I’m Puzzled!

April 25, 1993

The other day, a flotilla of small boats left Key West for Cuba with cargoes of much-needed medical supplies, vitamins and food. Because Cuba is a Communist nation, the United States has maintained a thirty-year embargo on trade with Cuba. Any attempts to resume some kind of trading with Cuba arouses instant, angry and sometimes riotous protests, particularly in Miami where so many Cuban expatriates live.

I’m puzzled why we are unwilling to do business with Fidel Castro. It cannot be because he is a dictator, because the United States has always been willing to deal with and support dictators when it suited our interests. Joseph Stalin was our buddy in World War II. We have supported Somoza, Marcos, Batista, Cristiani, for example, all of whom were more cruel and self-aggrandizing than Castro.

Why are we so scared of Castro’s communist Cuba when we are snuggling in with the most powerful communist nation in the world – China? (Forgetting the horrors of Tienanmen Square.) More than that, we have granted China “most-favored-nation” status in the jargon of world trade.

The collapse of the Soviet Union has created crippling shortages in Cuba. Oil, needed for both transport and energy, is scarce; so are medicine and food.

Louis Friedman, a journalist, reports on a recent eleven-day fact finding trip to Cuba (“Human Quest” May-June, 1993), including a visit to Cuba’s Isle of Youth, where Cuba is educating over 100,000 secondary-school-age children from around the world.

(Some years back in Jamaica, in a difficult and potentially dangerous situation, I met a young Jamaican lady who escorted us down a mountain road. She was polite, well-spoken and a “very present help.” She had received her high-school education in Cuba on a scholarship granted by the Cuban government. I have wondered how many scholarships we offer to high-school age young people from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands?)

Louis Friedman also writes, “We visited the Jose Marti Pioneer Camp outside Havana, where over 11,000 child victims from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine have been treated (and are being treated) in the last three years. There are acute shortages of food and medicine at these facilities – and in Cuba in general.”

Why can’t we be more generous toward people who provide such humanitarian efforts?

Is our United States prosperity so great that we can reject and disavow Cuba as a trading partner? We even occupy part of their nation, Guantanamo. If we can talk of billions to aid the former Soviet Union, why are we refusing to do any business with Cuba? Commercial trading creates and maintains jobs, profits, dividends, does it not?

WE might benefit in other ways, too. I have read elsewhere that literacy in Cuba is 97%. Our education gurus might learn something if they checked-out the Cuban educational system. All Cubans are covered by a national health plan. Why don’t we find out how and why that works? In terms of our nation’s health, we need all the advice and wisdom we can get.

There is an old adage that as a boy, I heard frequently from my elders, “Don’t cut off your nose to to spite your face.” I believe that old, and somewhat inelegant adage is a sage way to conclude, “I’m Puzzled.”