UN votes overwhelmingly to condemn US embargo of Cuba - Polidicks

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/world/the_americas/cuba-gets-support-before-un-votes-on-embargo-us-amendments/2018/11/01/e84ca7fc-dd8b-11e8-8bac-bfe01fcdc3a6_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_source=reddit.com U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley stressed before the votes that “our reason for the embargo is and has always been Cuba’s denial of freedom and the denial of the most basic human rights for the Cuban people.”

Oh no, trump will get another angry letter to throw into the furnace.

I mean yeah that's why the US is best friends with human rights advocate North Korea, Russia and Saudi Arabia. The US Federal government is the physical manifestation of the concept of hypocrisy.

Politics is never about consistancy, there's a "moral" excuse for anything and everything. Or at least an excuse that uses words associated with morality. The stated reasons are meaningless, the only courses of action taken in politics are ones that keep those in power in power or attempts from those outside power to get into power. That's it.

Is anyone except US even following that embargo? Feels like US has just solo embargoed Cuba while rest of the world trades with them freely. Or if that isn't the case what the fuck is wrong with the world, we don't have to follow every dumb thing US president does.

If I may: wouldn't it be better if we extended sanctions to apply to more genocidal dictatorships, rather than opposed sanctioning one of the few genocidal dictatorships we actually do?

Very much so. Cuba should have the sanctions removed while the other three should be the ones sanctioned instead.

Why should Cuba have its embargo removed? If North Korea and Saudi Arabia deserve embargo then so does Cuba.

What's Cuba done to us lately to deserve it? From a left-wing perspective it's adversely affecting regular Cubans and costing them access to food, water and medicine. From a right-wing perspective it's losing us a billion dollars per year in lost trade. No other major country is embargoing Cuba. It's a holdover from the Cold War days where we did it to spite the communists.

Bad Reading on my part, sorry. Cuba has very much shown that it's open to outside investment and companies and not completely averse to change. While they do the usual communist playbook of supressing dissent AFAIK it's more on the level of countries like Vietnam where it's no good but not nearly as bad as N. Korea or how badly Saudi Arabia systemically treats literally over 50% of its population. Russia is less oppressive than N. Korea or even Cuba but, well, they're dead set on destabilizing North America and Europe by mass social engineering so they definitely deserve the stick.

I am 1000000% sure Trump will ignore this.

Not really, actually in comparison to Vietnam and in some respects even Saudi Arabia Cuba is substantially worse off. Cuba's freedom of speech law has a specific provision that exempts any speech critical of the government from protection, independent labor unions are banned, to even get a job in Cuba you have to swear a pledge of loyalty to the regime. Cuba has no due process beyond the occasional show-trial, its freedom of the press is nonexistent to the point where absolutely all media must get the stamp of approval from Cuba's "Department of Revolutionary Orientation" before being disseminated in the country, internet access is tightly restricted and completely monitored, the Cuban army has brigades set up for the specific purpose of assaulting and kidnapping protesters. The main reason why those Cubans in the US can't visit their relatives is because they're wanted dead in Cuba, prior to 2013 you required a travel permit to leave Cuba and even mentioning someone traveling without a permit was a criminal offense, and it was policy of the Cuban coast guard to intercept and sink boats fleeing the country and leave their passengers to drown. Even if you did get a travel permit it was forbidden for families to travel together so that spouses and children could be kept behind as hostages. Even though Cuba has loosened its own travel restrictions somewhat as of late, all those fleeing to the US are still considered fugitives in Cuba and would likely be put in the gulags if they were ever to return. Cuban Americans overwhelmingly support not only maintaining the existing embargo but actually taking even harsher actions against the Cuban government because they represent over 1 million of Cuba's victims.

Cuban-Americans are evenly split on the embargo. Cuba is a brutal authoritarian regime, but if that's your sole justification then we also should be embargoing Saudi Arabia, Russia, China, Venezuela, the Phillipines, and most of Africa.

We've proved that isolating these countries into their own little bubbles does nothing to further our goal of "spreading democracy" so I don't know why we'd go back to something that clearly, as evidence shows, has never worked.

This is embargo was punishment for daring to resist US influence. If America can't support a successful coup in your country it's going to suffocate and starve you for daring to be independent, good or bad. If you think this has anything to do with condemning human rights violations, you're ignoring reality.

Yeah the US embargo of Cuba is fucking stupid and literally nobody else gives a shit about Cuba and are just baffled at America's hate boner for Cuba. Us Canadians have been going to Cuba for decades. At least in Cuba they have affordable healthcare and I'll take whoever they have in charge atm over the fucking cheeto that's running the US.

I wouldn't go that far. A dictatorship is still a dictatorship.

Actually the embargo predates the Bay of Pigs. The Eisenhower administration initially imposed an arms embargo on the whole island during the revolution and it was expanded to other goods in response to Castro's government nationalizing American-owned industries on the island. With that said it's definitely a dumb holdover from a long-past era and really needs to be changed, if not entirely dropped. The Cuban government has been getting by on imports from the rest of the world and maintaining the blockade probably isn't going to change that any time soon. If it were up to me I would scrap basically everything except arms sales and the restrictions on American tourists, since tourism is one of the few sources of income the Cuban government is actually reliant on. Healthcare is basically all you'd get there, the Cuban government is run on a shoestring budget and most of that gets poured into maintaining the military and police forces. The country's infrastructure is visibly falling apart at the seams and the government-run services scrape by doing the absolute bare minimum that they can. The government-owned internet service there, for example, is only available at certain wifi hotspots and you have to buy access by the hour for glacial speeds. I don't think its available at all outside of Havana and the other major cities.

Cuba is exactly the country Trump wants the US to be. A tinpot dictatorship with complete surveillance, no right to free expression or assembly, massive systemic racism, and constant kidnapping, censorship, and murder of journalists and political opponents.