For the 30th year in a row,
the United Nations General Assembly voted
concerning the United States
embargo against Cuba.
By the way, embargo is the old word.
Nowadays, we would call it sanctions regime or sanctions.
The United States did to Cuba
for the last half century what it is now
doing to China and Russia and Iran.
And for the 30th year in a row, they voted.
And typically, the vote was just like this year.
Get ready.
185 to 2.
185 countries want the United States
to end the embargo against Cuba.
Two countries voted in favor of the embargo.
One, which will come as no great surprise, is the United States,
which is imposing the embargo,
and the other one is Israel.
I won't make any comment.
None is needed.
Okay.
Why do I bring this up?
Because the vote is lopsided.
Well, it is every year because the rest of the world believes
that this is an illegitimate, inappropriate, wrong policy.
Yes, I think Americans tend not to want to know
if the rest of the world disapproves of something the United States does,
even though it's very important and probably more so than ever before,
that we become aware of what the world thinks about us.
Because if it thinks that way about the embargo against Cuba, guess what?
You should not be surprised that a majority of the countries
in the United Nations wouldn't support the sanctions against Russia and China
either, partly because those kinds of sanctions often lead to war
and partly because they are not a way
to build a peaceful world.
But let's be clear, the United States justifies the sanctions against Russia
on the grounds that Russia invaded Ukraine.
Okay.
But that doesn't really make much sense because Cuba
didn't invade the United States or anybody else.
And it's got sanctions.
In fact, the sanctions against Cuba began
right after the United States invaded Cuba, not the other way around.
When that Bay of Pigs, it was called the Bay of Pigs invasion
by American supported Cuban
exiles took place in 1961.
It was followed by this embargo.
Neither of them achieved their objective, which was to weaken
and overthrow the Castro government.
Okay.
Well, if embargoes, sanctions are done to weaken
and overthrow a government in Cuba, maybe in Iran,
maybe what's going on in Ukraine is really got less
to do about the Russians invading Ukraine
and a lot more to do about a program that hopes to weaken and overthrow Mr.
Putin and so forth in Russia than anything else.
And that would lead me, and I hope thinking people everywhere,
to ask the honest question: just as the U.N.
wants to prevent war, military war,
why wouldn't it include that now
to have also economic warfare be just as outrageous?
Most of the victims in military war
are civilians, bystanders.
And, you know, in economic warfare.
It's even more that.
It's not the leadership of the country.
It's not the government.
It's not the people who make the policy.
It's the mass of people who are victimized.
It maybe is time to be honest about these things
and to go with 185
who are against embargoes in Cuba,
probably against them everywhere else.
And take the bold step of reducing the risk of war militarily
by reducing the legitimacy of applying sanctions.