The US Blockade of Cuba  

"I believe very few Americans realize what their country is trying to do down there -- starve people into submission and deprive children and old people of medicine"

Dr. Benjamin Spock in American Medical News, February 22, 1993

For nearly forty years, America has maintained an illegal economic blockade against the island nation of Cuba. The blockade was justified in the beginning on the basis that Cuba was a threat to the national security of the US. Cuba's seizure of American owned property after the1959 revolution, it's alliance with the USSR, and public support for armed revolutions against injustice in Latin America and Africa, are some of the reasons given.

Now however, with the start of a new millennium come and gone, the global political climate is entirely different. The Cold War has been over for upwards of a decade; the Soviet Union has long dissolved, America has normal diplomatic and trade relations with all the countries in the former Eastern bloc, and has even granted the worlds largest Communist state, China, its "Most Favored Nation" status.

Meanwhile in Cuba the economy is failing, it no longer has any sort of capacity to support armed revolutionary forces abroad. Overall, as stated in one Center for Defense Information Study, Cuba spends on its armed forces in a year what the Americans spends in ten hours. But still, with two acts of Congress (the Cuba Democracy Act of 1992 and the Helms Burton Act of 1996, both of which were signed into law by Bill Clinton) the U.S. has tightened the trade embargo against Cuba.

While  US politicians persist with failed, archaic policies, the people in Cuba are having their lives made increasingly hard and U.S. nationals  are denied any opportunity to study virtually the only models of alternative economic development in the western hemisphere.

every year out of the last seven, the UN has condemned the American blockade of Cuba, the most recent of these by a vote of 157agaibst to 2 for. Also, many major human rights groups, inside and outside Cuba, call for an end to the blockade. Isn't it about time the US realized the extent of the  problems caused by this outdated Cold War nostalgia and encouraged dialogue with Castro administration. And yet, with out any idea of reason, the U.S. blockade of Cuba is continually reinforced and tightened.

Here is a picture I got off the net of a protest of US physicians against the "Illegal US blockade of Cuba." Even the people of the US have lost confidence in the federal governments illegal, archaic and downright abusive blockade of Cuba.

Another Web pic of American armed police siezing humanitarian aid heading for Cuba. Like they need it!!!

Vivacuba.freeuk.com says: ENOUGH IS ENOUGH AND CALLS FOR IMMEDIATE END TO A NO LONGER NEEDED BLOCKADE OF AN ISLAND STATE INCAPABLE OF ENDANGERING THE US PEOPLE.

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