Proudly delegitimizing the state since 2005
"Aye, free! Free as a tethered ass!" —W.S. Gilbert
"All the affairs of men should be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and . . . the State should be abolished." —Benjamin Tucker
"You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." —James Madison
"Fat chance." —Sheldon Richman
Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro have nothing to talk about. While they do their diplomatic dance, the Cuban people are suffering because of the American trade embargo. It should end forthwith. The idea that trade between Americans and Cubans must await an American president’s say-so is an insult to anyone who aspires to be free.
The rest of the op-ed is here.
—Henry David Thoreau
"Free association . . . the only true form of society."
—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
8 comments:
I agree the embargo should be lifted, but I wonder why it's been such a catastrophe for the Cuban people. There are a lot of other countries in the world, and none of them have an embargo on trade with Cuba, do they? Also, are there no middlemen willing to launder goods for traders in the U.S. and Cuba? An arrangement like that would add to transaction costs, but I would think that over time competition would make the costs fairly modest.
Cuba's pretty close to Mexico and Central America too.
I wasn't thinking of smuggling. Why can't someone from, say, Switzerland go into the business of buying goods from Americans and reselling them to Cubans?
The embargo denies Cubans access to a huge close market for their agricultural goods. It has also prevented Cuban-Americans from taking large quantities of goods with them when they visit there.
But why can't they sell their agricultural goods to Americans through a middleman from another country?
That sort of activity might be hard to disguise and I'm sure there were sanctions against it.
I found an interesting article on the Economist's web site about the embargo. It sounds like the U.S. government has made some attempts to apply the embargo against foreigners since 1996. Other countries have objected, and it's not clear to me how successful the U.S. has been. The article makes it sound like the embargo has generally not been very successful at stopping goods from flowing.
In 1975 the U.S. changed it policy of sanctioning other countries that traded with Cuba. OAS nations were trading before this and in that year formally ended their own embargo. The U.S. also stopped going after foreign subsidiaries of American companies.
This would represent a leakage in the prohibition of exports to Cuba, but it wouldn't open the gates to imports from that country. Being able to sell here, even if under Castro's control, would have earned substantial amounts of dollars with which to buy the world's products, some of which would have filtered down to the Cuban people.
Interestingly, in the 1960s when people asked why the U.S. traded with Russia but not Cuba, the official answer was that the Cuban regime was regarded as "temporary," unlike the Russian.
I think we also have to acknowledge, as Jacob Hornberger does, that American tourism is in effect forbidden the embargo. That has obvious economic consequences for Cubans.
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