David Adler (42:39)
So let's talk about the layers of US Policy when it comes to the strangulation of the island of Cuba and the asphyxiation of its people. I agree with you. Calling this an embargo seems to be a criminal understatement of the siege that we are now laying against Cuba. And Trump is quite forthright about saying we are the ones who are inflaming a humanitarian crisis and we're the ones who are advancing the logic that was once set out in black and white on a 1960 State Department cable that's explicitly said the goal of US policy towards Cuba in the case of Castro's victory is to prevent the arrival of any cash or money to inflame hunger and desperation on the island to and to inflict a form of social uprising that can lead to the fall of a government that the United States perceived to be somewhat adversarial to its prior interest in the Bautista regime, from which Marco Rubio's family originally fled, that was known for its brutality, known for its criminality, and known for its immiseration of the Cuban people, leaving them in forms of poverty and commiseration for many years. But this is a multilayered siege. So, first of all, if you go online and you have the misfortune, as I often do, of engaging with that far right Cuban diaspora, the line that often emerges, their narrative, which is one that Marco Rubio has made in Congress under oath, is that there is no blockade, there is no embargo, that everyone is free to trade with Cuba. The United States decides its relationship to the Cuban people, or its relationship with the Cuban government, so to speak, that, you know, we determine them to be some kind of threat to our national interests and national security. But really, there's no embargo. That's just a term that the Cuban socialist government uses as a way of excusing its own failures and mismanagement of the island. So, first of all, we're looking at a huge admission that I think is going to embarrass not just Marco Rubio, but that whole community in Miami where he's explicitly saying we do have an embargo and we do have the overwhelming capacity in terms of our control over the international systems of trade, in particular over the international system of finance, to keep Cuba completely isolated out of that system. So let's talk about those layers. There's the original blockade that's, as you say, been going on for longer than 60 years, which basically not only prevents countries, not only prevents US Companies from engaging in commerce with Cuba, but also prevents third party countries from engaging with Cuba. That's not a Republican policy, it's also a Democrat policy. I believe it was Obama who sanctioned Paribas for one of the largest fines in history of US Kind of economic statecraft, really, for daring to engage with financial services with the island of Cuba. So this is a long standing bipartisan legal framework that is built in Congress that can even be undone by an executive order. That's how deeply established, interwoven into a bipartisan view of our moral and political obligation to oversee the immiseration of the Cuban people. That's the blockade. Then you've got what's called a state sponsor of terrorism list. So Donald Trump's a big fan. He's did it in Trump won his final week in office, and he's done it again in Trump too, of putting Cuba on a list of state sponsors of terrorism. What kind of terrorism, we don't really know. The justifications are extremely superficial and very difficult to believe. But effectively, this is one of our strongest forms of financial strangulation that bars Cuba and its people from participating in the international financial system, not just accessing financial developmental aid, for example, loans from the imf, grants from the World bank we're talking about for any major financial institution or even wire service like PayPal, for example, of engaging with transfers on the island. So that's the ssot. Joe Biden was generous enough to take Cuba off the SSOT list in his last week in office, only for Trump to put it back on the week after. So a lot of the blame for the present conjuncture with Cuba should be laid at the feet of the Biden administration, should be at the feet of his State Department, of Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken in particular, who failed to restore the diplomatic relations that Cuba managed to establish with Barack Obama at a time that, as you say, with this thaw, oversaw a really golden period in Cuba when tourism was taking off, when there was really healthy relations between the two countries. But it was Joe Biden, who was really convinced by Marco Rubio, then head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, that he could be the president that liberated Cuba finally from the grips of castriesta socialism. Now, you know, Marco Rubio is in pole position. He's leading out this clan of Gusano psychopaths who really are leading under the refrain of the beatings will continue until morale improves with respect to the Cuban people. We're going to make you poor. We're going to kill babies, we're going to kill mothers, we're going to kill grandmothers and grandfathers in order to secure their freedom. And that white Orwellian logic is the dominant one. And as you say, it's really dispiriting that we're not seeing a more forthright response, not just on the hill, but in the international community. And the failure to recognize that that tactic of siege, once normalized in Gaza, has been exported to Cuba and brics contagion to the rest of the world. And so those are really the stakes of what we're up against in Cuba. And I think we're a bit slow, a lot of people to come online to what a siege really means. It doesn't just mean, you know, one life at risk or another. It means the rapid collapse of critical infrastructure that sustains the island. Homes and hospitals and schools, basic medicines, you know, if there's no electricity, you can't store blood, you can't store important medicine, you can't move people from point A to point B. This is an unfathomable situation, I think for any so called first world country. And until we switch on to those humanitarian consequences, we're going to be very slow. Slow to realize that what we're doing right now is a historic war crime that will never be forgotten by the world at large.
