On March 20th Steve Paiken of TVO.org's The Agenda had a discussion on Cuba After Fidel and a possible boycott of the Olympic Games. This international panel first discussed the ability and rationale of boycotting the Olympics due to accusation of Human Rights abuses against the Tibetan people and later on a full discussion on the future of Cuba from the perspective of locals, US Experts, Cubans expats and the international community on Cuba after Fidel's control. The discussion can be seen here and the video on the TVO.org March 20th Video page.
The panel's discussion hit some key issues important to foreign policy towards Cuba. A comparison of policies towards China when abuse of rights is accepted by the international community, as compared to the heavy sanctions on Cuba for less abusive acts was the glue between the discussions of the two issues. Much of the criticism comes from the openness of the US and other countries towards China when many of the policies towards Tibet run contradictory to policies which support an embargo of Cuba. While rights abuses by any country are unacceptable, it is those who are abused which suffer from inconsistent policies which allow trading partners to ignore political pressures while placing a small country into poverty for the same reasons. Ideally, abuses by Cuban and Chinese officials should not be accepted for the sake of trade, and policies should not starve citizens of any country in an attempt to protect them from the abuses of the own government. This was the case during the oil sanctions on Iraq after the Gulf War, which lead to the starvation of many innocent civilians at the behest of Saddam Hussein. Bad policy which leads to increased suffering of politically oppressed people should be clearly unacceptable in any rights based society.
I encourage our FPA readers to take the time to watch the TVO program. Please address these issues in our blog comments accordingly.
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