Another UN Vote Shames America

In Denouncing Cuban Embargo
WThursday, October 29th, 2015

       Tuesday, for the 24th consecutive October, the nations of the world strongly denounced an American Cuban policy that, since the 1950s, has shamed America and democracy as well as America's best friends around the world. In the United Nations this week, the vote was 191-to-2 against the U. S. embargo of Cuba, a cruel anti-Democratic abomination that was installed back in 1962 for the purpose, according to declassified U. S. documents, of starving and depriving Cubans on the island to entice them to rise up and overthrow Fidel Castro. 1962! Starvation and Deprivation imposed on a smaller nation by a much more powerful one, which at the time happened to be the most respected nation in the world. This week's vote in the United Nations is a reminder that newsman Tom Brokaw famously anointed the Americans that led the free world to victory in World War II in 1945 as "The Greatest Generation" of Americans. However, by 1952 when the U. S. teamed with the Mafia to support the brutal-thieving Batista dictatorship in Cuba, and by 1953 when the CIA engineered the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected President of Guatemala, America's Greatest Generation had begun to dissolve. What has been left is the sheer fact that the last two generations of Americans can be labeled The Worst, The Most Cowardly, The Most Ignorant, and the most Un-patriotic Generations in America's history. If that sounds like too harsh an indictment, then justify the 191-to-2 vote in the United Nations; then justify a policy since 1962 designed to starve and deprive innocent people on a nearby sovereign island; then justify acquiescing to the mantra in the Miami media that the terrorist bombing of a child-laden civilian airplane was "the biggest blow yet against Castro"; and then justify the photo at the top of this essay that depicts the vote at the United Nations. 191-to-2! 191-to-2! 191-to-2!

      Once again this week Israel was the only nation in the entire world that voted in the UN to support the United States embargo of Cuba. Israel, a world nuclear superpower, is also the only nation in the whole wide world that receives billions of dollars in economic and military aid every year from United States taxpayers.

      America's two-term President, Barack Obama, has begged the dysfunctional, bought-and-paid-for, right-wing U. S. Congress to end the embargo of Cuba. Mr. Obama, a decent and democracy-loving man, is ashamed of the image, depicted above, that the embargo casts on the United States and on democracy. Unfortunately, the last two generations of Americans have not had either the guts or the decency to support Mr. Obama's Cuban overtures. Last month the Associated Press reported that Mr. Obama planned to tell his UN ambassador "to abstain" on the embargo vote. Not surprisingly, considering the threats and pressure Presidents Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton {the other three Democratic Presidents since 1962} received, Mr. Obama backed off that abstention plan. In the past year Mr. Obama has bravely done all he can do with his Executive Powers to normalize relations with Cuba. But he has been and will be stymied by a generation in which the U. S. Congress, the U. S. media, and the American people simply do not have the guts or the patriotism to support him.

      Therefore, this week's 191-to-2 vote in the UN reflects this image of America that is now emblazoned around the world. But this pusillanimous generation of Americans doesn't have the courage to react sanely to this image, and neither does the intimidated and/or incompetent U. S. media. But for two generations, the world's most powerful democracy...and once the most respected democracy...has allowed remnants of an overthrown foreign dictatorship that reconstituted itself in nearby Florida in 1959 to shame what had been the greatest form of government ever devised. For what it was worth, that is what the world, including America's best friends, expressed to the American people at the UN this week. That expression will be shamefully ignored.

191-to-2

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