US Orthopedic Docs Trip to Cuba Nixed
HAVANA TIMES, Sept. 6 – The U.S. government did not authorize a delegation of US orthopedists’ trip to Cuba to participate in the International Congress of Orthopedics and Traumatology, to be held September 21-26 in the eastern Cuban city of Bayamo, affirmed Rodrigo Alvarez Cambras, president of the Cuban Society of Orthopedics and Traumatology.
The US government routinely blocks scientific, educational and cultural exchange between Cuba and the United States. While hopes still linger that President Obama will institute change in the hostile US-Cuba policy, most of the obstacles put in place by former administrations remain in tact.
The US has imposed a nearly half -century travel ban on its citizens from visiting Cuba without special permission from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).
HT: The importance the U.S. monopolist regime gives to the example of Cuban socialism is evident in the half-century embargo. It appears to progressives in the U.S. that it is the people of our country who are also being embargoed. Not in the sense of trade, etc., but in the sense of ideas. The name of the game for the maintenance of the empire is keeping the U.S. people brain-washed regarding the alternative system of socialism. If the embargo can be seen in light of this prime propaganda need of U.S. imperialism, our minds begin to open up and things start to make sense. Why would the U.S. play footsie with much larger socialist countries, yet keep the embargo on relatively tiny Cuba? It may not be to strangle the Cuban government, but better to keep up the fiction that Fidel is a dictator and socialism is horrible. Havana Times, by finally giving U.S. people an honest view of Cuba, may start a process of dialogue between the peoples that will help end the embargo of our minds.