A renewed US oil embargo on Cuba is deepening hardship on the island, reflecting a long-standing pattern of intervention driven as much by ideology as strategy.

On 16 April, P&I republished an article about Donald Trump’s mental state from the American progressive magazine Common Dreams. In it, Professor Jeffrey Sachs from Colombia University and several eminent psychiatrists and health workers appealed to Congress and senior Cabinet members to hold urgent consultations regarding President Donald Trump’s fitness for office.

Their concerns were not only about Trump’s decision to go to war against Iran, his illegal kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela and his public musings about taking over Canada and Greenland, but also his oil embargo against Cuba.

This embargo has already damaged the capacity of Cuba’s 11 million people to survive, and the situation can only get worse. Food is spoiling for lack of power to refrigerate food, rat-infested rubbish is rotting in urban streets, hospitals, even with their own generators, are unable to operate, public transport is grinding to a halt for lack of diesel fuel, the poor and elderly are becoming beggars as they poke through rubbish in search of the odd aluminium can to sell for food.

And by all informed accounts, Trump has imposed the embargo, not for any altruistic reasons, but to destroy the government and return the ownership of properties nationalised by Fidel........

© Pearls and Irritations