Comment Re:That's about right if your name is Fidel Castro (Score 5, Insightful) 344
A lot of things ARE America's fault. Cuba is a case of both sides being wrong.
When your government is some crazy military who has remained in power by force for 50 years and has isolated the country from the rest of the world
In case you forgot, America has had an embargo on Cuba for decades, which has only recently been relaxed. Cuba never isolated itself from the world; America imposed that isolation because it didn't want a communist country sitting off its coast.
Communism is certainly a crappy form of government, but that doesn't give America the right to try to force its preferred form of government on foreign, sovereign countries. If the Cuban people want to try communism, that's their right.
The other big reason America was so oppressive towards Cuba is because American corporations owned a lot of land in Cuba and used it for sugarcane farming. When Castro took power, he seized all this property and nationalized it (just like Venezuela nationalized their oil industry under Chavez). American corporations whined and the American government acted as their enforcement arm, and tried to oust Castro.
From an objective, moral viewpoint, America is completely in the wrong. That land belonged to the Cubans, not American corporations who had somehow bought it up, and it was the Cubans' right to take it back. There's a simple lesson here: if you're not a citizen of a foreign country, then you don't have any rights there, especially when a new regime takes over. Stay in your own country. If you want the same rights and privileges as citizens of another country, then emigrate there and apply for Citizenship. Otherwise, don't act surprised when they change their minds one day and kick you out.
Cuba is just another example of America's imperialism throughout the 20th century. If we really believed in freedom, we would leave other sovereign nations alone to do what they want, and stop trying to control them with military power, bribes, etc.
If America had had a "hands-off" policy towards Cuba under Castro (i.e., no embargo, no assassination attempts, no invasions, etc.), and people were still trying to escape by homemade raft, then you could rightfully criticize that nation for not working very well. But you can't screw around with another country and then criticize them too. It's like tying one of a boxer's hands behind his back and then making fun of him for boxing poorly.
America is the main reason crazy leftist leaders like Castro and Chavez have been able to come to power and stay in power in Latin America. When the locals of these smaller countries are faced with a choice between exploitation by American corporations, or leadership by a nutcase who'll at least provide for them better than what they were getting, they'll choose the latter. It's not too different from Germany in the 30s: they were being oppressed by the Allied powers under the crappy treaty terms set down at the end of WWI, so in comes Hitler who turned them back into a major power, though he was a nut. If countries would stop screwing with each other so much, and mind their own business, we wouldn't have all these problems.
