Cuba is today wracked by the worst economic and social crisis in almost 40 years, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, a prolonged period referred to as the “special period.” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who comes from a Cuban exile family, is taking special sadistic pleasure in the fact that the U.S. trade embargo on Venezuelan oil, if maintained, will also strangle Cuba, denying it crude oil and diesel fuel needed to keep the economy running. What Cuba gets from Mexico and Russia isn’t enough to meet its needs.
Suffering and hardship in Cuba are nothing new. Rubio and his Florida-based Cuban-exile mafia claim that the island’s economic problems are due entirely to its “communist” system, causing great harm to the Cuban people. But every year the Cuban Foreign Ministry issues a special report documenting the genocidal effects on every facet of Cuban life caused by the U.S.-run economic blockade of Cuba, imposed in 1957.
The Dec. 21 Wall Street Journal pointed out that, in the event Cuba couldn’t obtain oil from Venezuela, Russia, or Mexico on favorable terms, it would have to buy it on the international market at a cost of about $3 billion a year, which it simply doesn’t have.
