Abstract

Beat the Devil

This article presents information on international relations between the United States and Cuba. The U.S. is killing Cubans every day. The victims are mostly over 65, and they are dying from such diseases as TB, influenza and pneumonia. It's the kind of carnage that is registered in small upticks on a mortality graph, not as easy to focus on as, say, a pile of bodies dismembered by the U.S.-trained troops in El Salvador in the early 1980s. But the killing, engineered by the U.S. government, is just as relentless. Cuba's crisis began with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s, but real devastation commenced with the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, reluctantly signed into law by former U.S. President George Bush, in order to head off candidate Bill Clinton, who had been eagerly promoting the bill in Florida. The new law severely tightened the thirty-one-year U.S. embargo on trade with Cuba, banning shipments to the island from any U.S. subsidiaries. Foreign ships visiting Cuba are forbidden to dock at the U.S. ports for six months thereafter.