“Cuba has an economy that doesn’t work and a political and governmental system that can’t fix it. So they have to change dramatically,” Rubio said on March 17. “They’ve got some big decisions to make over there.”
If a deal can’t be reached, Trump has nodded at military action. He’s said, it “may be a friendly takeover, it may not be a friendly takeover.” Trump’s administration is also said to be weighing indictments for Cuban officials.
Aid flotilla vessel arrives in Cuba amid US-driven energy crisis
The first boat in a humanitarian aid flotilla has arrived in Cuba to support the island amid a worsening US energy blockade that is deepening its economic and energy crises.
A boat carrying about 30 people, including food, medicine, solar panels, and bicycles, arrived in Havana, the capital city, on Tuesday, part of the “Nuestra America” or “Our America” convoy that set out from Mexico last week.
A blast from the past:
Gitmo inmate complains: home is worse
Andrew Bolt
Remember how poor old David Hicks was portrayed as the victim of unbelievable cruelty at a hellish prison at Guantanamo Bay, even though he came out fatter than he was going in?
As (The Age) said in its Monday editorial: “(The US’s) treatment of detainees has caused it to forfeit the right it once claimed to moral superiority in its battle against those who threaten democracy.” …
Take the story spread by his lawyers, Major Michael Mori and Stephen Kenny, that Hicks was so traumatised he was losing weight. Or, as another Hicks lawyer, David McLeod, put it just last January: ”His eyes are sunken and his cheeks are sallow. He looks like an old man.”
Imagine the astonishment of reporters, then, when Hicks turned up to his hearings just weeks later looking fat, healthy and tanned, and cracking jokes.
Turns out that Guantanamo is actually so pleasant that some of the terrorist suspects there refuse to leave:
Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to close the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Since then, he seems to have backed off; maybe he has listened to the Gitmo prisoners who don’t want to leave:
The Obama administration would quickly send home six Algerians held at the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but for one problem: The men don’t want to go. Given the choice between repatriation and incarceration, the men choose Gitmo, according to their lawyers.
The detainees fear that they might be tortured or killed if they return to Algeria. Which is to say, actually tortured, something that has never happened at Gitmo, notwithstanding the global hyperventilation of the last seven or eight years.
Administration officials point out that despite this history, the United States, under the Bush and Obama administrations, has already sent 10 Algerian detainees home from Guantanamo Bay, and that none has been persecuted.
But that isn’t enough to persuade these detainees to leave Cuba:
The administration has been preparing to repatriate one of the six Algerians. But lawyers for Aziz Abdul Naji, 35, who has been held at Guantanamo for more than eight years, said he is “adamantly opposed to going back.”
“It would be outrageous and inhumane to take him against his will,” said Doris Tennant, one of his lawyers.
Inhumane to lock them up, inhumane to let them go. The US really can’t win with these guys, can it?