Forum: Author Hangout

If my decrepit memory serves me right the original reasoning behind the embargo was to limit the technical knowledge available to Cubans working for Castro, but was a major failure due to the knowledge he wanted being made available by the Russians. So it's long overdue for repeal.

I noticed that earlier, but I'm curious, who'd benefit more: Cuban authors, American authors or Cuban readers? Not that the Cuban immigrants children have grown up, there's no longer the big draw for everything Cuban (at least among them), though in the Spanish speaking countries, there may still be interest.

If anything, you'd think we'd want to export our ideas, rather than allowing the complete indoctrination of Marxism to continue.

Personally, I think it's a no-brainer, but there's a big difference between petitioning the President and getting the 'do nothing' Congress to pass anything, especially when they'd rather the next President pass any new bills. Chances are, Obama will continue loosening existing restrictions anyway.

One thing to keep in mind is: when the embargo was put in place Castro was very busy executing or putting in prison the majority of the Cuban population who could read English because he saw them as working for or with the USA. Thus what was really affected by the embargo was the Spanish language books, which, at that time, weren't that many written in the USA. Thus it wasn't likely to have much of an effect. However, it was possible Cuba may have been exporting Spanish language books then, I don't know because I've not seen any data on that.

If the USA Congress is concerned about sale by Cuba and not sales to Cuba, then they can simply remove the export embargo and leave the import embargo in place.

Cuban literacy rate is nearly 100%,

But I bet it's not 100% of Cubans being able to read and write in English, which is what the majority of books exported by the USA are written in.