First Cuban embargo a good one

This October 19 marks sixty years of the U.S. economic embargo against the socialist government of Cuba. It represents six decades of trying to overturn that government for shaking off six decades of U.S. cruelty and exploitation of Cuba after grabbing it from Spain in the 1898 Spanish American War. That cruelty and exploitation was largely erased from the narrative when the U.S. embargoed Cuba following Castro’s nationalization of U.S. business interests following the successful 1959 revolution. Earl T. Smith, last U.S. ambassador before we broke with Castro put it succinctly to Congress: “The U.S. was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that the American ambassador was the second most important man, sometimes even more important than the Cuban president. Nearly all U.S. aid to Batista’s government was weapons assistance which strengthened the Batista dictatorship and completely failed to advance the economic interests of the Cuban people”.

But that military aid ended March 14, 1958 when the U.S. slapped an arms embargo against the Batista regime. Why? We realized that Batista, having killed tens of thousands of Cubans during his quarter century rule, had lost nearly all support of the Cuban people and would likely be overthrown by the Castro revolutionaries. That embargo spelled the death knell of the evil Batista regime when Castro forced Batista to flee with tens of millions in Cuban treasure just nine months later.

Early on in the second embargo, the State Department issued an all too candid memo specifying the purpose was to make the Cuban people suffer so greatly they would overthrow the Castro regime. Sixty years on that same cruel, warped mentality continues the embargo against the Cuban people while similarly cruel economic sanctions crate suffering, even death, for many thousands in Venezuela, Iran, North Korea, among others, all designed for regime change that never occurs.

The U.S. instead, should replicate the short, successful Cuban arms embargo of March, 1958 against the bad actors on the world stage including Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, all of whom make American weapons makers rich at the expense of the people destroyed by those weapons.