8.7.20

Cuba Recovering from COVID

Cuba Hopes to Recover from Trump!!
     Today -- July 8th, 2020 -- the Daily Journal of the United States Government known as the Federal Register included a notice from the U. S. Department of Energy that said: "The current list of 'foreign adversaries' consist of China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Venezuela."
     As usual today -- July 8th, 2020 -- Cuba reported that it has no new deaths {"fallecidos"} from the Coronavirus pandemic and few new cases {"casos nuevos"}. Sarah Marsh, the excellent Reuters journalist in Havana, reports today on two drugs that helped quelled the COVID-19 virus in Cuba. And...uh...Sarah Marsh, working for the world-famed London-based News Agency, also had the freedom to explain that "Cuba's totally free universal healthcare available to all Cubans" was, also, a major factor.
   Someday, perhaps, American journalists...like the great Reuters journalist Sarah Marsh...will be again permitted to write fair articles related to Cuba.
      With its struggle with the Coronavirus pandemic cautiously under control, Cuba has begun to reopen its beaches to international tourists.
     The first tourist attractions that Cuba has opened to international tourists are the five mot popular keys just off the north-central coast of the main island -- just as Cayo Santa Maria that is circled above.
This is the beautiful Hotel Melia Cayo Santa Maria.
      Five of the Cuban keys have some of the most gorgeous and most pristine beaches in the world.
     Thanks to the herculean normalization efforts by former U. S. President Barack Obama, Cuba anticipated a record 5.3 international tourists in 2017. Entrepreneurs like the owner and driver of the convertible above rejoiced about the financial rewards of driving tourists around Havana and other prime locations. But, of course, 2017 was the year another Republican president, Trump, took office...returning the cruel and indecent Embargo-Blockade against the Caribbean's largest and, arguably, its most beautiful and most desirable island.
     Millions of Americans, including Hollywood's superstar Vin Diesel shown above driving gleefully along Havana's famed Malecon seawall, love the Cuban people and they showed their love for him.
     The uniquely beautiful and pristine beaches at the Cuban keys are again open but the Trump administration, which takes all of its Cuban measures only from a handful of zealous anti-Cuban Cuban-Americans in Miami and in the U. S. Congress, has instituted uniquely genocidal policies against Cuba that particularly try to blockade the island's crucial revenue derived from tourism and all other sources too. Of course, during the current pandemic, no other nation in the world has to endure such policies from the USA or any other Superpower.
     Meanwhile, this young Havana couple sits on the famed Malecon seawall and daydreams at sunset about how a handful of greedy and seedy individuals 90 miles away across the Caribbean Sea are allowed to reap rewards from punishing them.
       Of course, a handful of seedy and greedy individuals in the world's strongest democracy can dominate the USA's Cuban policies by dominating the Cuban narrative, which has been the case in the U. S. virtually since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959. But that Cuban narrative in the U. S. includes concocted lies as it purports to speak for the Cubans on the island. Yet, like the Cuban above, they want to be able to speak for themselves about how much they love Cuba and hate Little Havana USA.
Little Havana, USA.
Havana, Cuba.
Havana Harbor.
     Cuba for four centuries fought wars trying to gain its independence from Spain and the United States, finally defeating its last foreign-backed dictatorship, the U.S.-backed Batista regime, on January 1, 1959. Except for the six-decades-old U. S. Embargo-Blockade, Cubans in July of 2020 believe they have had independence only since January 1, 1959...and enough of them still are willing to fight to retain it.
      This tree on the edge of the gorgeous south-central colonial city of Trinidad is off-limits only to Americans who would be breaking a U. S. law -- the Helms-Burton Act -- if they got to see this tree in person. All other citizens around the world have the freedom to see this tree in person, although many of them are persuaded from doing so by the USA, which is the economic and military world power. Meanwhile, Americans themselves are not supposed to ask why a mere handful of greedy and seedy people can write and maintain Helms-Burton decade after decade after decade.
     The Batistiano-written and Batistiano-maintained Helms-Burton Act is the Little Havana bible that grossly enriches  and empowers Cubans in Miami but starves and deprives Cubans on the island. It was the Trump administration that allowed Little Havana stalwarts to add the genocidal skull & X equation to the Helms-Burton Act.
     Still embracing its independence provided in 1959 by the Cuban Revolution, this 2017 photo...as far as Cubans on the island are concerned...means the difference between having a Republican U. S. president, Trump, replace a U. S. Democrat president, Obama. Trump promotes starvation and deprivation on the island while Obama until 2017 tried his best to normalize relations with Cuba that would allow Cubans on the island to have the wherewithal to have jobs via tourism and other ventures so they would have the financial opportunities to care for their families. While the resilience of the pugnacious Cubans on the island is legendary, their suffering administered by Republican presidents since the 1950's has been cruel and extremely anti-democratic.
     Americans since 2017 are not SUPPOSED to understand what this handshake meant to the advent of U. S. genocidal starvation policies aimed at Cubans on the island. It depicts President Trump turning the USA's Cuban policies to vicious, self-serving Little Havana members of the U. S. Congress -- Mario Diaz-Balart, the son of one of the Batista dictatorship's most powerful Ministers, and Mario Rubio, who still believes that his Little Havana credentials will soon put him in charge of both Washington and Havana.
      Meanwhile, in July of 2020 the independent Cuban flag still waves in the Caribbean breezes...even as the nearby United States, the strongest nation in the world, continues and expands what is history's all-time longest and cruelest economic Embargo ever imposed by a powerful nation against a much weaker and smaller nation. Of course, to this day Americans and Cuban-Americans are not SUPPOSED to be ashamed about the image above, which is the famous Carlos LaTuff graphic that personifies the Embargo to the rest of the world. It also confirms, I believe, that the Cuban Revolution to this day says even more about the United States than it says about Cuba.
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