Cuban Americans gather in Tampa to call on Biden Administration to end U.S. embargo on Cuba
By Mitch Perry Hillsborough County
PUBLISHED 3:34 PM ET Apr. 26, 2021
More than two dozen citizens gathered in West Tampa on Sunday to call for an end to the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba.
Progressives Call on Biden to Lift U.S. Embargo on Cuba as Thousands Protest Critical Shortages
"The truth is that if one wanted to help Cuba, the first thing that should be done is to suspend the blockade of Cuba as the majority of countries in the world are asking," said Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
JULIA CONLEY
July 12, 2021
Progressives in the U.S. and around the world on Monday demanded the Biden administration lift the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba and hundreds of sanctions on the country after thousands of Cubans protested the country's economic crisis, which has been worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The protests in Havana and several smaller cities and towns made headlines Sunday, with major international outlets reporting on Cubans taking to the streets to express outrage over food and medicine shortages.
Demonstrators chanted, "Enough!" and "Freedom!" while one person told the Associated Press, "We are fed up with the queues, the shortages."
As The Economist reported earlier this month, food exports from the U.S. to Cuba, which imports about 70% of its food and relies heavily goods exported from the U.S., recently reached their lowest level since 2002.
Last month, The Intercept reported that the decades-long U.S. trade embargo against Cuba as well as sanctions imposed by the Trump administration and kept in place by President Joe Biden has kept Cuba fro
According to The Intercept, large shipments of ventilators, masks, and m accessing "critical foreign-made medical supplies to treat its own population" during the pandemic, even as Cuba sent more than 2,000 medical professionals to help fight the global crisis in other countries. syringes have been unable to reach Cuba since the pandemic began due to companies' financial ties to the United States.
. . .
Last month, the U.S. delegation to the United Nations General Assembly was joined only by Israel in voting against a resolution to condemn the six-decade trade embargo imposed by the U.S. on Cuba; 184 countries voted for the resolution, which has passed every year for nearly three decades.
"The U.S. has had no problem starving Cuba with a decades-long embargo that the entire world (minus Israel) condemns," said Assal Rad, a senior research fellow at NIAC Action. "If we care about Cubans, lift the embargo."
Others, including Miami's Democratic Socialists of America chapter and Progressive International, echoed the calls made by Rad and Benjamin, with Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) tweeting about the issue on Monday.
Link to tweet
"The truth is that if one wanted to help Cuba, the first thing that should be done is to suspend the blockade of Cuba as the majority of countries in the world are asking," Mexico's leftist president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, said Monday. "That would be a truly humanitarian gesture. No country in the world should be fenced in, blockaded."
David Adler, general coordinator for Progressive International, noted that the corporate U.S. media reported on Sunday's protests as though the embargo has little connection to Cubans' suffering. The blockade has barred U.S. trade with Cuba since 1962 and has cost the island an estimated $130 billion according to Cuban officials and the United Nations.
More:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/07/12/progressives-call-biden-lift-us-embargo-cuba-thousands-protest-critical-shortages
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Tells me you never bothered to read the article of my source. Figured as much.
Republicans Jesse Helms and Dan Burton.
By Jesús Arboleya Last updated May 17, 2019
HAVANA – In 1998, just two years after the Helms-Burton Act was passed, the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a well-known nonprofit organization dedicated to journalistic research with the stated purpose of “revealing abuses of power, and corruption of public and private institutions” of the United States, published an extensive report on the origin of this law, which until today has not been refuted (*).
According to the CPI report, it all started when Republican Jesse Helms assumed the presidency of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and proposed a ten-point agenda aimed at changing the direction of the foreign policy of then-President Bill Clinton.
Perhaps because Cuba seemed like one of the few remnants of socialism in the world, the island appeared at the top of this agenda. Nothing else could be expected from a fanatic anti-communist who had voted against the end of racial segregation, the right of homosexuals, the investigations on AIDS, and all the proposals of social benefits that he had before him during his 30 years in Congress.
To carry out this task, Helms appointed his assistant, Dan Fisk, who put together a team that included Cuban-American Republican members of congress Lincoln Díaz Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, as well as senators Bob Menéndez and Robert Torricelli, all who had already worked on previous legislation against Cuba.
As a counterpart to Helms, Republican congressman Dan Burton was chosen in the lower chamber. Burton was head of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee of the House of Representatives despite the fact that one of his most famous proposals was to deploy U.S. ships to the Bolivian coasts (Bolivia has no coastline) in order to stop drug trafficking.
Originally from Indiana, Burton was well-known for his golf game, where he spent most of his time, and also his support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. Although he probably did not know where Cuba stood on a map either, he received more contributions from MiamPi than from his home state.
More:
https://progresoweekly.us/the-true-origin-of-the-helms-burton-act/