
End the U.S. Embargo on Cuba - rodrigocoelho
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/opinion/sunday/end-the-us-embargo-on-cuba.html
======
penprog
2nd generation Cuban American here. My family has a massive anti-Cuban
government sentiment and pretty much all the older Cuban people in Miami feel
the same. I don't blame them considering most had their homes and belongings
taken from them by the current Cuban government.

As someone who is a little more removed from the actual suffering Castro
caused I believe that if the embargo ended and the US and Cuba began trading
again that the regime would lose a lot of strength just from the exchange of
culture. Especially since the US and Cuba are such close neighbors.

What could possibly happen though is that the regime clamps down completely on
trade and all the money being made goes straight to the higher ups in the
government. Which is why most Cubans that moved away don't want the embargo to
end.

~~~
ereyes01
Also a 2nd generation Cuban American, born/raised in Miami. I think you're
right on the money with all your points.

I also believe the embargo has another dimension having to do with stability
of the status quo on both sides of the Florida Straits:

-The Cuban government often uses the boogeyman of the United States to justify their policies (and their people's poverty) domestically. The embargo keeps the U.S. strongly in the boogeyman category.

-On the other hand, I would wager that the United States wants little to do with a destabilized Cuban regime 90 miles away from Florida. While they are probably pretty old by now, there are still some Cold War era militant groups in South Florida that wouldn't mind capitalizing on a collapsing Cuban regime (i.e. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_66](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_66)).

I think the fear of destabilization so close to the U.S. also figures into the
government's calculus, which apparently concludes it's best to keep the
embargo untouched for the moment. However, as the article says, it is true
that the situation is changing as the Cuban government makes some sink-or-swim
adjustments to their system...

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bruceb
We trade with countless non democratic states yet do to a few factors such as
Florida being a swing state Cuba is evil incarnate.

If after 50 years the embargo hasn't worked it isn't going to.

~~~
bayesianhorse
I think it's not about non-democracy, and more about setting precedents and
reminders. Threats are only worth something if they are believed, and Cuba
never did anything to warrant a lifting of the sanctions. The rationale is
that lifting the sanctions would weaken the threat of sanctions against other
countries.

While I would applaud a removal of the sanctions I can understand why it's
such a hot potatoe. I think Cuba will have to wait until the next president,
or make a relatively large gesture towards changing its ways.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Absolutely, Cuba was supposed to become an example of what it means to thwart
US interests, in most simple and blatant terms. A quick video and an
interesting article from Chomsky on this here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_K5nLyvijw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_K5nLyvijw)

[http://www.chomsky.info/books/hegemony02.htm](http://www.chomsky.info/books/hegemony02.htm)

------
atmosx
One of my best friends went to Cuba this summer. He told me that if you wanna
see the _real thing_ you must go there pretty fast, things are changing,
Castro is losing grip and _Capitalism_ is growing slowly but steadily. Prices
have grown and people are ready to embrace foreign investment.

I think it's a good time to end the embargo, given the fact that even in
foreign policy Obama failed to deliver what was expected (in retrospect that
nobel prize seems utterly ridiculous), I'd say that it would add some points
to the US president a bold move like that.

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drdeadringer
In the "politics" section of my bucket list, aka "what political events I'd
like to see in the world before I die", this makes a line-entry.

------
maceo
I'm the only person in my family who wasn't born and raised in Cuba. I've
spent time on the island and it's been an obsession of mine for as long I can
remember.

If you read the writings of American foreign policy makers from around the
time the embargo was put into place, it's clear that the embargo exists for
idealogical reasons more than anything else. The American government was
afraid that if the Cuban Revolution was allowed to continue without stiff (and
illegal) resistance from the US, that it would act as blueprint for successful
socialist government in the region. They were afraid that its ideals would
spread beyond the small island into Central and South America. And they had a
good point. Even today, with the Cuban economy in a pretty dire condition, the
Cuban Revolution is widely admired throughout Latin America. Imagine the
movements the Revolution could have inspired in the last 60 years had the
embargo not sapped the Cuban economy of so much potential. It should be noted,
that the embargo is illegal under international law. Every time the subject
comes up for vote in the UN, the only 2 nations to reaffirm the embargo are
the usual suspects - the US and Israel.

On the island, the embargo provides the government with a convenient excuse
for its poor economy. Unfortunately, it's a pretty good excuse, and the
citizens understand that. I don't think the average Cuban is any more anti-
American than the average American is anti-Cuban. Even though I grew up
hearing stories about how shitty the authorities were in Cuba, it was hard for
me to admit that it was a police state until I first visited. It's sad, but it
is a police state, and again the US is partially to blame for inspiring so
much paranoia in the regime. For as much as the US claims to fight against
terrorism, it was responsible for terrorizing the Cuban people in countless
ways, not least of which includes bombing a passenger airline (Cubana Flight
455). That said, from the point of view of American policy makers, I think
that their aims in Cuba have been relatively successful. They didn't succeed
in killing Castro or the dream of the Revolution, but they did ensure that
Cuba was transformed into a draconian state with a crappy economy, thereby
making it a poor model for other states in the region to follow.

For all its failures, the Cuban government has also had many successes. I
think they deserve praise where it's due, because for the last 60 years they
have been regarded as an enemy by their neighbor, the worlds most powerful
state. Since everyone already knows about the shitty things the Cuban
government has done, I'll lay out some of their redeeming achievements.

1\. Cuba was the only government to send its military to help liberate Africa
from colonial powers. They also sent military forces to help liberate South
Africa, which is why Mandela looked up to Fidel Castro a personal hero and
friend. While the US and most Western nations did everything they could the
continue the status quo in South Africa, Castro stood firmly on the right side
of history and backed up his words with money and men.

2\. There are no homeless people in Cuba. I walk through downtown LA every
week and I see more misery on one street than I've seen in the poorest cities
in Cuba. To me this is inexcusable and a signature failing of the American way
of life.

3\. The World Wildlife Fund reports that Cuba is the only sustainable country
in the world. I couldn't find the original report, but what this means is that
its the only country that can take care of all of its citizens needs without
compromising the needs of future generations.
[http://pages.vassar.edu/sustainability/video/history-of-
sust...](http://pages.vassar.edu/sustainability/video/history-of-
sustainability-in-cuba/)

4\. Cuba has amongst the highest literacy and life expectancy rates in the
world, both of them just a bit higher than those in the US.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>2\. There are no homeless people in Cuba. I walk through downtown LA every
week and I see more misery on one street than I've seen in the poorest cities
in Cuba.

My uncle visited Cuba and stayed for a month. My understanding is that there
is plenty of misery in Cuba. The difference is that it happens indoors and out
of sight, as opposed to outdoors and in front of everyone (i.e. homeless).

~~~
drivingmenuts
Is it the same kind of misery, though? If the situation in Cuba is as you
describe, then at least the basics of keeping a roof over one's head is a
solved issue (maybe not well solved) and other problems require a different
kind of solution that is not yet a recognized problem by the government.

The same problems may be occuring in the US, but with the addition of the
misery of no roof and no food.

It doesn't speak well of either country, really. But, Cuba has a solution to
the problem of homelessness, implemented in a crappy way.

But the US is just flat writing people off.

I'm not thrilled with the US and I doubt I'd be happy living in Cuba either.
But at least I wouldn't be homeless.

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7Figures2Commas
Given the serious crises in the Mideast, Eastern Europe and West Africa, the
notion that ending the embargo on Cuba would be seen as a "significant foreign
policy success" is wishful, naive thinking on the part of the editorial board.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
I don't see how the one follows from the other. You're saying because there
are big issues, solving what you seem to deem as a relatively small issue,
therefore can't be deemed a significant success?

If so, I'd invite you to look into the 200 year history of US-Cuban relations,
as well as the extent to which the embargo affects virtually everything for a
population of 11 million people. It's extremely pervasive.

A change here would be quite a major foreign policy event. To get a sense of
this, the UN general assembly condemned it for every single year without
exception for decades now, with votes usually showing 180 or so in favor of
condemning and 3 or so against (the US, Israel and something politically
insignificant like Micronesia)

------
cadizjavier
I born and live in Cuba. I will give some insights from a tech/developer
perspective. I'm a young rails and ios developer who works mainly as a
freelance, consultancy and lately running a local startup. Being a cuban
developer isn't an easy task mainly by the following reasons, all of those due
to the embargo (yeahh, i agree with the argument that this is a "convenient
excuse for its (our) poor economy" but "Unfortunately, it's a pretty good
excuse") and this is why for the most part:

\- A lot of services are blocked too Cuba due to the Embargo (Google, Paypal
and a lot of other companies services). I know that they can't do too much
about that, only follow the _law_. For example this image is almost a day to
day thing [http://imgur.com/8l5rmxt](http://imgur.com/8l5rmxt) Hopefully a lot
of this stuffs can be solved using a VPN.

\- Is extremely difficult to access paid services like rent hosting, buy
domains, etc. Most of the time i ask for favors to friends of mine who lives
in other countries to help me to paid those kind of premium services.

\- The internet connection is extremely slow and in most cases limited by very
restrictive firewalls. To put in perspective, 56 Kbps dial-up connections are
still a very popular kind of connection here. Until the arrive of the optical
fiber cable our main channel of international communications was a really
expensive satellite link with a very limited bandwidth. Recently with the
optic fiber cable arrive things are becoming much more easy but still very far
from the ideal scenario.

As you can see, this thread-off, if not impossible to solve it means a huge
competitive disadvantage if you are running a tech business, not to mention if
you are going international. Even when i work as a freelance is difficult to
explain to my employees that two or three days without internet can be a
_thing_ in some moment.

To be even more illustrative and pragmatic i will give some insight of my
recent startup. I'm the co-founder and main developer at Isladentro
[http://isladentro.net](http://isladentro.net) . This is a mobile-first
startup to promote and emerging sector of self-employee workers and local
business (think of it as a cuban yelp). So far we have gained a lot of
traction and have a lot of happy customers which by the way paid for the
service, is a premium service. We have a lot to improve (yeahh is a crappy
website but that was a MVP) and recently our customers ask to see their
business on the web. Ohhh boy, what a difficult task. We need to run the most
that we can using _free_ services, the only paid thing is the domain name due
to a favor.

For the most part this our stack at the web.

\- Running a Heroku free dyno instance that supports the app. For the data we
are using the free postgres plan with give us a very fair numbers of rows at
the database.

\- To avoid the dyno idle we use Pingdom to send a ping every 30 minutes.
(Which by the way i can't use anymore because they send me an email two days
ago that due to the embargo they are closing my account)

\- To store the assets we are using Github Pages as our CDN. We store there
all of our images and download links. Yes, i know that github isn't optimized
for CDN performance and probably we are abusing their amazing service but this
is the best that we can get and so far is running pretty good.

As you can see there are a lot of trade-off but non of this stop us. We are
even planning a big re-write in the entire platform and mobiles apps and the
business is generating revenue.

Hope that you gain the big picture of the trade-off a being a developer under
the embargo.

Sorry by any misspell that i made. If some of you have any _tech_ (yes, only
tech ones please) related question about anything you can find me on twitter
@cadizjavier

~~~
penprog
How did you get a computer?

~~~
cadizjavier
Easy. Paying for it like most people do :) Is easy to buy any kind of hardware
and devices in some classified sites.

------
brg1007
Maybe the time is right. With Russia flexing its muscle you may never know
when it could turn its attention back to Cuba.

~~~
_random_
Or China.

~~~
refurb
I'm not sure what you mean. You mean Russia aligning with China?

I would argue that China doesn't need Russia anymore. That was why there was
alignment in the past, neither country could face the US alone.

At this point in time I don't think China needs (or wants) to align with
anyone else.

~~~
pdabbadabba
I think the suggestion was that, although Russia has faded as a major
geopolitical competitor to the U.S. (though, to be sure, it still causes ore
than its share of headaches for the U.S.) Cuba could eventually fall into
China's orbit and become a useful geopolitical tool for them, just as it used
to be for Russia. I'm not sure of what China would gain from that, though. I'm
mostly just trying to interpret the comment.

~~~
refurb
That's a fair point then.

This is my own person opinion, but I get the sense that China wants to expand
its sphere of influence, but not in such a directly antagonist way to the US
as Russia did.

While the US and Russia saw the entire world as a possible sphere of
influence, I get the sense that China (at least for now) has a much more local
focus.

------
lallysingh
Oh! An NYT editorial. Things are about to change!

------
Hermel
In case you want to bet on this, consider buying sherritt.com . This is
probably the company that would benefit most from an end of the embargo, as it
owns some mining and oil rights on Cuba.

Disclaimer: I myself bought this stock somewhat below 4 CAD. Now its at 2.67
CAD. :(

EDIT: Honestly, why the downvotes? I for one would be very happy if people
shared more of their thoughts about how one could trade particular potential
events. But maybe hackernews is the wrong community for that...

