WHY DO I EVEN CARE?
Fifty years ago, as a 14 year old youngster I accompanied my parents to an unwanted exile. What I left behind was my heritage and my national identity. I learned to first live with a different culture, eventually assimilating those things I found worthy and rejecting those I didn’t.
I encountered a lot of rejection along the way in the form of discrimination. I couldn’t understand it at the time why anyone would find it objectionable that I was born 90 miles too far south to be considered a human being. To this day, that concept still escapes me…and that is one of the great motivations in my life in America. I swore that I would fight and struggle to if not eliminate that racism and 
bigotry; at least I could neutralize it, so that my children could have a better life and not be subjected to the humiliations I was.
I also saw something very enlightening: the corrupt, greedy and selfish politicians and the very rich totally ignoring the welfare of the common people. That says a lot as to why the emergence of a totalitarian government after festering with iniquities and unfairness since Cuba gained its independence in 1902. I don’t think that anyone can argue that there was at least one honest politician or one government devoid of corruption and scandals. Some were worse than others but all never failed to leave office filthy rich and bequeathing a country worse off than they found it.
I see a lot of parallels with what happened then and I observed in my youth. José Martí, the Cuban patriot and philosopher once said that 
countries have the governments they deserve. Cuba could not be a better example and the people of Cuba by allowing themselves to be duped, to believe in demagoguery and be manipulated only hastened and facilitated the advent of a very disastrous revolution. It was 51 years on January 1st and Cuba is today back in the 17th century in many ways. With the exception of education and medicine where they have made significant progress, the rest is a chaotic, depressed, anemic economy with severe shortages and hardship for the Cuban people. There, only a very few and limited number of people, mostly those who are very high up in the food chain of government have an easy life and one of abundance. The rest of the population is in severe 
deprivation and extreme repression. And please don’t tell me that it is the US embargo that is causing this because that embargo is mostly symbolic, Cuba does business with almost every country in the world but they have to do it with cash reserves and that in Cuba is a rarity and a luxury. Cuba has for too long been a poor credit risk and very negligent in paying back any loans or even the purchases they make.
I am in favor of lifting the embargo simply because with the embargo gone, Cuba will no longer use it as an escape goat for its shortcomings, they will finally have to admit that after fifty years their system is a failure.
I get very nervous when I see our government borrowing enormous amounts of money from the Chinese and the Arabs just to finance two stupid wars. I get very angry when I see that in the U.S. we are not earnestly trying to become energy independent and even when we have the technology there is far too much influence from the oil companies and corruption on the part of politicians who are in their pockets. What is that you said? That we don’t have the technology? I beg to differ…a third world country like Brazil way back during the first oil crisis in the seventies, embarked on a very ambitious program to alter their vehicles to run on ethanol; produced nationally from sugar 
cane and then they turned around, borrowed heavily and built the largest hydroelectric dam in the world: Itaipú which supplies more than half of the electricity in South America.
Why do I draw these parallels? Because when you have a radical movement taking over a country the consequences are disastrous. I can only imagine what would happen in America if the Tea Bagger-conservative Republicans finally prevail. America, as much as I love it, would not be a place I want to live in.
PHOTO SOURCE: http://biosonicsinc.com/images/ItaipuDam_100.jpg
http://mytravelling.nl/cuba/foto/cuba2775.jpg
http://www.wired.com/images/article/full/2008/02/cuba_400px.jpg
http://progreso-weekly.com/2/images/stories/embargo%20caricature.jpg
http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2007/castro_obit/fidel_castro_01.jpg
http://www.unison.org.uk/file//cuba2.jpg
http://havanajournal.com/images/gallery/CUBA_018.JPG
http://cuba.foreignpolicyblogs.com/files/2009/06/elderly-cubans.jpg
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