The truth on the other hand, is the unshakable reality that has driven every sanction, every sabotage attempt, and every assassination plot since 1959: Cuba is a threat only to an idea. It is a threat to the imperial doctrine that a small, poor nation in America’s ‘backyard’ must not be allowed to choose socialism, to provide free healthcare and education, and homes to live without the permission of Washington.
For this sin of self-determination, the crime of building a society where capital is not god, Cuba has been punished with the most enduring economic siege in modern history. This is not an ‘embargo’, which I consider to be a sterile, political term. It is a total blockade, designed to constrict and cripple. It is enforced by a plethora of laws with names like the Helms-Burton Act, which terrorises foreign companies from trading with the Island and allows the US to seize ships in international waters. Its goal, as US politician Robert Torricelli once admitted, was to…
‘Wreak havoc’.
The Hawaiian diaspora is the most severe in the entire world when viewed per capita. More Hawaiians have been forced out of Hawai’i than any other group of people have been forced out of anywhere else
Plus the US quite literally holds massive amounts of Hawaiian lands that were seized when the US overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy, and could easily return that land to the Hawaiian people, it just chooses not to do it. Mostly by refusing to recognize any Hawaiian leadership and treating them on par with how other US native people are treated. If native Hawaiians had a recognized government the way indigenous peoples on the mainland do, the government would have to turn that land over. So they refuse to recognize