Cuba, a human safari to support the real blockade that is ruining that island

The Cuban communist dictatorship is suffering serious problems that could end up causing its fall in a short time.

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At this time, the island is suffering from severe blackouts. A month and a half ago, the tourism industry (the most important source of foreign currency) began to notice the oil shortage problems, with the island running out of fuel to refuel the planes arriving from other countries.

These problems have a simple explanation: the end of the Venezuelan oil supply that has been sustaining the Cuban dictatorship, in an infamous symbiosis between two anti-democratic regimes. A few days ago, the Miranda Center for Democracy published "Oil for Repression," noting that since 2000, Venezuela has transferred the equivalent of $63.8 billion worth of oil to Cuba. The report states the following:

"Venezuela has paid Cuba $63.8 billion (at present value) to finance its own repression. This forfeited capital could have funded 67% of Venezuela's announced oil-sector investment requirement or rebuilt Venezuela’s collapsed power and water grids three times over. By prioritizing the 'Oilfor-Repression' model, the regime traded the nation’s industrial future for a Cuban-designed praetorian guard. This $63 billion stolen opportunity makes dismantling the GRUCE more than a political necessity, it is a prerequisite for economic recovery."

What the people of Venezuela have suffered is a colossal theft to sustain the Cuban communist dictatorship, a theft that came to an end last January with the United States' intervention to capture the dictator and drug trafficker Nicolás Maduro.

Faced with these facts, the extreme left tries to convince us that Cuba's problems are due to a US "blockade" and that if this weren't the case, the situation on the island would be considerably better. However, as I already explained here, Cuba is not suffering from a blockade, but rather a trade embargo. There are no US warships preventing goods from reaching the island. This embargo excludes food and medicine (something the extreme left always omits) and makes the democratization of Cuba a condition for its end. The communist dictatorship has always refused to do so.

Faced with the risk of the communist dictatorship falling, far-left leaders from several countries have organized a trip to Cuba that pretends to be a "humanitarian mission". It is utterly repugnant cynicism. A genuine humanitarian mission to Cuba would require the end of the criminal dictatorship that has ruled the island without free elections since 1959, a regime that imprisons, tortures, and murders opponents and has ruined and oppressed the Cuban people while the communist elite became immensely rich —a process already seen in other communist dictatorships.

The trip to Cuba by left-wing extremists, including some who live in luxurious villas and always fly first class, is not a humanitarian mission. What the extreme left has gone to Cuba to do is a human safari that treats the misery of the Cuban people as a spectacle, a misery not caused by the United States or any other country, however much that anti-democratic regime tries to blame others for all the problems it has caused—a common practice of all communist dictatorships.

Cuba is in ruin because of one single, genuine blockade: the one the communist dictatorship has been imposing since 1959 (67 years now), violating human rights, preventing Cubans from freely electing their representatives, governing with a one-party regime in which all other parties are banned, and turning any criticism of the regime into grounds for the most brutal repression. The extreme left has gone to Cuba to support this communist blockade and the criminal regime that imposes it. I hope they pay for it someday.