policies of appeasement that you propose for Cuba were followed, the Soviet Union would have been still in power sustained with our taxpayers’ dollars.
Your proposition is naïve, Castro only buys on credit, if he had money or credit to buy elsewhere, and he would never buy anything from us. The problem is that Castro has defaulted on his debts and the smart entrepreneurs who thought they were going to do a quick and easy profit exploiting Cuban cheap slave labor were cheated. If he is now offering to pay cash in advance is just in order to erode the embargo. Once he pays a few small purchases in cash, he will demand the opening of credits. The same tactics used by conmen all around the world.
Bush Administration Stands Firm on US Embargo Against Cuba
By Jim Burns
CNSNews.com Senior Staff Writer
November 27, 2001
CNSNews.com) - Even though four U.S. companies have signed contracts to sell food to Cuba, the Bush administration made it clear on Tuesday: The U.S. trade embargo against Cuba "stands firm as a U.S. foreign policy."
Lino Gutierrez, an assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs, told a Washington audience that it is Cuban leader Fidel Castro - not the United States - who is having a change of heart on U.S.-Cuba trade.
According to Gutierrez, any U.S. companies that end up selling food and medicine to Cuba will do so in full compliance with U.S. law. Congress authorized food exports to Cuba last year, but at the same time it refused to let Cuba tap into American sources of financing to make those food and medicine purchases. The Cuban government has complained bitterly about the law.
After a damaging hurricane in Cuba earlier this month, four U.S. companies signed contracts with Cuba - the first such contracts in four decades -- to supply the communist nation with $20 million worth of food.
Representatives from Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Riceland Food and ConAgra signed agreements with Cuba's state run company Alimport to provide wheat, corn, soybeans and rice. The Commerce Department must now approve the deals, in which Cuba must pay cash.
Earlier, the U.S. State Department offered to send emergency food and medicine to Cuba, and it also offered to send a team of specialists to evaluate the nation's humanitarian needs after the hurricane.
The Castro government politely refused the State Department offer, then contradicted itself by proposing that the U.S. sell it food and medicine -- on Cuba's terms.
"The change which has taken place here is that Castro has reversed himself," Gutierrez said Tuesday.
He said it is Castro who is backing away from his prior insistence that Cuba will not buy a single grain of American rice until the U.S. government permits him to arrange U.S. financing for such purchases, and until Cuban goods can be sold in the U.S.
"Castro has done a 180," Gutierrez said, while United States has held firm: "Our policy continues to be to encourage a rapid, peaceful, transition to a democratic Cuba and characterize a full respect for human rights and open markets."
Gutierrez said the U.S. offer to send a State Dept. team to Cuba to assess its post-hurricane needs still stands. But that's not what Castro wants, he said: "What Cuba does want to do is purchase food and medicine to replenish its civil defense stockpiles."
On another topic, Gutierrez described the Cuban military as a "disciplined hierarchy and a wealth of economic strength that is well positioned to survive a post-Castro transition."
He said the Cuban military is better off economically than are many other institutions in Cuba.
As Fidel Castro ages, speculation grows about Cuba's future without its longtime dictator.
See Earlier Story:
Report Predicts Democracy Will Return To Cuba After Castro's Death (Oct. 29, 2001).
Cuba is an economic black hole not because the U.S. trade embargo, but thanks to Castro’s adoption of a brutal Stalinist regime that does not allow any kind of freedom, personal or economic, and for 42 years he has maintained “Socialism or Death” without any room for compromises or changes.
In a country investment risk survey made by the magazine “Euromoney”, Cuba was ranked 183rd place among 187 countries, even below Somalia. “The Financial Times” reported on June 30, 1995, “Why then, investors may ask, should they bother with Cuba in a world replete with opportunities and more welcoming governments?” Cuba is a country where there is not the rule of law, where the executive, legislative, judicial and the press, are solely on Castro's hands. Foreign investors are, as every body else in Cuba, at the mercy of the whims of a tyrant whose laws frequently change overnight.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.