Counting with Castro
06.01.2008


Fidel Castro made an interesting analogy recently. In his inimitable way he explained the empirical reality
of United States debt, which today stands at $10 trillion.
"A man working eight hours a day, 300 days per year, without missing a second, counting one hundred one-dollar bills per minute,"
he postulates, "would need 710 billion years to count that amount of money."
Barring any cosmic catastrophe and overlooking the ridiculousness of the concept, the job would never be completed.

Castro seized power in Cuba on January of 1959 in a Marxist revolution and US legislators, fueled largely by hysteria,
have spent the last 50 years attempting to overthrow him primarily through an oppressive trade embargo.
There has always existed an ingrained paranoia in the US towards communism and it's fear has often trumped reason.
Billions have been spent in a failed effort to subvert the values embraced by most of Cuba's people
and their suffering has been magnified by the belligerent inequity of American policy.

The Department of the US Treasury released $700 billion in a bid to salvage an irresponsible banking system
which essentially, equates to a widely described "socialism for the wealthy" in all but name.
The irony certainly isn't trivial. The hypocrisy is epic.
Cuban communism, Castro-style, isn't a blissful paradise by any stretch, and 50 years is perhaps insignificant in the face of
710 billion but the embargo was, and still remains, a morally bankrupt waste of time... and money.