Why does the Cuban Embargo exist?
I’ve seen people asking this question due to the amazing vaccine Cuba managed to produce despite it, and there’s a lot that goes into the reasons for the Cuban embargo.
The story basically starts with colonialism and imperialism. The poet and warrior Jose Marti is a Cuban hero for fighting against Spain to win Cuban independence. Unfortunately, that didn’t end the scourge of colonialism in Cuba. You see, Spain had given huuuuge tracts of land as plantations to certain rich loyal subjects. And so the poverty of the general populace continued largely as it had under colonialism.
The United States helped Cuba win independence, but it was low-key a land grab. Walt Whitman, famous American poet, dreamt that Cuba would become a US state. But Cuba didn’t want to become a state, which is where imperialism comes in.
Ultimately, Cuba became a playground for the rich and famous and the American mafia. Resources were owned by American corporations. Land was still owned by colonizers. The “president” was a man who lost an election and then came in from Florida and orchestrated a coup, and he upheld American interests because hm, I wonder why. *eyeroll* It was a military dictatorship, one installed by the US, basically a puppet.
And this environment gave birth to Fidel Castro, who famously failed at his attempt to overthrow the government the first time and was exiled. He met Che Guevara (The Motorcycle Diaries is a fab movie if you want deets there), an Argentinian doctor who may have grown up wealthy but despised the poverty in Central and South America. They had similar ideals. Notably, those ideals were specifically anti-imperialist.
As you might imagine, this didn’t make them popular with the imperialist United States.
But they won. They took the nation, starting in Santiago de Cuba and driving the imperialist forces from the island.
Folks expected that it would just be business as usual. That Fidel and his cohort would just adhere to colonialism/imperialism and be excited to get money.
They started nationalizing industries. Kicking out the imperialists. Then they passed an agrarian act, which finally took the land from the old colonizer families that still held it, with the goal of having that land be for the people.
The US, obviously, was not happy with this. How could Cuba be a playground for organized crime and the rich and famous if the status quo wasn’t maintained? How dare!
It turned into a tit-for-tat. The US retaliated against Cuban reforms via trade, and Cuba responded by kicking out more imperialists and taking back their oil production lol.
And then the US cut its sugar quota. You see, once upon a time, most of our sugar came from Cuba. This was a fuckton of sugar. And that could break an economy.
Except the USSR stepped in and picked up the sugar quota. And so Cuba became a pawn in the Cold War.
Mind, we also didn’t like that they fought against apartheid in South Africa, sending aid to the struggle, and fought against imperialism across South and Central America. Famously, Che Guevara was executed and his body desecrated in Bolivia. They eventually sent his hands back to Cuba, and the CIA has his belongings on display like trophies.
The tit-for-tat ended with the Embargo, but the US didn’t stop there.
In 1996, the US passed the Helms-Burton Act, which strengthened the embargo and claimed that (at that point nearly 40 years later) the colonizer-descended families still owned the land that had been redistributed by the Cuban agrarian reforms. Furthermore, if any company in the world was discovered to be using land or resources claimed in Cuba under this act, “trafficking” in property supposedly owned by US citizens (because Cuba is a commodity, not a nation, you see), they would be penalized. This also covers property owned by Cubans who left and became US citizens.
The Helms-Burton Act is still in place, in 2021.
I’m admittedly biased. I’m a US citizen born and raised, but I am anti-imperialist and lean strongly toward socialism. I was able to study abroad in Cuba during a brief window in 2004 when educational programs were permitted to travel to Cuba (directly from Miami, even!).
We traveled the reverse path of the Revolution (Havana to Santiago de Cuba), and studied at the Agrarian University of Havana. At that university, while speaking to students, we noticed one of the buildings was unfinished and had been left to molder. We asked why, and learned that the USSR had been building it, but then the USSR fell and Cuba entered the Special Period, wherein they had to learn how to survive without subsidies from the USSR, with the embargo still in place.
The Special Period was the period of boat people, where people across Cuba were literally starving to death. And the US saw it as just in the name of imperialism, while also trying to gaslight Cuba. Of course, the US picked up the boat people, and there’s even a law that gives any Cuban who steps on US land citizenship. It’s all part of the abuse.
Despite this, Cuba has discovered many life-saving drugs it tends to refuse to patent, preferring to make them available to the world. Cuba has renowned programs to train doctors, and sends doctors world-wide.
TLDR; Cuba is anti-imperialist and the embargo is a 70-ish year-long punishment.
