Cuba

Your instructor goes "everywhere" to seek out the truth -- even to places that the U.S. government prohibits its own citizens to go to! Indeed, a 75-year-old retired teacher from Wisconsin was fined $7,500 for a cycling holiday in Cuba [Source: The Disarm Education Fund]! Take an optional trip to Cuba: what did I see?

Why are his pants rolled up?

800,000 or so Cubans left Cuba to the United States since the Castro revolution of 1959. The Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), with its 5,000 members -- mostly wealthy businessmen -- uses its wealth to support congressional and presidential candidates who support a hard line against Cuba, such as the tough trade and travel embargo, and the Helms-Burton law aimed at foreign companies investing there. The US government funds Radio Marti and TV Marti, which broadcast the CANF view of the world to Cuba (pointlessly, since the broadcasts are jammed by the Cuban government). Imagine if Cuba passed laws and acted this way towards the USA -- politicians would be asking for revenge! What is truth? and What is propaganda? Answer: truth comes from the side one identifies with; propaganda comes from the "enemy"!

Why has the U.S. government been so aggressive and hostile with its economic blockade of Cuba? Which country invaded which? Why did the U.S. government never invade the Soviet Union? Was it not a far, far greater threat? How does ideology and size of countries explain the actions of governments?

Answers:

pants: extreme gas shortage for cars and buses existed in Cuba by 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union from which Cuba got its fuel. So, when I traveled to Cuba, I took my bike!
U.S. Cold War ideology could only see enemies in revolutionary movements, like that of Castro's, even though the U.S. itself was born of revolution and rebellion against England. We learn little from history because history, like all human knowledge, is ideological. The U.S. government also has a bully foreign policy: acting aggressively towards small "enemy" governments, such as Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, Iraq, and Iran, but engaging in dialog with big "enemy" countries, such as the Soviet Union/Russia and China.

Several Cuban organizations (in Cuba) have sued the U.S. government for $181.1 billion, demanding it pay for the deaths of 3,478 Cubans (in part from the 1961 U.S. organized Bay of Pigs invasion) and the disabilities of 2,099 others as a results of nearly 40 years of "hostile acts," including a trade embargo [Source: Latin America Press, Vol. 31, No. 22, 1999].

Cuba won more gold medals at the Sydney 2000 Olympics than the USA! I bet you never heard that. How can that be? Answer.

Created by Ingolf Vogeler on 1 February 1996; last revised on 07 March 2005.