Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Cuba defies Bush

Source: Green Left online

Lauren Carroll Harris
25 October 2007


On October 24, US President George Bush — a firm defender of freedom and human rights, as any Iraqi tortured by US forces at Abu Ghraib could testify — denounced Cuba as a “tropical gulag”. Bush said that Cuba is characterised by “terror and trauma”. The president also reaffirmed his support for the punishing US economic embargo against Cuba, which has lasted almost half a century and cost the Cuban people some US$89 billion.

A report from the Prensa Latina news agency noted that “The economic siege, officially established in 1963 and maintained for ten US administrations, aims to make the Cuban people surrender by [promoting] hunger and diseases.”

In view of the blockade’s failure to crush Cuba’s will to defy Washington, “Bush decided to approve a plan in May 2004 to speed up the destruction of the constitutional order agreed by the Cuban people. Only two months later, he reviewed the plan and added new measures to toughen the blockade, something he has been doing frequently in the last three years.”

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