Cuba Libre? Not

Bush administration figures are tightening travel restrictions to Cuba, reports the Associated Press, which notes that the restrictions are "unrelated to Cuba's recent crackdown on dissidents."

When President Clinton announced the expanded people-to-people exchanges in January 1999, he said he hoped increased contacts between ordinary Americans and Cubans would "demonstrate the United States' compassion for the Cuban people." Treasury Department officials in the Bush administration say the policy was abused by groups and individuals who organized tourism packages masquerading as study tours. "Many of the trips were being used largely for tourism, undermining the sanctions against Cuba," said Taylor Griffin, a Treasury spokesman in Washington.

And you can't undermine those sanctions when your brother is the governor of Florida, can you?

Meanwhile, MSNBC reports that Castro's economy is--once again--in the tank.

Comments

[thoreau]

You'd think that with Castro just 90 miles away, people in the US would realize how futile sanctions are.

I wonder how long a tiny handful of Miami voters will hold our foreign policy hostage.

[Plutarck]

It really is stunningly stupid. The whole point of the supposed power of American culture is its extreme desirability of output to humans everywhere on earth - one of the highest demand bits of contraband in Afghanistan was Titanic, for goodness sakes, and when men got the chance they were asking barbers for haircuts just like what's-his-face. It really is the biggest hated thing about American culture - we really do look imperialist, even if we aren't/weren't, because the people really do want even the stuff we consider low-grade crap really, really badly (which shows you just how impoverished they really are).

So what do you do to crush a dictator? Why, do his job of shielding his people from the truth and keeping their necks firmly under his foot for him, of course! ...huh?

He would have a hell of a time organizing paper shortages to supress the creation of pamplets and books trashing him if Americans themselves were pumping in there, and if their freedom of expression and industry was being guaranteed by the US Government by threat of war if Castro tried to fuck with any Americans during their stay...wouldn't he?

But no, instead they do right the opposite, doing what he could not possibly do on his own if his people could get much more than a whiff of what they were being deprived of, and just who was doing the depriving. For now, of course, it's the US doing the depriving - a source of propaganda so pure and easy that even America or the USSR at it's height couldn't manufacture a better one.

[Joe]

"So what do you do to crush a dictator? Why, do his job of shielding his people from the truth and keeping their necks firmly under his foot for him, of course!"

Pluto, calm down. Don't you know that it takes politicians to do political damage?

Only when we begin thinking outside the political box, will we begin to see any kind of improvement.

[tonio-k]

Great. Big Mac and the bluejeans took down the Berlin Wall. and the sanctions prop up a two-pence Dictator. the Allmighty Dollar could rip his regime asunder in about zero point nothing seconds. Ready, Steady,... SHOP!