What do you think of the Helms-Burton Act?

What do you think of the Helms-Burton Act?
In Alice Walker’s open letter to President Clinton, written just after he signed the Helms-Burton Law (which tightened the embargo against Cuba, in 1996), she writes, “The bill is wrong, the embargo is wrong, because it punishes people, some of them unborn, for being who they are.” I agree with her.

For starters, there’s a great deal of hypocrisy in that name. What this legislation does is make it difficult to establish peace, and it tries to force the rest of the world to become hostile against Cuba. This may be why the whole world is in opposition.

According to Wayne Smith, from the Center for International Policy, the CDA is “the brainchild of the ultra-conservative Republican organization, the Cuban-American National Foundation,” and is an example of “how not to advance our objectives” in Cuba. “Thanks to the Cuban Democracy Act,” he says, “ the United States was isolated, with only Israel and Romania voting with us.”

As enhanced by the Helms-Burton Act, the embargo against the Cuban population is considerably meaner than any other U.S. embargo, including those against China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Uganda, Iran, Iraq (during the Gulf War, the U.S. government exempted foods and medicines to the Iraq embargo for humanitarian reasons) and Nicaragua. Non-U.S. firms in countries such as Switzerland, France, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic have reportedly been threatened by U.S. embassy personnel with commercial reprisals unless they canceled planned sales to Cuba of goods ranging from milk to soap.

The meanness of this legislation, and the timing of its implementation, looks very bad for the U.S. from a world perspective, and makes people doubt the wisdom of U.S. leadership. It confirms the fears many people have that the lunatics are all in congress.