Seabird Air Seaplane Charters

• Executive Flight Support, LPI Airport
• Nassau
• Nassau / Paradise Island, Bahamas

The U.S. embargo against Cuba: Washington's sterile Havana strategy

This past February marked the 50th anniversary of Washington's embargo against Cuba. The birthday, which went uncelebrated here and in the Caribbean, was a grim reminder of the persistence of one of Washington's most egregious foreign policy blunders.
Enacted less than a year after President John F. Kennedy's ill fated attempt to unseat Fidel Castro's fledgling communist government at the Bay of Pigs, the embargo was designed with the express purpose of ousting Castro and his fellow revolutionaries from power. Renewed on a yearly basis under the aegis of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, the policy was last extended in September 2011 by President Barack Obama, who stated, "I hereby determine that the continuation for one year of [the embargo] with respect to Cuba is in the national interest of the United States."
But is it?
In the 1960s, when the embargo was young and the United States was in the throes of the Cold War, that Washington would seek to ostracize the newly installed communist government in Havana is understandable. Fi- del Castro had, after all, just toppled the U.S. backed Batista regime, and subsequently nationalized all American holdings on the island. And in October 1962, a scant eight months after Kennedy's embargo went into full effect, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. U.S. - Cuban relations remained rocky throughout the Cold War, and in 1996, ties were further marred by an incident in which the Cubans shot down two privately flown Cessna planes which had crossed into their airspace, killing the four Cuban Americans on board.
The Cuba of the 1960s, however, is not the Cuba of today. Since his assumption of the presidency in 2006, Raúl Castro has done away with many of the restrictions on the purchase of cell phones, microwaves, and other long-sought items previously prohibited under his brother's rule. He has overhauled the system of compensation in all state run companies to better reward the most productive employees, and has fired numerous government officials said to have been standing in the way of further economic reform. Raúl's tenure has seen the privatization of portions of the economy so as to create and bolster a new "non-state" sector, as well as the release of the last of the political dissidents jailed in the 2003 Black Spring crackdown.
In 2010, Fidel Castro himself stated in an interview with Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg that "the Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore". After its publication, the aging exdictator claimed his comment was misinterpreted, but such a statement cannot be readily misunderstood, and the past few years have been telling. Cuba is less ideologically mo- tivated today than at any point in recent history, and the Castro brothers have repeatedly stated their desire to achieve reconciliation with the United States.
Yet Washington, for its part, continues its irrational and imprudent support of a policy which over the past five decades has proven itself an unequivocal failure. The Castros are still in power, and Cuba is still militantly socialist - though no more so than China or Vietnam, with which the United States maintains relatively healthy diplomatic and economic ties. Havana's record on human rights remains lackluster - but so, too, does Beijing's and a score of other U.S. trading partners'. And Cubans still do not enjoy fully free elections - but neither do the Saudis or Russians, and the U.S. has no compunction about dealing with them. Washington routinely associates with nations more oppressive and less democratic than its Caribbean neighbor, and yet with Cuba, it balks. Such a towering inconsistency, in light of the productive relationships the U.S. pursues with other questionably democratic societies and the wholly unproductive nature of its Cuba policy, cannot stand. And were it not for Florida's position as a swing state and the influence of the many pro-embargo Cuban Americans who live there, it would not.
Washington's stubbornness has cost the United States billions of dollars in lost sales, and has, by Havana's own estimate, cost the Cubans upwards of $975 billion since the embargo's inception. Though such a figure may be inflated, there can be no doubt that the U.S., whose economic size and close proximity make it a natural Cuban trading partner, is at least partly responsible for the island's dearth of badly needed medical supplies and crushing shortage of building materials. Unfortunately for the United States, to combat shortfalls, Cuba has increasingly turned to countries like Venezuela, Russia, and China, which have all condemned the U.S. embargo - along with the entirety of the UN General Assembly, save Israel - and which have all been eager to peddle their goods and influence in the Caribbean. The United States, in both prestige and trading opportunities, is patently missing out.
Obama has taken a step in the right direction by easing restrictions on travel to the island for Cuban Americans and certain student and religious groups. But if the U.S. would truly like to see an open Cuba, then it must go further. Considering the massive concessions it is prepared to make to such absolute pari- ahs as Iran and North Korea, it is long past time for Washing- ton to end its 50-year tantrum. The Cold War is over; five decades of senseless stalemate is enough.
o Alexander Frye is a research associate at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. The coun- cil, founded in 1975, is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan, tax-exempt research and information organization. For more information, visit www.coha.org or email coha@coha.org.
o Printed with the permission of caribbeannewsnow.com.

read more »

Bimini Seaplanes Will Soar Again

Biminites will see the return of seaplane service from South Florida, as a new charter operator reports the upcoming U.S. Labor Day weekend is already fully booked up. The 30-minute charter will be operated by South Beach Seaplanes and offer service out of Watson Island, Miami Beach, directly to the Bimini Seaplane Station in North Bimini, just minutes away from the Bimini Bay Resort & Marina.  It is one of the features the seaplane's founder, Christian Eiroa, said would make the route attractive to many South Floridians.

read more »

Cherokee Air Limited

• Marsh Harbour Intl Airport
• Marsh Harbour
• Abaco, Bahamas

Le-Air Charter Services Ltd

• Nassau International Airport
• Nassau
• Nassau / Paradise Island, Bahamas

Call for inquiry into deadly plane crash

Former Civil Aviation Inspector and consultant Randy Butler yesterday called for a public inquiry to be held into Tuesday's deadly plane crash in Lake Killarney.

"I believe that it is the only way we are going to know because most of the incidents and accidents in The Bahamas we have not seen any reports from them and so now we need to[make]the ones that we pay accountable and we need to know that we have an appropriate system, an adequate system in place that we are paying for

read more »

Colton Harris-Moore, the Camano Island teen fugitive, may have

read more »