Dale's Inspirations

Dale, I have to thank you again for your questions that inspire me to blog. One of the things you asked me was related to the price of food, which led me back to the topic of the blockade, and I just wanted to clarify for everyone exactly what's going on with the embargo (to be honest, I wasn't clear on this until I got here). It's not just the US that doesn't trade with Cuba. Being a serious tool, our country also let it be know that any country that trades with Cuba will be regarded as an unfriendly state. Also, the Helms-Burton bill says that any ship that makes port in Cuba is NOT allowed to come to the US within 6 months following their stop in Cuba. You can then follow the economic consequences of that to see how this would negatively effect other countries, because the US is a huge exporter. So yeah, this makes me angry. Why do we think we have the right to stop the trade other countries have with Cuba? Yes, we CAN do it, as in the ability to do it exists, but why do we think we can???

One other note, to balance this out politically. Most Cubans are pretty stoked about Obama winning the election- but not all. On our first bus ride (I don't know how I forgot to write aboutthis earlier) an old man asked Chelsea where we were from, and when she answered, he said "Obama, Obama". And she replied something along the lines of "Yeah, he won, isn't it great?" And the old man was actually unhappy, saying that "we'll all be hungry for 30 years". I wonder if that might have anything to do with the embargo being lifted, because while in the long run it will help the Cuban economy, I think it will have a very rough effect on Cuban individuals because they are used to prices that are being kept artificially low, and when the prices normalize after the embargo ends, I think that will produce some hard results here. But yeah, that's what's going on.