Cuba , officially the Republic of Cuba is Communist( a political and economic system in which the major productive resources in a society—such as mines, factories, and farms—are owned by the public or the state, and wealth is divided among citizens equally or according to individual need.) and an island country in the Caribbean comprising the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud and several archipelagos. It is the only Communist-run country in the Western Hemisphere.
Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. The official language is Spanish. The president is Raúl Castro . On 4.19.18 Miguel Díaz-Canel was selected to succeed Raúl Castro as the new president.
In April 1961, Cuban exiles trained by the CIA attacked the Caribbean island and tried to overthrow Communist leader Fidel Castro.
Statement on Cuba Policy Changes - ease trade, travel and financial restrictions that have been in place for decades.
Pres. Obama has said he wants to ease restrictions on remittances and family travel by Cuban Americans. Some critics in the Cuban-American community oppose relaxing sanctions until Cuba releases political prisoners. Some of the Bush sanctions were put in place following a Cuban government crackdown on dissidents in 2003. With worsening U.S. relations in recent years, Cuba has drawn closer to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who provides billions of dollars in subsidies to Cuba. Continue...
President Obama lifted all restrictions Monday, April 13, 2009, on the ability of individuals to visit relatives in Cuba, as well as to send them remittances.
The move represents a significant shift in a U.S. policy that had remained largely unchanged for nearly half a century. It comes days before Obama leaves for a key meeting of hemispheric powers, the Summit of the Americas, in Trinidad and Tobago.
"President Obama has directed that a series of steps be taken to reach out to the Cuban people to support their desire to enjoy basic human rights and to freely determine their country's future," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.
Obama also ordered new steps to promote the "freer flow of information among the Cuban people and between those in Cuba and the rest of the world, as well as to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian items directly to the Cuban people," Gibbs added.
The president took "these steps [in part] to help bridge the gap among divided Cuban families."
4.13.08 Monday: President Obama charts a new course with Cuba. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports: Keeping a campaign promise to ease U.S. policy toward Cuba, the President acted to allow Americans to make unlimited trips and money transfers to the communist nation.
The Cuban government, long the object of a U.S. economic blockade, is prepared to meet with the Obama administration, Cuba's leader said. "We've told the North American government, in private and in public, that we are prepared, wherever they want, to discuss everything -- human rights, freedom of the press, political prisoners -- everything, everything, everything that they want to discuss," Cuban President Raúl Castro said Thursday at a summit of leftist Latin American leaders in Venezuela.
Organization of American States lifts 47-year-old suspension. Washington has enforced the embargo (the U.S. embargo against trade and financial activity) for nearly 50 years, in part to press the Communist nation to move toward democratization and greater respect for human rights. Some U.S. leaders say the hard-line stance has clearly failed to achieve the goal. Cuba & the U.S. struggle to repair relationship. The center of the Cuban exile community is in Miami, where the Cuban American National Foundation became a powerful lobbying group courted by U.S. politicians. For nearly five decades, pressure and political donations from the exile community have thwarted any efforts to lift the embargo.
EMBARGO
The origins of the embargo go back even further, to when Fidel Castro came to power Jan. 1, 1959. He quickly lost American support as he publicized private land and companies, and imposed heavy taxes on imports from the U.S. In the first year of Castro’s regime, U.S. trade with Cuba decreased 20%. Essencially, after Castro nationalized American-owned property, allied himself with the Communist Party and grew friendlier with the Soviet Union, America’s Cold War enemy, the U.S severed diplomatic and economic ties with Cuba and enacted a trade and travel embargo that remained in effect until 2015.
Why Did the U.S. and Cuba Sever Diplomatic Ties in the First Place? As Castro purged Cuba of Batista supporters, he declined to institute the democratic reforms that many had hoped for. Initially, the revolution had not been overtly Communist, but Castro moved further toward that ideology as his rule went on. In the middle of 1959, he instituted wealth-distribution and land-confiscation programs.
In a Cold War world, the rise of Communism in a nation so close to Florida was not taken lightly. Though the U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Philip W. Bonsal, did finally manage to meet with Castro that September, their discussions — partly concerned with arrests of U.S. citizens in Cuba and the government confiscation of some U.S. investments in Cuba — proved fruitless.
In the United Nations, Cuba began to stand with Communist nations against the U.S.; in Cuba, the ruling regime encouraged anti-U.S. sentiments; in early 1960, the U.S.S.R. instituted a trade-and-aid deal with Cuba; U.S. sugar producers pushed for the nation to stop buying sugar from Cuba; Castro accused the U.S. of sabotaging a ship that blew up in Havana’s harbor. The details of changes in Cuba and the U.S. reaction to those developments are complicated and often conflicting, but suffice it to say that TIME called that period a “rapidly deteriorating situation that sees Cuban-American relations reach a new low each day.”
Eventually, in late October of 1960, the U.S. imposed a strict embargo barring two-thirds of American imports from Cuba, which before then had been buying a whopping 70% of its imports from the United States.
3.21.16: Obama tells Raul Castro the Cuban embargo is going to end.
January 14, 2011: President Obama has directed the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Homeland Security to take a series of steps to continue efforts to reach out to the Cuban people in support of their desire to freely determine their country’s future. Changes are to be made to regulations and policies governing: (1) purposeful travel; (2) non-family remittances; and (3) U.S. airports supporting licensed charter flights to and from Cuba. These measures will increase people-to-people contact; support civil society in Cuba; enhance the free flow of information to, from, and among the Cuban people; and help promote their independence from Cuban authorities.
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is located on the shore of Guantánamo Bay at the southeastern end of Cuba and has been used by the United States Navy for more than a century. Since 2002, the naval base has contained a military prison, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, for persons alleged to be enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan and later in Iraq. These are combatants who are considered "unlawful combatants" and who were formerly not being afforded protection under the Geneva Conventions for various reasons.
1.22.09: Pres. Obama issued executive order to close Guantanamo Bay prison and an order that all interrogations must follow Army manual. This will change America's image abroad, which has been damaged by the use of torture and the indefinite detention of suspects at the Gitmo prison in Cuba.
The Obama-Biden administration has already suspended terrorist suspects' trials at Gitmo for 120 days pending a review of the military tribunals.
5.15.09: President Barack Obama will restart military tribunals for a small number of Guantanamo detainees, reviving a Bush-era trial system he once assailed as flawed but with new legal protections for terror suspects, U.S. officials said.
2006 Military Commissions Act allows prosecution of Gitmo prisoners in a military court and abolishes habeas corpus a.k.a due process rights (a right to a court hearing so as not to be held indefinitely in a prison without being charged) for enemy combatants.
Dems voted against the Act. GOP voted for the Act.
Bush was reducing the number of detainees and has been seeking to return dozens of cleared prisoners to their countries of origin.
Obama said the military tribunal (court of justice) is flawed. Gitmo should be closed and habeas corpus restored. In 2006 Obama said it was a violation of U.S. law because of th elimits on detainees' legal rights. Biden said Gitmo should be closed and prisoners moved to the maximum military prison at FT. Leavenworth, Kansas.
Military Tribunal is a Bush-era trial system (detention system). Many human rights advocates and legal organizations don't like this system because it denies detainees many of the rights they would be granted in a civilian courtroom.
2.1.2010: Pres. Obama is asking for more than $230 million in the 2011 budget to buy and prepare an idle Illinois prison to house terrorism suspects now detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. CNN reports
2.27.15: The U.S. and Cuba make progress in Restoring Diplomatic Ties .
11.25.16: Wearing a green military uniform, Cuba's President Raul Castro appeared on state television to announce his brother's death. "At 10.29 at night, the chief commander of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro Ruz, died," he said, without giving a cause of death. "Ever onward, to victory," he said, using the slogan of the Cuban revolution.
BACKGROUND (Also see Pre-Castro Cuba)
The United States government had supported the American-friendly Batista regime since it came to power in 1952. After Fidel Castro, together with a handful of supporters that included the professional revolutionary Che Guevara, landed in Cuba to unseat Batista in December 1956, the U.S. continued to support Batista. Suspicious of what they believed to be Castro’s leftist ideology and fearful that his ultimate goals might include attacks on U.S. investments and properties in Cuba, American officials were nearly unanimous in opposing his revolutionary movement. As the Castro government moved toward a closer relationship with the Soviet Union, and Castro declared himself to be a Marxist-Leninist, relations between the U.S. and Cuba collapsed into mutual enmity.
In October 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union came to the brink of nuclear war over Soviet nuclear missiles installed in Cuba. President Kennedy demanded that the Soviets remove the weapons, and he established a naval blockade around the island. In the end, the Soviet Union backed down and removed the missiles. Cuba, which had struggled economically despite the Soviet subsidies, underwent even more severe hardships starting in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
A group of CIA-trained Cuban exiles, armed with US weapons, landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in an attempt to overthrow Castro. The invasion failed miserably, with many of the exile fighters killed or captured.
The United States later paid $53 million worth of food and medicine in exchange for more than 1,100 prisoners.
Two weeks after the Bay of Pigs,an isolated spot on the island’s southern shore, Castro formally declared Cuba a socialist state. A group of CIA-trained Cuban exiles, armed with US weapons, landed at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in an attempt to overthrow Castro. The invasion failed miserably, with many of the exile fighters killed or captured.
The United States later paid $53 million worth of food and medicine in exchange for more than 1,100 prisoners.
Two weeks after the Bay of Pigs, Castro formally declared Cuba a socialist state.
A Timeline of US-Cuba Relations.
11.28.16: "If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the U.S. as a whole, I will terminate the deal," Donald Trump tweeted. He would reverse the deal unless Cuba met certain demands such as the "religious and political freedom for the Cuban people, and the freeing of political prisoners," without going into specifics. He called the Obama administration's negotiations "a very weak agreement."
The White House pushed President-elect Donald Trump not to reverse President Obama’s opening with Cuba.
11.29.16: Some blacks applaud Castro legacy of racial equality. To them, he was a freedom fighter who cared about improving the lives of all Cubans, regardless of race.
Many Cubans saw their families torn apart after Castro took power, seizing property and jailing dissidents. Millions fled the country.
But for many African-Americans, Castro was a leader who was unafraid to stand up against racism at home and abroad.
At the height of the U.S. civil rights movement, Castro met publicly with Malcolm X, and sent Cuban troops to Angola to fight against the apartheid government of South Africa at a time when the U.S. still supported it. His support of the Civil Rights movement in America and African independence movements abroad has complicated his story.
Soledad O’Brien, whose mother is an Afro-Cuban, said those who have not fully studied history should take into account the “horrible things” perpetrated on Cubans, as well as the “big things” Castro brought to the nation, including healthcare, literacy and his attempt to “stamp out racial discrimination.”
Assata Shakur was granted asylum by Fidel Castro in 1984.
Cuba has long been a haven for African-Americans who've committed what might be interpreted as political crimes. Black Panthers such as Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and Raymond Johnson all spent time in Cuba in the 1960s (not always happily). At one time it was speculated that as many as 90 African-Americans were living in Cuba under asylum.
For Cuba, turning Shakur in to U.S. authorities would constitute a betrayal of its long, very carefully cultivated relationship with the African-American community, with the African diaspora and Africa itself. Castro didn't just do photo ops with Malcolm X; under his leadership, Cuba articulated a vision for the elimination of institutional racism and attempted to dismantle it (though even he admitted this was not as successful as he'd hoped), put men and women on the ground in several wars of liberation in Africa, trained doctors from Africa for free through its Latin American School of Medicine and, in recent years, extended scholarships to the school through the Congressional Black Caucus to U.S. students from underserved communities. (Of course, all this has also resulted in tremendous tolerance by African and other Third World countries of Cuba's human rights abuses.)
Returning Shakur to the U.S. would be an inconceivable 180 on the principles that governed all that. And whatever Cuba's actual record on more general ethical behavior, this is one issue on which it has never wavered.
12.17.19: 5 Years After Detente With US, Cubans Say Hope Has Dwindled.
