Additional embargo policies restrict Americans from traveling or sending money to Cuba — though there are loopholes enabling U. Treasury-licensed food and medical supply sales to Cuba. The year-old embargo inhibits the fledgling Cuban private sector and makes it harder to obtain the goods they need.
Many people in the U. But the president of the United States cannot do that unilaterally. Lifting the embargo would require Congress to either certify that Cuba has become sufficiently democratic according to the Libertad Act or pass a new bill overturning it. The Cuban government has a history of political repression and fiscal mismanagement, both of which harm the economy. For example, it tightly controls who may obtain state-issued licenses to start their own businesses.
It bans independent labor unions , which would protect workers from exploitation. Finally, few countries still limit trade or diplomatic relations with Cuba because of the embargo. They have created laws that help protect their businesses from retaliatory U. Just as it blames the U.
Indeed, the U. The United States even occupied Cuba , in the early 20th century. After Castro took power, the U. You can be sure that Batista. The lovefest now proceeds to its crescendo. Today, it is all but impossible to imagine that moment in when the Cuban Revolution was fresh, Fidel and Che were young and handsome, and Americans could view the uprising as an embodiment of their own finest ideals.
Murrow to the Hollywood actor Errol Flynn. A few months later, in April , Fidel even traveled on a victory lap of the northeastern United States: he was mobbed by admirers as he ate hot dogs in New York City, spoke at Princeton, and made dutiful visits to hallowed shrines of democracy such as Mount Vernon and the Lincoln Memorial.
Meanwhile, American Cubaphiles flocked to Havana to see the revolution firsthand and were warmly welcomed. They immersed themselves in the Mardi Gras atmosphere, attending mass rallies and wacky, radical street celebrations such as a mock funeral parade for a nationalized telephone company, complete with musicians dressed as mourners and fake coffins.
Havana was a round-the-clock fiesta, with buskers on every corner singing patriotic songs to raise money for the new Cuban state in a delirious wave of optimism. Beat poets wrote odes to Fidel. A Creek chief traveled to meet Fidel wearing a full-feathered war bonnet. The entire world was fascinated by the apparent explosion of idealism: Fidel, Che and Celia basked in goodwill, entertaining intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
There was a chance, many felt, that Cuba would become a paradise of political, racial, and gender equality. The reason for our amnesia about how the revolution was received is, of course, political: the popular memory of the guerrilla campaign was an early casualty of the Cold War. When los barbudos first rolled into Havana in January , they were showered with admiration for what seemed a black-and-white struggle for liberty. But Atomic Age milestones such as the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in April and the near-Armageddon of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October , which pushed the human race the closest it has ever come to extinction in nuclear war, quickly overshadowed any romance for most in the Western world.
It became widely accepted in the U. It was also full of larger-than-life characters. Castro is also recognized for his responses to international crises, most notably for the work of the Henry Reeve Brigade — a group of more than 1, Cuban doctors and nurses who were among the first on the ground following the earthquake Haiti in and West African Ebola outbreak in The U.
Nearly 2, American students — many of whom are of color and from low-income households — were enrolled in Cuban universities during the academic year. While Castro is noted for his unwavering commitment to medical, military and educational internationalism in the African diaspora, his legacy among blacks is contrasted by the treatment of Afro-Cubans in his own country.
Any forms of dissent and criticism of the revolutionary government have been met with imprisonment, the majority of those are Cubans of African descent. To date, the number of executions carried out by the Cuban government is still unclear but estimates range from 10, to , people, with the last known executions taking place in Afro-Cubans are often subject to racial prejudice and disproportionate imprisonment for dissent.
As of May , the prison population of Cuba totals 57,, many of whom have been detained for voicing critiques of the government. But condemnation of Castro and the Cuban government, however, can in turn be said of the United States government as our nation has the highest prison population in the world , gross human rights violations at U. Frankly, the heroes of the United States have not necessarily aligned with the heroes of marginalized peoples of this country nor with the heroes of the Global South.
There was a time when Martin Luther King Jr. Terrorist Watch List up until Even now, as President-elect Donald Trump appoints racists and white nationalists to his cabinet, there are calls for the Black Lives Matter Movement to be labeled a terrorist organization.
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