Cuba's economy is not doing well because of the illegitimate and illegal US embargo. End the blockade. Take Cuba off the completely farcical State Sponsors of Terror list. Let Cuba live!
Cuba developed its own COVID vaccine but couldn't give it to its own people because they could not buy metal for syringes. Its fucking crazy.
Is it the embargo that prohibits fishermen in Cuba from fishing, farmers from harvesting, cubans from freely doing business? Is it also responsible for cubans getting beaten and imprisoned for thinking differently? Was it the embargo that destroyed every sugar mill in the country, textile factory, shoe factory, you name it?… The dictatorship is the one responsible for all these things.
CIA-backed groups in Miami were bombing Cuban hotels in the 1990s. They were bombing Cuban passenger airlines, killing many civilians. They were burning sugar fields. Of course there was also the Bay of Pigs invasion, the theft of Guantanamo harbor etc.
There is no blockade, and there hasn't been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. An embargo prohibits US citizens and US-owned businesses from trading with Cuba. A blockade would be the US Navy preventing anyone else's ships from entering Cuba to trade.
Cuba is poor because Cuba is Communist. The US is not the only trading partner in the world, but a country has to have something to trade in order to engage in trade, and Cuba has nothing.
Is Cuba even that poor, though, compared to its Latin American peers, and is communism the reason?
Aside from the recent weirdness with their GDP spike in World Bank's numbers, Cuba's GDP per capita is basically the same as Mexico's, and it's higher than Brazil's, neither of which are communist.
Furthermore, aside from raw GDP numbers it's higher in the UN Human Development Index rankings[1] than Brazil and Colombia along with a slew of other very capitalist countries.
If you make apples to oranges comparisons in demographics, you can make any country look bad. The UK is basically Mississippi if you take out London. The US also fares poorly if you don't count the wealthiest 15% of the population. The median Cuban isn't well off, but they aren't wildly different from others in their region.
> The US also fares poorly if you don't count the wealthiest 15% of the population.
This is false. The US has the third highest median income of any country in the world, after Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates (which clearly does not count the income of their foreign slaves). PPP adjusted, btw.
GDP/Capita isn't median income (it should roughly correspond to mean income); many of the higher GDP/capita are also higher inequality and so lower median is quite possible.
Okay, I already ceded that point anyway. The overall point that you can cherry pick to make any country look bad in one way or another stands, however.
Illegitimate and illegal according to what authority? Unless you believe in God, there is no higher authority than the US government and its military might.
That said, i don't think sanctions violate intl law. You are under no obligation to trade with people you dont like. A blockade probably would be (generally blockades are an act of war which is only allowed in defense or if un security council approves) however america isnt blockading it.
International law isn't real. You can tell it's not real because if it were real there would be real repercussions for violating it. There aren't, so it isn't. It's just words made up for politicking and persuasion.
Cuba developed its own COVID vaccine but couldn't give it to its own people because they could not buy metal for syringes. Its fucking crazy.