Lifting the U.S. travel ban against Cuba and making food sales to the country easier would benefit both nations. So naturally, it may not happen.
Such a bipartisan House bill has apparently stalled, mostly in part to one very powerful lobby, Time magazine reported.
Opposition to lifting the ban comes from the pro-embargo lobby US-Cuba Democracy PAC, a major contributor to congressional campaigns, Time reported.
Cuban-American Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a Democrat, explains the logic this way:
“This is not the time to ease the pressure on the Castro regime,” Menendez said, insisting it will only give the brothers “a much needed infusion of dollars that will only extend their reign of oppression,” Time reported.
Last month, President Raul Castro released 52 political prisoners, locked up in 2003 by his brother, former President Fidel Castro. The largest prisoner release in decades failed to impress the pro-embargo group. In freeing the prisoners, Raul Castro was responding to international pressure after a political prisoner on a hunger strike died in February.
Those who support ending the ban include farmers, businesspeople, travelers, educators, human rights advocates and the United Nations. The European Union is happy to conduct business with Cuba. (A Texas A&M University study says the U.S. stands to gain $1 billion in annual sales if the ban is lifted.) Even a majority of Cuban Americans agree that opening Cuba to Americans will do more to help end repression there than boycotting it has, Time reported.
So it’s typical U.S. politics that a powerfully rich lobby, which represents a minority view, may derail efforts to let Americans travel to Cuba.
If the embargo is maintained, the decision will be purely 100 percent hypocrisy-based.
If the embargo is really there because the United States refuses to do business with a country that is ruled under a “reign of oppression” what are we doing with China? Because China has incorporated a free market under its Communist regime, and now has the world’s second-largest economy, its “reign of oppression” is morally OK?
China executes thousands of people every year, more than all other world government’s combined, Amnesty International reports. Some 55 crimes can be punished by execution, many of them non-violent offenses, The Los Angeles Times reported. In an attempt to amend its image, China has eased the punishment for some crimes — such as not executing a man who killed his girlfriend when he learned she was allegedly cheating.
If China is the standard by which we judge with whom we will do business, why are we even discussing Cuba?
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