procure this little. street looking. through the t.v. on time main headlines as egypt gears up for a new democratic chapter with elections in september morning start groups linked to radical islamists gaining ground. the muslim brotherhood can take over the country's. world's u.s. backed financial situations through a method on the bank bank pointing to roadblocks on the path to recovery options debts one of the saying america should solve its own troubles for helping out advice to others. runs it's really faces

a lost generation and one in five young people out of work the prospects of getting a job in tough economic climate trees to bring suffering the same fate as greece and italy and. cuba is planning summit revolutionary economic changes it has to do all it can to survive after all its more than fifty years since the us sat down a crippling budget so like the discussion next to people about in crosstalk. if you can. get. along in the welcome to cross talk i'm peter lavelle fifty years after the cia back bay of pigs operation the castro dynasty still dominates havana but has the u.s. hardline stance on cuba had unintended consequences for the revolution is it time

finally to end the embargo that is never achieved its original aims. to. discuss u.s. cuban relations or lack of them i'm joined by ray waltzer in washington he's a senior policy analyst at the heritage foundation in berkeley we cross the salt landau he is a senior fellow at and vice chair of the institute for policy studies he's also a filmmaker and his new film is the real terrorist please stand up and in san francisco we have gloria she is a coordinator of the national committee to free the cuban five all right this is cross talk that means you can jump any time you want but first let's have a short look at a short report on recent relations between washington and havana. fifty years following the failure of the us back bay of pigs up aeration to oust fidel castro's government and cuba the two nations remain at loggerheads decades of washington imposed embargo have kept the debate raging some supporters of the sanctions in

congress say easing them only the communist regime but others see the embargo as elevated and counterproductive to u.s. interests and to the welfare of the cuban people it has long been agreed that doing business with cuba could rake in large profits for america's business especially the tourism and agricultural sectors according to cuba foundation every year the embargo cost the u.s. economy three point six billion dollars in lost agricultural exports the. i mean you could it's believed the worse the fact has been on the cubans themselves most of whom earn an average twenty dollars a month and struggle for basic necessities such as food clean water and medicine any injustice any crime in what ever time has no excuse to go on the cruel blockade against the cuban people costs lives cost suffering at the same time there are those who say isolating cuba may very well be helping to demonize washington and justify the very regime the embargo seeks to erode

a two thousand and nine public opinion poll revealed that sixty seven percent of americans favored ending the embargo and recently the us administration appeared to be slowly steering toward a policy shift when president barack obama relaxed travel restrictions and when it insists to cuba but still as a woman makes the gradual overtures to ease tension it remains unclear whether it will be another decade before the status quo changes my chardonnay for across our team. ok ray if i can go to you first in washington after five decades more than five decades why don't we just change the policy towards cuba because the original aims of the embargo have just utterly failed there's been no progress whatsoever the castro family is still there what the castro family is going through eleven american presidents if i count right i mean isn't it when you make finally a change is necessary go ahead. well first of all there is not

a full embargo we trade in agricultural commodities wheat some medical sales are made there there is clearly a steady flow of remittances from cuban americans to cuba there's a fairly active track of visitation no doubt every tourist can visit cuba but there's a certain a lively exchange so what we have is a partial embargo that is still there because of the relation the political relationship between the two countries cuba remains a totalitarian communist state there are some in your audience who may have memories of what it was like to live under a totalitarian regime and that basically is the is the roadblock it's not. the american people's dislike of cuba but it is the existence of a communist authoritarian regime which creates the sort of the the gap the one that you have talked about which is existed for something like eleven presidencies ok it's interesting in one go it is solid mean the united states and the soviet union

had diplomatic relations and they weren't the best of friends during the cold war i'll repeat my question the beginning of the program it's a failure this whole policy has been a failure and it's a lot of people put it on the shoulders of the administration's eleven administrations in washington go ahead sir. well a on think it's been a total failure i think that the embargo has had a good deal of success in the sense that it's really cut off lots of possibilities that cuba would have had if the embargo hadn't been in place and embargo has except seeded very very well causing suffering in cuba i think mr waltzer is wrong in the sense that he talks about trade there's no trade there is one way sales the united states sells food and certain medicine to cuba c o d cuba has no credits and cuba has no ability to sell anything to the united states other than that all companies that do business with cuba banking for example get punished if they have banks in

the united states so the embargo is still on and it doesn't make any sense if you want to bring down the government but it does make a lot of sense if you want to demoralize the population and that's what the embargo is done and right now cuba's economy is in terrible shape it's in a dysfunctional state in fact if you want to change cuba in other words if you wanted to see overnight drastic shift in cuba you would lift the embargo and it would change in a week but look here's the question to ask i think what it cuba through to us again i mean china is a single party communist government whose human rights record is arguably far worse than cuba's viet-nam as a single party communist government which has us as its largest trading partner and trade goes both ways and it also has no perfect human rights record so what cuba do to us to deserve fifty plus years of punishment i think that the main reason for

the maintenance of the embargo is that it serves political ends in florida and certain people are making money off of it i can't see any other logical reason for it other than obsession perhaps you could argue obsession but is that if you have no logical. reason other side were making probably or look at the same. go ahead greg i had just crossed are jumping right now i was just saying no logical fact other than the fact that we have the same ruling dictatorship that is both for fifty two plus years nowadays we have been told it well maybe i'll always have a ten year additional term so i mean there's no there's no political dynamic that's involved in the ok are there is a state we're going to settle in a democratic western hemisphere ok i'm going to go to gloria i mean the royal family of saudi arabia has been there for a long time too and no one calls out an open society you go ahead. yes first of all i would actually call it more of a blockade because the u.s.

policy goes beyond just being trade between two countries the united states sanctions corporations around the world as saul and our said positions banks that except cuban money and from the very first day of the blockade and before the stated intention was to make the cuban people suffer and try to force them to overthrow their government and i think it's time for the american people to realize that we have an obligation to demand that our government stop the taking to other countries speaking of dictatorship there is now a third war going on against libya and i don't think the people of this country voted for that but i've been to cuba many times and seen the suffering that has taken place because of denial of medicine by the united states and you know i've seen medical parts and machinery that has been paralyzed because the u.s.

prevents european countries from selling those parts to cuba the block which annoys the terror. laurie you know girl i'll tell you there was a key there is a pediatric heart hospital in havana which could not use a blood gas analyzer because apart that the launch of the machine became ish company that was bought up by a us corporation could no longer sell the park so actually my organization collected money and bought a car from denmark and sent it through to cuba but a country can't operate that way and eleven million cuban people have a right to determine and they have determined what kind of society that they will have it's time for the us to stop this criminal blockade ok ray you want to jump in there i mean a lot of people would say go ahead ray go ahead well first of first of all ok first of all most of the medical i mean i'm not totally comfortable with the medical

issue is a very it's a very tense one but the my understanding is that there's a pretty advanced medical supply houses in europe and in latin america that if they had the foreign exchange if they had a functioning economy they could purchase what they needed on the open market. that's an interesting very technical point about that certain items may be blocked but again this is a country that has relations with the rest of the world its biggest problems are the fact that its economic model simply it's a rusty old engine that won't try forward and keeps eleven million people basically imprisoned on an island ok if i'm going to go back through i will tell people what you know i was going to go to sol and say i mean if how if the blockade is. if it's maintained and how how can we have a normal economy if it's suffering blockade i don't understand that. well that's like trying to breathe with

a heavy boot on your throat i mean that's essentially was what the embargo blockade is the united states has its boot heel right on cuba's economic for oak and that really makes life very difficult for a nation of eleven million people without a basically strategic economy and it won't have a strategic economy unless it locks out and discovers that the oil offshore actually will start flowing but look there's a real point here. what is and i repeat this what has cuba done to the united states other than be disobedient i mean i think you could put fidel castro in the guinness book of records for disobedience that's been his great sin otherwise the united states you know say all cuba has political prisoners in fact the united states has more political prisoners in cuba then cuba has in guantanamo which by the way the united states has that place there is over one hundred years the cuban say get out the united states say states says to cuba go to hell the united states

has placed the embargo on cuba i mean what could cuba do to the united states other than surrender in other words that's i think what the u.s. government is demanding and well in the school system in florida and the united states' process of democratization could recognize that the opposition is on that island is not mercenaries in the pay of the united states it can begin to open up and excuse me i think of truth on that island ok i have to jump in here we have to go to a break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on cuban state with r.t. . close up to you has been to the show ya been screeching for the long lost secret of

thomas steel it's been discovered. the finale archie goes east of lake baikal with the longest russian railway line runs. for the sunday desert lies among siberian mountains the first people full of the same roots as hundreds of years ago . welcome to the trance like kali. russian close up on the part. wealthy british scientists. dr. margetts why not scandal. find out what's really happening to the global economy in these kinds of reports on our key. players and you can see. the full.

play. welcome back to cross talk i'm peter lavelle to remind you we're talking about cuba and the united states. play can still play. ok gloria just before i went to break things were getting heated up and i noticed you wanted to jump in so i'm going to give you that chance now but i want i want re-install to resolve the issues they started in the first part of the program go ahead gloria. yes well the last united nations general assembly vote was overwhelming and it keeps growing and growing with only three countries voting in favor of the u.s. blockade and over one hundred eighty three voting against it but the u.s. has far more power because of the security council and the pressure that it applies to other countries the it's ironic that the blockade is tightening ever more including under the obama administration at a time when cuba is exporting jocker is helping with hundreds of doctors providing

medical care for free and haiti in venice well and many other countries and i think that what the u.s. fears most of all is the example that cuba provided. that ray excuse me let me finish let me let me go to the board the people of illinois belgium's here everything from over here and doctors. and we are less human than peers who agree on everything. you have to let me finish you're being very rude i was in new orleans right after katrina several days when cuba had monkey thousand one hundred doctors prepared to fly into houston drive to new orleans and provide free health care for the people and we are the ones actually in the united states who are being deprived by this relationship with the u.s. in closing and so uber that we would find out cuba is developing many medicines like a lung cancer vaccine and other health that we could also benefit from from having

normalized relations you know if i go to you instead if i go if i go to you ray i mean you know the cold war is over ok now i think in a certain context you could understand it ok cuba is a. proxy for the soviet union ok and we went to the cuban missile crisis and all of that ok through the cold war prism i can i can understand where you're coming from but now i mean what risk and what is threat does kill is the only way the cold war is over and then oh. what how they kick off their congress with a with a great recollection of the defeat of the the imperialist if you go to yani sanchez's blog they march down the streets and say we are the we are the men who wear the pants and the imperialist wear the skirts and you know there is still so let it sink in you saying you always go ahead go ahead and i ask you what makes i ask you all if it is a totalitarian this hotel or terry and state how come they let you know and he said

to her blog how come my little all these bloggers who their blood soaked lawyers all of the women had already told how unfair the racial yeah. yeah well that they were they are often times so you know every time you know at some reputed day they're in and out in their tolerance they have released political prisoners it's a it's a different regime it's not it's not a mask it's a bit more manly as it's us but it's a totalitarian it's a tell you i mean they're a regime in principle because you have they control the total power in the state no that's a word that they allow power to cheap or you know half of them and half the demonstrations in the united states end up with the rest as well if you don't have a primate you can't have a demonstration in the united states and even sometimes with a permit and we've seen so many times where the cops beat the hell out of the students so let's forget this crap i mean really castro had one brilliant idea i know he's not supposed to tell a little i was totally out of the let me let me just like ok so all the steps that

are coming out of the clinic out democracy what are we what are we learning about the mechanism let me let me in the future leadership who are you know you saw all saw go ahead some go ahead you want to hear us talk about let's talk about it all go ahead you have to follow the smaller actually lowering their solo half the floor go ahead saul i'll tell you first of all if the united states hadn't been so stupid as to import females opponents they're all in south florida or a they're not in the island he's exported a million people or more who had they stayed on the island would have made everything he tried to do did you have any experience i mean he's already you know already started. excuse me they excite you i think something will replace to go through with the united states when i'm a let me just finish because if you look at what's going on now you have the most frank admission but made by roll castro if you read his speech it's very clear that their model has had serious deficiencies and if you look at the input that's been

made into that model you'll see a different kind of democracy maybe not the kind we have here well once every four years the citizens get to vote for one of two candidates which they had no role in choosing i mean please let's stop this the mother and a system of checks and balances or we need lori and you know you've been very patient gentlemen gloria please. i'd like to know what is democratic about a billionaire like donald trump running for president and the people having this imposed upon them but regardless of who ever we vote for we have no way of their being accountable for the wars that they create and the fact that we're paying more and more taxes like we did last night you know we don't have elections every two years we. know this and seen every story one party you know every and iran iran iran for president last in two thousand and eight and we were not able to

access ballot access for the people to vote for us because it's a locked up game between democrats republicans and millionaires and billionaires now that's not democracy but i want to get back to one point and that is that you should have heard all we have so you. will see well i guess i was a united to say you haven't taken i missed it so here really you know where he is they are in the western hemisphere ok i'd like to i'd like to ok gloria you probably agree of course go ahead gloria keep going but i want to talk about yes the impact of this how cuban policy is made in the united states among the cuban communities the pro and anti castro forces because that is very important in the united states but going first gloria. well because the cuban people have exit exerciser self-determination the united states has resorted not only to blockade but to us terrorism and over thirty four hundred cubans have been murdered by us sabotage and bombings we've seen the most notorious terrorist luis posada go to

relist getting off free now he lives in miami even though he's killed seventy three people on a cuban airliner for hiring mercenaries to plant bombs planting bombs in cuban hotels in one thousand nine hundred seven he now walks the streets free of miami easily and a solution is always open to. lucian look i don't. know you guys here let me call a clean war in ethiopia is me they let me sleep in and shoot. and find a okeechobee. imperialist wars. all right gloria go ahead finish your thought i'm going to go with really gross yes go ahead finish your employee you turn it off for a while since mike allen and five cuban then are in u.s. prison they're called the cuban five they can be found a website they were peacefully trying to stop that terrorism and the u.s. is completely hypocritical and this is the rubbles of the reindeer when there were

terrorist organization when the big shop airplane aircraft in beijing a few their little baby invading cuban airspace i mean the car is from cuba. and the release of the cuban civilian aircraft that has no weapons upon it and you clearly knew what it was excuse me immediately back here where it already was we're going to go to so now we're going to assault go ahead solve go ahead. ray i think if a cuban plane flew over washington how long you think it would last i don't think it would last thirty seconds ok period no no country in the world allows on a license their credit us aircraft that's not permitted to fly over it's capital it's period that's it well they were they were up to her as it were over almost all in their a period of an hour they were still about seven or eight miles out to sea is a writer and you know say going to jump in here a short walk if you please i'm going to jump in here is very messy today ok ok i

like to talk but i'd like to talk about spence get up so i would like to talk i would like to talk about the impact of the you cuban community the divided community community in the united i'd like to go to you right here how much is that in the in the halls of power in the state department where you have you have to be seen as hard on castro tough on castro and he keeping that in mind said we've had for decades it hasn't gone anywhere. well i mean first of all it's the advantage ministration is gone forward to engage on everything from. freedom of travel for cuban americans for increased remittances for the good for opening up at least exchange processes the five hundred dollars per quarter remittances to any sort of cuban i mean it is solved senator kerry has put a hold on democracy promotion there is an attempt on the administration and the liberal support but yet in congress i can't see that it's all just three congressman from southern or one. one senator from new jersey and three

congresspeople from south florida that are blocking these beneficial acts of legislation i mean it is a complex game and it all totally is decided in the congress not by the executive nor by talking heads like ourselves it is and clearly sol and gloria represent one line of opinion i tried to express those who are kind of really a little skeptical about ties with cuba even in this day of a of a changing regime and i think i agree with sol that the regime is changing because it simply has run out of gas its leaders are ancient its ideas are antiquated is carlos a month a year once said you know communism is something that you experience between you know the end of capitalism and the restarting of capitalism i sort of see where headed back in that direction ok gloria i can see you want to say something we got one minute i'm going to give you the last word go ahead what if the american people had the legal right to freely travel to cuba i think they would find

a completely different image and reality that we're not allowed to see and then words and claims by people like ray wallace are could go on and challenge i would like to also finish without interruption if you go to cuba you will find a society that's remarkably free of the kind of violence that we see in the streets here in in the united states you see a country where people don't have to worry that their kids can go to college because from day one when they're born. college and university is free and that health care is free there are difficulties and problems but they are working to resolve them and i would say that what the most important thing is that we have to understand american people to not support policies of punishing others and we need to be able to travel to cuba we need to have normalized relations between the two countries but we do support the job and that's really very serious so thank you very much many thanks my guest today in washington berkeley and in san francisco

and a story viewers for watching us here are keep see you next time remember prost our friends. keep still.

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