As they say in Spanish. What balls. Fidel Castro is not satisfied with President Obama’s steps to relax the Cuban embargo. Apparently the U.S. needs to live up to Castro’s high ethical standards:
Castro responded to the measures in an online column Monday night, writing that the U.S. had announced the repeal of ”several hateful restrictions,” but had stopped short of real change.
This from the only person in Cuba who is permitted to express his opinion via an online column.
”Of the blockade, which is the cruelest of measures, not a word was uttered,” the 82-year-old former president wrote.
Go to Human Rights Watch and read some reports on Cuba if you’d like to learn about cruel measures.
”The conditions are in place for Obama to use his talent in a constructive policy that ends something that has failed for nearly half a century,” [Castro] wrote.
Something that has failed for nearly half a century! Too much irony… make it stop…
Castro also said Cuba would like to hear ”some self-criticism” by the U.S. for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion 48 years ago and a guarantee that it won’t happen again in the hemisphere.
This is what bothers me about the stateside campaign to lift the embargo, and I say it as someone who wants to see the embargo lifted, for cultural/artistic reasons if for nothing else. I don’t like how the anti-embargo calls can play into Castro’s hands, as in the quote above, putting the moral onus entirely on the United States. Mr. Castro, you too have an embargo in place — an embargo on thought. Lift it.
[Update — Marc Cooper here:
The embargo — rationalized as a measure to destabilize the Cuban dictatorship– is, in reality, the glue that continues to hold the whole shoddy show together. The now-phantom threat of U.S. invasion and the economic sting of the embargo, is a wonderful nationalist bonding agent — about the last weapon left in the political arsenal of the Castro Brothers. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Obama’s move Monday, his clean break with the last half-century of American policy, in itself begins to rob the Cuban government of its convenient bogeyman. […]
So those of us who wish to lift the embargo now have the
obligation to demand that the Cuban government start to make some tangible concessions toward democratization.Agreed, and emphasis in the original.]
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