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Over 1,500,000 people have died as a result of U.S. embargoes since 1960. The pace has really picked up since the embargo on Iraq in 1991. And death is only one part of the story. Starvation, lack of medicine, and other problems have caused untold suffering. There should be a counter on each and every U.S. news broadcast showing the number of people who have died as a result of embargoes that day, and since the Cold War began.
Instead, in the first four months of the year 2000, millions of person hours were directed to the story of one boy, Elian Gonzalez, and his life isn't improved as a result of all this attention; quite the reverse: many people say the attention itself was causing him harm while he was being held hostage by distant relatives and interviewed by right-wing "journalists" such as Diane Sawyer (former aide to Richard Nixon who left with him on the plane after his resignation).
For some dictatorships that roll over their citizens with tanks, we can't figure out how much to bend over backwards. Should Russia be given 15 Billion (which we never have any hope of seeing again) or 30 Billion. Do we give China Most Favored Nation Status or full membership in the World Trade Organization.
The U.S. won't even allow Cuba, which tries to provide free medical care to all citizens, to buy life saving medicine at any cost, and it punishes any country or company that tries to do business with Cuba. (The U.S. Embargo of Cuba has been condemned by the U.N. General Assembly every year for 7 years running; only the U.S. and Israel vote against the condemnation.)
How should the people of the world respond to tyrannical dictatorships? Currently, the U.S. response seems to reflect the promotion of Capitalist ideology more than concern for human well-being, and has no consistency other than that. In other words, the U.S. is killing people (primarily poor people and their children) for the sake of ideology! Vicious is too kind a word for U.S. behavior in this regard.
The answer: Never Embargo (unless you're simultaneously sending in the ground troops...Embargo is Real War with all the immoral dimensions of Real War). But meanwhile don't give tyrants, any tyrants, Most Favored status of any kind, no matter how much we stand to gain from it. Let them pay the standard rate, or a tariff proportional to their human rights and environmental abuses. Apply these tariffs to all tyrants equally, regardless of their size or strategic importance (lest you be tempted to make the rates extra high for the few small ones that are forced to pay). Embargoes are not only immoral, but just like prohibitions, they are ultimately counterproductive, especially when extended over many years. It is always better to regulate than to attempt to prohibit.
This is a moral question of the greatest magnitude. That is why it is discussed on Price of Liberty.
How is it that a handful of pro-Embargo (and apparently, as the Elian affair demonstrated to most reasonable people in the world, anti-family as well) hardline Cuban Exiles in Miami are controlling U.S. foreign policy? (By the way, not all Cuban Americans felt this way, just the ones that got most of the press coverage in the U.S. corporate media. And, to many people the coverage seemed biased in favor of the hardliners, despite the crocodile tears they are now shedding about how they were abused by the media...which in fact they were manipulating.) It is commonly supposed that a small group of individuals that vote as a block can have such a disproportionate effect. But all these hardliners are ultra-conservatives (strongly capitalist and supposedly religious...but handily ignoring the Pope's calls for ending the embargo) who can simply be counted to vote one way in every election: Republican. So, from an electoral standpoint, they could be ignored; they are not swing voters, and their size compared with the total population of Florida is very small.
But probably the biggest factor is an unholy alliance particularly with ultra right wing Republican politicians such as Jesse Helms who now enjoys status as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee thanks to a Republican majority in the Senate and who will stop at nothing for the sake of anti-Communist ideology. 1,500,000 lives lost seems a price worth paying to such people.Castro is no hero of liberty. But, after reading about the violence in Miami toward those expressing anti-embargo ideas, it appears that the exile hardliners are not heroes of liberty either, and it's clear why Cuba wasn't big enough for both. Pondering this, one begins to wonder if Castro is really as bad as he is typically cracked up to be in the U.S. Non-partisan international organizations have compared Castro's Cuba favorably with the right-wing governments in other Central and South American countries (many of which have right-wing death squads supported by or trained in the U.S.!) Compare what Amnesty International, the UN, and other such organizations have to say about Cuba today with what they say about Columbia (to which the U.S. is about to send 1.7 Billion Dollars) for example.
If the Cuban exiles want to fight a civil war with Castro over who controls Cuba, they should not be enlisting the power of the U.S. to do so. This is a matter for Cubans, not U.S. citizens, to decide. If instead the exiles are inclined to remain in the U.S. (the greatest country on earth) as U.S. citizens, they may speak their mind, but they should be prepared to obey U.S. laws and the rights of other U.S. citizens to speak their mind as well.
The Helms-Burton Act of U.S. law officially recognizes property stolen by Castro, and indeed "stolen" property is at the core of the anger of many hardline Cuban Exiles toward Castro. Castro has had to fight off the claims people have on their property, and Castro has used tyranically means (not approved of here!) in this fight.
But much of this property which was "stolen" by Castro in 1959 was itself stolen from the people of Cuba under the Batista regime and earlier tyrannical regimes in Cuba.
Both Capitalism and so-called "Communist" systems exploit people, siphoning off some of the value of people's labor to increase the property of others. Property which has been accumulated through Capitalist exploitation is just as "stolen" as property accumulated by Communist nationalization.
The right to home and personal effects is a fundamental liberty. It is terrorism to threaten people's homes, and terrorism is the antithesis of liberty (much as anarchy is the antithesis of liberty). People need their homes, right at this moment, in order to survive.
But when one goes beyond that sort of property to Capital, i.e., property such as ranches, factories, and hotels, which "earns" money, the fundamentality of that liberty becomes more nebulous. If you go back far enough, all property was stolen from someone, or ultimately from other species who used to occupy it before Homo Sapiens came along and decided all the Earth was his to dispose of. (Who gave us that moral right? Why, God, of course. This is one more demonstration that God is the invention of humanity to justify its inhumanity, including its inhumanity toward other species.) Therefore, ultimately all property has been stolen, and most property has probably been stolen many times over!
True peace will only be achieved when people can think beyond property and the past, of who stole what from whom and when. There is no way to get to the end of such reckoning without conveniently forgetting some of the past. Marx's classic statement "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" is a timeless statement in that it divides work and resources according to the current moment and not alleged deferred gratification, which is really a cover for exploitation and theivery, in the past. It grates on many people precisely for that reason; many people were raised to believe that they "earn" money and property (claims on future resources) through their work (action in the past). (I was raised that way too, and I know how difficult it is to shake that perception.)
If we can build a shared perception based on the present rather than the past, I believe that humanity can be saved. Unfortunately, this does not seem likely. The greatest likelihood is that humanity is doomed by its own greed, and the root of that greed is the inflexibility of its own perceptions. What a shame! This website is dedicated to the tiny possibility of bringing light into that darkness so that humanity can be saved.