• The Cuba blockade is a failed foreign policy implemented to destroy the revolutionary Cuban government, which has had the exact opposite outcome leaving the Castro family and subsequent undesirable leaders in power for the past fifty-eight years.

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• Castro, and subsequent Cuban leaders, have successfully blamed the economic problems of Cuba on the US blockade; which many foreign policy experts believe is why they have repeatedly scuttled negotiations on ending. 

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• Due to the blockade, Cuba is once again becoming increasingly dependent on Russia.  “We call this period a renaissance,” said Aleksandr Bogatyr, Russia’s trade representative in Cuba.

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• It is hypocritical to argue that the blockade is necessary because the Cuban government is not a representative democracy given the fact that the US has supported many brutal dictators friendly to US interests including former dictator General Batista, known to have killed, tortured, and imprisoned as many as 20,000 Cuban political dissenters.

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• A lack of democracy has not kept the US from commercial relations with other nations including communist Russia, China, and Vietnam, so why should Cuba be held to a different standard?       

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• It is hypocritical to suggest we cannot lift the embargo because the Cuban government jails too many of its citizens when in fact, the US has a per capita incarceration rate of 716 Prisoners per 100,000 compared to 510 per 100,000 in Cuba.       

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• It is ethnocentric to judge the Cuban government as a total failure given the fact that infant mortality rates are higher in the US at 5.80 per 100,000 live births than in Cuba at 4.40 per 100,000 live births and literacy rates are higher in Cuba at 99.7% than in the US at only 86% of the population. 

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• The blockade prevents many corporations and farmers interested in shipping goods to Cuba from doing so with an estimated cost to the US economy of $1.2 billion in lost sales of material goods and $4.84 billion in agricultural exports annually as well as around 6,000 lost jobs. 

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• The blockade reduces the opportunities for improvements in democratic reforms and human rights in Cuba, as well as denying the Cuban people access to technology, medicine, and affordable food.

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• Most people in the US are opposed to the blockade with a December, 2016, Pew Research Center Poll (most recent poll data available) reporting 73% of US citizens favoring lifting the embargo, up from 66% just two years earlier, with 62% of Republicans favoring lifting it. 

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• Nine US governors signed a letter opposed to the blockade in 2015.  

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• Every year since 1992, the General Assembly of the United Nations has overwhelmingly approved a resolution condemning what it calls “the adverse effect of the embargo on the Cuban people,” which most recently passed by a vote of 191 to 2 abstentions (the US and Israel).

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• Many US Christian denominations have passed resolutions demanding the end of the blockade in  solidarity with fellow Christians in Cuba.  Christ teaches that policies like the blockade, which cause  hardship on innocent people, are morally reprehensible and must be challenged and changed.