October 19th marked a half-century of US sanctions against the Cuban government.
"The sanctions that were imposed on Cuba so many years ago were really designed to impoverish people," said Phyllis Bennis, the director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC.
"The idea was if you make people poor, if you make people oppressed, they will turn on their government. The reality is it never works that way. They turn on the ones who are imposing the sanctions," Bennis said. "Sanctions are based on the idea that people are stupid. But they’re not. They know their own government isn’t responsible for the sanctions."
Cuba is one of 13 countries that currently face US sanctions. But rather than force dictators into submission, economic sanctions have principally affected the poor and the children.
When asked about the 567,000 Iraqi children who died as a direct result of US sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in the 1990s, then US Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright famously said, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”
Watch the full interview with Ivan Eland
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