Desperate for an electoral win in Florida in November, President Trump is targeting the Cuban people with even more impoverishment, maybe even death. He just announced that he is strengthening the 60-year-old economic embargo against Cuba by ordering a cancellation of private charter flights to the island. Trump’s Secretary of State (and former CIA Director) Mike Pompeo said, “The suspension of private charter flights will deny economic resources to the Castro regime and inhibit its capacity to carry out abuses.”
Unfortunately, Pompeo failed to mention anything about the abuses that his former agency — the CIA — also carries out in Cuba. I’m referring, of course, to the CIA-Pentagon torture and prison center at Guantanamo Bay, where torture, indefinite detention, denial of due process, and kangaroo military tribunals are established policies, just like on the communist side of Cuba.
Pompeo said that another reason for strengthening the embargo is the Cuban regime’s support of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. But why isn’t it within the prerogative of any government to support any other government in the world? Let’s not forget, after all, that the U.S. government is one of the biggest supporters of dictatorships in the world, especially the ones that it installs into power. Do the names Saudi Arabia (today), Egypt (today), Guatemala (1954), Iran (1953), Cuba (prior to 1959), and Chile (1973) come to mind, among many others?
And hey, let’s not forget Vietnam! That country has been headed by a communist regime ever since it defeated the Pentagon and the CIA in the Vietnam War, killing 58,000 American men in the process. The Vietnamese communist regime has the same type of political system as the one in Cuba, one where the exercise of the rights of free speech and free assembly are not permitted.
Do Trump, Pompeo, the Pentagon, and the CIA maintain an economic embargo against Vietnam? Do they target the Vietnamese people with impoverishment and death, as they do the Cuban people?
Are you kidding? The Pentagon and the CIA now love living in peaceful coexistence with the North Vietnam communists. Heck, the Pentagon would even like to reestablish some of its imperialist bases in Vietnam.
Let’s also not forget North Korea, whose communist leader President Trump, by his own admission, has fallen in love with. Why, Trump even salutes communist military generals in North Korea,
So, why continue targeting the Cuban people with death and suffering?
The original purpose of the embargo was to oust Fidel Castro from power and re-install a brutal and corrupt pro-U.S. dictator, such as Fulgencio Batista. But that aim was never fulfilled. Castro died before they could oust him from power through coup, invasion, or revolt.
One reason for continuing to target the Cuban people with death and suffering is that the CIA and the Pentagon have still never gotten over their defeat at the Bay of Pigs and during the Cuban Missile Crisis. For these two elements of the U.S. national security state, the Cold War has never ended insofar as Cuba was concerned. They are as committed to ousting the Cuban communist regime today and replacing it with a brutal pro-U.S. dictatorship as they were throughout the Cold War.
Another reason for targeting Cubans with impoverishment and death is political. There are Cuban-Americans living in Florida who salivate over the possibility of regime change in Cuba at the hands of the U.S. government. Those are the ones Trump is targeting for votes by targeting people in Cuba with more impoverishment and death.
Finally, it’s worth pointing out that Trump’s dictatorial edict to cancel private charter flights to Cuba is no different from the type of dictatorial control that the Cuban communist regime exercises over the Cuban people. Americans, like everyone else, have the natural, God-given rights to travel wherever they want and spend their money any way they want. Under what moral authority does Trump suspend the principles of the Declaration of Independence — the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for any reason whatsoever, and especially to just be reelected to office?
What we need in this country is hundreds of thousands of Americans protesting the destruction of their own rights and freedoms at the hands of their own government. We need the restoration of the natural, God-given rights of freedom of trade and freedom of travel. A good place to begin would be protests and demonstrations calling for the lifting of the brutal, corrupt, deadly, destructive, and immoral U.S. embargo on Cuba.
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