“In a major shift, The Trump administration will allow lawsuits in U.S. courts for the first time against foreign companies that use properties confiscated by Communist-ruled (and Russian-client state) Cuba since Fidel Castro’s revolution,” headlined Reuters back in April, 2019.
“Russia Calls On U.S. To Immediately Lift Cuba Blockade,” squealed Putin’s captive media in response to President Trump’s shocking enforcement of the Cuba embargo. (He was the first U.S. President to actually apply its teeth.) “By tightening the grip of sanctions and reinforcing the trade, economic, financial and energy blockade of Cuba,” squealed Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Pankin to the UN General Assembly, Washington seeks to prevent Cuban citizens from exercising their right to a dignified life!”
Putin’s eunuch continued squealing: “Essentially, Washington (under Pres.Trump) has embraced the policy of slowly seeking to introduce a genocide, (italics mine) targeting the Cuban people. Former US President Barack Obama relaxed US policy toward Cuba…However, current President Donald Trump toughened the policy once he came to power.” (Thus squealed Russian Dep. Foreign Minister Alexander Pankin to the UN General Assembly once he came to power in 2017.”
“Like all nations, we get to choose which countries we trade with,” smugly replied Trump’s UN Ambassador Kelly Kraft. “This is our sovereign right.” Touché, Ambassador Craft! At any rate, we certainly “feel your pain,” Russia—those of us conversant with recent Russian-Cuban relations, that is.
After all, who can blame Putin for desiring that the U.S. taxpayer be the saps who prop up his kleptocratic, terror-sponsoring client-state on our doorstep? Of course that client state’s swarm of agents of influence (on the payroll and off) among the U.S. media, Democrats and libertarians phrase the matter a bit differently. They’re always moaning and whining about the “cruel, ineffective and anachronistic U.S. embargo of Cuba.”
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On the other hand, people who actually bother to study this issue (and who want what’s best for the U.S.) have long recognized these economic sanctions against Cuba as among the crown jewels of post-war U.S. foreign policy. President Trump certainly did. So he tightened and enforced them—to the sputtering rage of those forced to get fleeced in lieu of the American taxpayer. Take Putin’s Russia for instance (please!).
Just four years ago Putin was forced to write off $32 billion owed to Russia by the Castro regime. Then just last month, in the very week he invaded Ukraine, one of his henchmen was in Havana writing off another $3.2 billion.
The term “major shift,” by Reuters cited earlier was spot on. Because the provision in the Helms Burton Act (i.e. codification of the “Cuba embargo”) allowing for these suits was passed with the act in 1996. But ever since, frowning, finger-wagging threats from the United Nations, European Union and the “international community” in general cowed every U.S. President into lowering his head, tucking his tail between his legs and waiving the lawsuit provision.
“Good boy!” snickered Castro, Putin and his European and Canadian partners in burglary as they merrily poked each other triumphantly in the ribs and patted the U.S. on the head. “That’s a good boy!”
That snickering, rib-poking and head-patting has now ceased, replaced by gasps, gulps, damp foreheads and sweaty palms. To wit:
“In a consequential ruling Monday night (March 12) a Miami federal judge said four major cruise lines with South Florida ties — Carnival, Norwegian, Royal Caribbean and MSC Cruises — engaged in “prohibited tourism” and “trafficking activities” by carrying passengers to Cuba and profiting from the use of Havana port facilities confiscated by the Fidel Castro-led government, the first decision of its kind that could affect similar lawsuits.
“The fact that (the Treasury Department, under Obama) promulgated licenses for traveling to Cuba, and Executive Branch officials, including the President (Obama), encouraged Defendants to do so, does not automatically immunize Defendants from liability if they engaged in statutorily prohibited tourism,” wrote the federal judge.
In other words: much of Pres. Obama’s “opening” to Cuba was essentially illegal, and Pres. Trump’s Cuba policies simply upheld U.S. law, as many Cuban-American “hard-liners” claimed all along.
Some of us clearly recall a U.S. Presidential candidate who stressed — almost from day one of his campaign — that should he gain office, our trading partners would no longer take advantage of Americans.”
Little did these “trading partners” realize how far this defense of American interests would extend.
Sounds shocking, I know. But — contrary to liberal fairy tales — the embargo was NOT put into place simply because “Mean and Rich ‘Ole Scrooge/Uncle Sam” had a hissy fit after Castro threw out the mob and granted his everlastingly grateful subjects free and fabulous healthcare as they sang and danced the days away, in a manner to shame the merriment witnessed by Dorothy in The Emerald City.
You’d never guess this from the Cuba “reporting” by the Fake News Media but the reason for the Cuba embargo in the first place was Castro’s mass theft, at Soviet gunpoint, of almost 6,000 businesses in Cuba worth $9 billion (in current dollars) from U.S. citizens. A few American business owners who resisted were tortured and murdered.
The Inter-American Law Review classifies Castro’s mass burglary of U.S. property as “the largest uncompensated taking of American property by a foreign government in history.” Rubbing his hands and snickering in triumphant glee, Castro boasted at maximum volume to the entire world that he was freeing Cuba from “Yankee economic slavery!” (Che Guevara’s term, actually) and that “he would never repay a penny” (this was the only promise Fidel Castro kept in his life!).
It can’t be repeated often enough: The Castro-Crime-Family has gleefully fleeced taxpayers from the European Union to Canada, from Mexico to South Africa — as mentioned, the taxpayers of virtually every nation whose government granted trade credits to these kleptocrats — in brief, to the taxpayers of virtually every nation whose government refrains from “embargoing” the Castro-Crime-Family.
We’ve been spared such fleecing because on Oct. 1960 — right after Castro’s gunmen stole $7 billion from U.S. businessmen and tortured and murdered a few who resisted — President Eisenhower imposed the first economic sanctions against the thieving, mass-murdering Stalinists who mostly (still) run Cuba. These sanctions grew into one of the crown jewels of recent U.S. foreign policy. And now, thanks to former Pres. Trump, they’re being enforced unlike any time in recent history. This enforcement is already panicking the Castro regime’s partners-in-theft — European and Canadian companies who operate property in Cuba stolen at Soviet gunpoint from American citizens.
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