Paul also agrees with Sharpton
Posted on 12/18/2014 3:05:33 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Sen. Rand Paul broke with the field of Republicans considering a 2016 presidential run on Thursday, calling President Barack Obama's decision to normalize relations with Cuba a "good idea" since the American embargo against Cuba "just hasn't worked."
Paul, a likely presidential candidate, made the remarks in an interview with News Talk 800 WVHU's Tom Roten, just a day after his potential competitors for the Republican nomination -- former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Ted Cruz -- slammed the decision to normalize relations as a dangerous move. Rubio and Cruz are sons of Cuban immigrants.
Paul joined the mostly Democratic supporters of the decision, asserting that the embargo hasn't produced results and hurts the Cuban people rather than their autocratic rulers. He even likened his support to U.S. trade with China, which he called "ultimately the best way to defeat communism."
"The 50-year embargo with Cuba just hasn't worked," Paul said. "If the goal is regime change, it sure doesn't seem to be working and probably it punishes the people more than the regime because the regime can blame the embargo for hardship."(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at clickondetroit.com ...
Paul also agrees with Sharpton
Oh , so give Cuba everything it wants while the US gets nothing but the bill , OK
A Cuban ancestry politician said on TV said today younger Cubans favor this Obama move.
Looks like Rand is only going after the younger voters who are not known to vote in large numbers! He is lecturing at every university who will tolerate him.
FURP!!
Just like his Daddy Ron.
His father and he are known to favor the legalization of marijuana, so that would be most colleges, I should think.
Sorry, it just naturally came out. Kinda ralphed it up when I saw the headline.
I am so over this guy.
CC
The only way USA/Cuban relations and trade agreements will ever be normal is when the Castro brothers are toasting in Hell with the Kennedy’s.
Until then - there is nothing to be done.
Which is why I regard Rand Paul as a loose cannon, wholly unprincipled, and probably a certifiable nutcase.
That is correct...Marijuana is quite popular on college campuses.
Definitely a strike against him in my book.
And that's just the faculty...
Rand Paul put an end to his presidential dreams.
IN CUBA, COMMUNISM ONLY BROUGHT OPPRESSION, BLOOD, AND MISERY.
THE EMBARGO AND JESSE HELMS
As stated by Senator Jesse Helms, “Flooding Cuba with new U.S. investment and American tourists will do nothing to bring democracy to Cuba. To the contrary, it will give new life to Castro’s crumbling regime.
Here’s why:
As almost any Cuban will confirm, the real cause of the misery of the Cuban people is not the U.S. embargo—it is Castro’s Marxist-Leninist economic system. Castro’s Cuba is a brutal police state; Castro maintains power by fear, intimidation and deprivation.
His regime controls every aspect of Cuban life—access to food, access to education, access to health care, and access to work. And if you say the wrong thing in Castro’s tropical gulag, you lose your job. If you refuse to spy on your neighbor for the government, you don’t get to go to college. If you dare to organize an opposition group, you go to jail.
U.S. investment won’t change this. It won’t empower individual Cubans nor will it give them independence from the regime. Why? Because foreign investors cannot do business with private Cuban citizens—they can go into business only with Castro. Consider: it is illegal in Cuba for anyone except the regime to employ a Cuban citizen. Everyone works for Castro.
Foreign investors cannot hire nor pay Cuban workers directly. They must pay Castro in hard currency for the workers. Castro then pays the workers in worthless Cuban pesos, while keeping the rest. Under these circumstances, U.S. investment cannot help average Cubans—it would only help the Castro regime.
Consider a real-life example: Sheritt International is Canada’s single largest investor in Cuba today. It is operating a stolen American-owned nickel mine at Moa Bay, where roughly 1,000 Cubans work as virtual slave laborers. Sheritt pays Castro approximately $10,000 for each of those Cuban workers. Castro gives the workers the equivalent of about $10 a month in Cuban pesos—and then pockets the difference.
The result? Sheritt provides Castro with a $10 million direct cash subsidy each year. And what does Castro do with that hard currency infusion? He uses it to pay for the ruthless and cruel apparatus that keeps him in power— and the Cuban people in chains.
Foreign investment can thus do nothing to promote democracy, nothing to promote entrepreneurship or independence from the state. What it does is directly subsidize the oppression of the Cuban people.
Tourism is another source of hard currency for the Castro regime that Castro is desperately seeking to expand. Every one of the tourist dollars spent in Cuba ends up in government hands—the Cuban government owns all the hotels, and it owns all the stores on the island.
And another side effect: Cuba has become the world’s capital of SX tourism. Thousands of destitute Cuban women, who cannot survive in Castro’s Marxist-Leninist economy, have no choice but to prostitute themselves with foreign tourists from Canada, Italy, Germany and other nations to get hard currency.
Many of these prostitutes—or jineteras—are schoolgirls as young and 12 and 13. Others are educated women— doctors and lawyers—who cannot earn enough practicing their professions under Castro to feed their families. Americans simply must not become a part of this degradation of Cuban women.
The United States must continue the embargo to keep up the pressure for change on the island, because if we don’t give up our leverage by unilaterally lifting the embargo, Castro’s successors will he forced to exchange normalized relations with the United States for a complete democratic transition in Cuba.
Fidel Castro isn’t going to live forever. He is going to leave power in Cuba— either vertically or horizontally. And we need to start planning for the day when he is no longer there as the unifying force for tyranny on the island.
That is why maintaining the embargo, by itself, is not enough. We need to start helping the Cuban people prepare for that day, by helping them to create an independent civil society, helping them to build free institutions, and getting resources to the human rights advocates, independent journalists and democracy activists so they can expand their space in society—just as Ronald Reagan helped the opposition leaders in Eastern Europe (who are now the presidents and prime ministers of free, democratic nations).
Last year, along with two dozen co-sponsors, I proposed bipartisan legislation— the Cuban Solidarity Act—to provide $100 million over four years in humanitarian relief directly to the Cuban people through private charities on the island. We will pass it, and send a message to Fidel Castro—and to the Cuban people that Congress and the Administration arc united in our support for freedom in Cuba.
I look forward to the day when Americans can once again go to their corner stores and purchase Cuban cigars. But those will be cigars will have been produced by free labor in a free and democratic Cuba. To get to that day, we must keep the pressure on Castro, while simultaneously working to help the Cuban people build a free and independent civil society within the crumbling shell of Castro’s teetering communist regime. “
+++++++++++++++++++++
The truth of the matter is that all the help received by Castro’s regime after the collapse of the Soviet Union through western tourists and western investments and trade, have been proven to be a total failure in bringing any freedom to the Cuban people, the oppression, the misery have continued and the Cubans still live under conditions even worse that those under which the slaves lived during the Spanish rule.
A real world embargo worked to put an end to the South African apartheid government. Why then ask United States to follow a policy already used by European, Canadians, Japanese and more than 120 countries around the world?
Their trade and investments proved to be a complete failure in bringing democracy or better living conditions in Cuba. Castro is still in power because only United States has remained in solidarity with the Cuban plight for freedom while the rest of the World has been accomplices of the Cuban genocide.
I can agree with stopping embargos at some point. The Castro’s are on their way out. Many people have lived many years under their oppressive government. I might would wait until Fidel is dead, but that won’t be much longer. Better relations with Cuba could help prevent another despot from taking it over after the Castro’s are gone.
What you’d expect from a Libertarian, and one whose first reaction to anything is, “How can I be different from any other Republican?”
Apple not having fallen far from the tree...
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