In the face of recent protests in Cuba against deteriorating economic conditions and the government response to the COVID crisis, the American news media has, predictably, revived time-worn propaganda by blaming Cuba’s woes on the alleged failures of socialism and the Cuban revolution. Virtually unmentioned, however, is the effect of 60 years of crippling US economic sanctions, a policy Joe Biden campaigned on eliminating but has yet to follow through on — just one of many progressive campaign promises Biden abandoned once he was inaugurated, mind you.
In this clip Cenk and Ana delve into the Cuba question, acknowledging that Cuba is no democracy, and that the Cuban government is a dictatorship, but also recognizing that the United States’ actions have dramatically worsened the suffering of the Cuban people. Ana describes Biden’s pretense of caring about the Cuban people while maintaining the sanctions as “disgusting” while Cenk argues that attempting to crush the Cuban people into such dire conditions that they will overthrow their own government as both immoral and unlikely to succeed.
And to any talk of America’s alleged interest in promoting democracy in Cuba, Cenk points out that the US is perfectly willing to count a dictatorship like Saudi Arabia among our key allies, so no one should be bamboozled into believing what Biden — or the likes of Marco Rubio or any others calling for Cuban regime change — are selling on that score. Instead, as part of the solution to Cuba’s woes, Cenk and Ana agree, the US should drop the sanctions, allow money to flow freely into Cuba and promote more worker-run cooperatives to dilute the government’s complete control of the nation’s economic activity.