They need to trade with people for money and food. If their closest neighbor let them trade, I guarantee Cuba would be saying the opposite to stay on the good side of them. But since they can’t, and Russia was iced out of the world economy pretty much, of course they’d extend a hand to Cuba, which is similarly iced out. And of course they’d accept for the good of their people. Who knows if they actually care how that war goes, they’re just a tiny island nation that wants to be able to eat and survive. We can’t blame them for making decisions under this kind of duress.
They can trade with other countries.
When Cubans took to the streets to protest recently, it wasn’t against the US, it was against their own government.
As usual, the Kremlin is allying itself with shitty dictators.
Even your own article shows how bad faith that argument is, but it’s from the US so it makes sense. The US media loves their propaganda. It points out that US laws makes it impossible for a ship to dock at the US for 180 days after docking at Cuba. They regularly fine and sanction foreign countries and foreign companies when dealing with Cubans. A ton of banks have stopped dealing with Cuba because of this. They also prevent US used goods from being traded to Cuba when it is a part of a bigger thing, so if any part of a foreign made product has something from the US, it can’t be traded over. This ends up including tons of medical equipment, farming equipment, scientific equipment, etc. There’s a bunch of other laws, too. Family members can’t even wire over remittances any more without paying tons of money.
Of course they can’t force other companies but they make it nearly impossible for companies to trade with the US and Cuba if they want to make a profit. Especially considering the power of the dollar in the US market. That’s what makes it a blockade. Saying a bunch of these facts while giving a “false” is extremely bad faith. It’s like saying Trump didn’t cause January 6th because he didn’t tell people directly to riot. It’s a very surface reading.
The Cuban government of course isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t detract from the power the US has on them. Plus, when the Republicans went to protest on January 6th it was against their own government, but that doesn’t mean they had a point. Most of the protests were from power failures, long food and medicine lines, and Covid lock downs, which is partly the government’s fault and partly the US’s for making them a poor country and restricting their ability to get medicine and make food through the sanctions I mentioned above. And partly just Covid’s fault, every country dealt with that. But the President went out and talked with them, and the country ended up making some economic reforms recently. That’s more than I’ve seen the US ever do in response to protests lol. If we really want to know if the Cuban government is so terrible, you should support the US lifting the embargo so the government can ruin itself. It obviously hasn’t destroyed the government over the last 60 years anyway.
