Jon Lee Anderson

He wants them to agree to negotiate themselves out of existence.

Whether he has a clear-cut path for them to do that, it's not evident to me, and I don't think he does.

I think the idea is a kind of package where they're reeled in through their need, their desperate need for fuel.

The idea is that the Americans would give it to them and they would owe the Americans for that oil, which would keep them alive, and they would have to agree to a timeline of further negotiations whereby they, you know, agree to look at their constitution and rewrite it so that it could be a multi-party state.

They would have to release political prisoners and so on and so on and so on.

That, at the moment, as far as I can see, is the sticking point.

It sure would, yeah.

So...

There is a law prohibiting the United States president from lifting the embargo, which has been in place since 1962.

It's called the Helms-Burton Law.

Clinton actually signed it into law in 1996, following the shoot down of a couple of Cessna airplanes that flew into Cuban airspace, which killed four people, including three US citizens.

This was a law that the right wing of the day, Helms and Burton senators, had been trying to get through, and he had been staving them off.

There had always been a kind of liberal current trying to engage Cuba in a kind of detente, and he had been active in that.

When this shootdown happened, he felt he had to sign this Helms-Burton law, which made the blockade permanent and can only be lifted through an act of Congress.

It has several components.

Successive presidents actually did waivers to suspend its more onerous restrictive protocols.

But Trump has reactivated that, has activated that.

And so what that means is that it's paved the way for lawsuits against the Cuban government for confiscated properties going back to the beginning of the revolution.

And this has allowed lawsuits to enter the court system again.

And it includes several large lawsuits by U.S.