Jon Lee Anderson
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
corporations.
There's a group of congressmen out of Miami who are Cuban-Americans, very right-wing, and they're consistently calling for much more strenuous...
policies to be directed against Cuba, such as cutting off all means of remittances from the United States to the island.
It's currently estimated about 40% of Cubans on the island live through remittances sent by their relatives in the United States.
Most of the food and medicines going into Cuba come from the United States.
And you can still fly to Cuba.
They haven't closed down all the flights.
So they would like to see the island strangled, asphyxiated.
And that's actually the language used
to me, some months back by Carlos Jimenez, a Republican congressman from Miami, who talked about a kind of shock therapy.
And when I questioned him on this and called him out on the consequences of this, humanitarian consequences, he described it to me as like cancer.
Sometimes chemo does a lot of harm to the body, but you get rid of the cancer.
And that's how he viewed
the need for this kind of approach.
Now, that is not the approach that, so far, Rubio is using towards Cuba.
Somewhat, yes.
I mean, this is just happening in the past week, really.
You have, you know...
the rainbow coalition of, you know, left-wing activists, Greta Thunberg, others there,
making the point that they are there out of solidarity or trying to bring, you know, bust the blockade with humanitarian boats and supplies.