There was a time when I believed in the embargo against Castro’s Cuba. I even believed that efforts by the US to broadcast into Cuba was both a noble cause and a necessity, given the iron grip on information the Communist dictatorship on the island has over its population. But as I continued to examine these efforts at blunting the Castro tyranny through the years, I realized that as noble and well meaning as these efforts were, they produced little or nothing by way of influence on the island, and was just a vast tax payer funded boondoggle which enriched those who were involved in these projects, while the plight of Cubans on that imprisoned island worsened with each passing year.
The vaunted embargo was nothing of the sort, as American corporations and businesses of all sorts used second and third parties in Canada, Mexico, and Europe to conduct business with the Communist regime and rake in millions of untaxed revenue for themselves – remember it is a criminal offense to directly conduct business with Cuba under the “embargo” so much of the business conducted is “off the radar.” This so-called embargo enriched unscrupulous Capitalists in this country – some of them Cuban Americans – while giving the Castro regime legitimacy in its claim to the Cuban people and the so-called “non-aligned” Third World countries that the embargo was the cause of the poverty on the island and not the failed socio-economic policies of the Castro brothers and their sycophants running their multi-decade long machinery of oppression.
It took a lot for me to come to this conclusion, and did not come easy, but it has come for me and for many other sons and daughters of those who fled the island fifty years ago.
The answer to Cuba’s woes lies when those conducting the affairs of that government decide for themselves that change must come in order for Cuba to progress, and with that change an opening up of commerce and ideas that will usher in an age prosperity such as only those who lived prior to the Castro Era can scarce remember existed a lifetime ago, and for which they dreamed would someday return to their beloved island.
When such change takes place, if it ever will, many of those Cuban Americans – sons and daughters of the first and second generation of exiles whom have made the United States their home – who have prospered and are able to aid in Cuba’s restoration; will need to step up and help their brethren on the island. But they will have to temper that enthusiasm with an altruistic desire to help and not to take over, since Cuba belongs to the Cuban people, and it is the Cuban people on that island who have lived and suffered through the worst privations who deserve to keep and enjoy the first fruits of their labor as they breath for the first time the first breath of fresh air they have ever breathed in their lives. Distrust, recriminations, vengeance, hatreds, and suspicion will have to be abandoned and make way for forgiveness, healing, honesty; in order for true reconciliation to take place and bear fruit in the new Cuba.
The Cuban of the island will then be able to take the hand of the Cuban-American of the United States and join together to start Cuba on its journey to its destiny.
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