Jose Azel, trying to explain why the U.S. embargo is justified, resorts to the argument about the expropriations of property by the Cuban government after the revolution. His libertarian theories about private property are fine if this were an honest ideological debate. But there is no honest debate by the right wing anti Cuba folks. They skip explanations of history as they criticize every action and decision made by the Cuban government. They either don't care about the reasons for the Cuban revolution and conveniently ignore them, or they are just ignorants posing as intellectuals propagating on behalf of the ex-plunderers of the Cuban people who never had many rights protected by anyone until Batista was removed and their sovereignty was finally achieved.
And speaking of property rights, here's a question: Of the expropriated land that you are so concerned about, how much of it was ill gotten, prior to the revolution, by picapleitos? I never hear about that. The people who scream about expropriations by the revolution do so as if time began on January 1, 1959. To them, discussing the absolutely corrupt situation that existed before that date is out of bounds.
How many Cubans who had their land virtually robbed through twisted legalities in a neo-colonial Cuba have ever been included in the discussion about expropriation and why so many of them are easily justifiable in a nation trying to undue a few centuries of wrongs? Never. So cry us a river and try to use your pseudo intellectual abilities to defend a horrific, uncosncionable embargo.
Thomas Paine, two centuries before the Cuban revolution's expropriations, and a century before Karl Marx, wrote about agrarian reforms that he felt were necessary in the newly founded United States to correct the injustices of land acquired prior to its independence. Trying to fix century old injustices is never perfect, but hooray for those who have the courage to try and do the right thing.
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