The real reasons the U.S. is getting friendly with Cuba....
😶..😶..😶.
😶..😶..😶.
1. One is 5,520 Miles away.....the Kremlin.
2. The second is financial exploitation of Cuba's medical discoveries.
After being hostile to Cuba for over 50 years and swearing never to restore diplomatic relations with them, America finally ended that a few months ago, but today President Barack Obama announced a new round of executive actions designed to increase trade and travel with the communist island of Cuba. And this is the one many Americans have been waiting for- no more restrictions on the island's famed rum and cigars....lol. The five-decade ban on Cuban rum and cigars is officially over.
Under the new rules, which go into effect on Monday, travelers can purchase unlimited quantities of Cuban rum and cigars in any country where they are sold so long as they are for personal consumption.
Sorry American couch potatoes: You can't order Cuban rum and cigars online and have them shipped to your home.
Supposedly, given the American oligarch greed historically inherent in American capitalism, the goal of the new regulations and policy directive is to make Obama's Cuba policy "irreversible" by establishing so many relationships with Cuba that a future U.S. administration wanting to scale back those ties would face widespread opposition from U.S. businesses and citizens.
Other changes include:
* Cuban pharmaceuticals can receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and be marketed, sold and distributed in the U.S. American scientists will be allowed to work on joint medical research with their Cuban counterparts (pay special attention to this one).
* Cargo ships can visit U.S. ports immediately after departing Cuba. Vessels previously were barred from loading or unloading freight at a U.S. port for 180 days after docking in Cuba.
* Americans can award more grants in larger amounts to Cubans.
* U.S. businesses can work in Cuba to develop the country’s civil aviation security system. U.S. airlines recently began regularly-scheduled commercial flights to Cuba, which has raised concerns among some in Congress that Cuba’s airports are not equipped to secure U.S.-bound flights.
* Cubans can purchase U.S.-made goods online, although the Cuban government tightly restricts Internet access.
Sheer genius.
However, here are the real reasons for the easing of restrictions which the mainstream media will not report:
The Lourdes military base in Cuba was once used to commit acts of espionage against the U.S. (remember the Bay of Pigs incident?). Moscow-based defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer admitted it might make sense the base could be used for purposes such as these again.
In February of 2013 Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was said to have inked a deal where Cuba would receive 8 jets from the Russian military. Not to mention just this past August Putin visited Cuba and even did Castro a favor by forgiving him 90% of the war debt owed to Russia, rumored to have been around $90 million dollars. Professor Robert Jervis from Columbia University claimed the move was suspect since Russia would have the ability to use the base to broadcast information to their military allies.
Russian President Vladimir Putin even managed to secure the rights to drill off shore from Cuba for oil reserves…
Stephen Cohen who is the Professor Emeritus of Russian studies at Princeton University said what Putin has done is “a reply to Obama’s notion that Russia could be isolated, by saying, ‘Hey, here we are back 90 miles off your shore with a big greeting, and we’re going back into economic business here.'”
The second reason?
Cuba, an unlikely global leader in public health and scientific investment, is very poor, and yet the country has some of the healthiest, most long-lived residents in the world, as well as a medical invention or two that could run circles around U.S. therapies, thanks to government investment in scientific research and a preventive public health approach that views medical care as a birthright.
“If people knew about these cutting-edge treatments coming out of Cuba, people would want to have them,” said Pierre LaRamée, executive director of the Oakland-based Medical Education Cooperation with Cuba, which advocates for Cuban medical inventions in the U.S. and publishes an international, peer-reviewed journal focusing on Cuban health and medicine.
Even while they were isolated by the U.S., the American Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control secretly authorized the importation of some Cuban medicines in the past, but only enough to conduct research and clinical trials, according to a spokeswoman for the Treasury......hmm. Sound familiar? We don't want you. We don't like you. We want to build a wall around you to isolate you. But we'd sure like to make tons of money from whatever good things you have.....
Perhaps the most well-known Cuban innovation is the vaccine "CimaVax". Invented by researchers at the Center of Molecular Immunology (CIM) in Havana, CimaVax targets a growth factor in cancer cells in a way that can arrest the spread of the disease. It can be used as both a treatment for lung cancer patients and a preventive measure for people at high risk of the disease.
A reported 5,000 patients worldwide have been treated with CimaVax. It has no known side effects, and the shot costs the Cuban government $1 to make......
$1.....$1.....$1.
Yes, that is not a typo.
Let that sink in for moment. How long do you think it will take for the price of Cimavax to climb to $100....$1000....$10,000 in America?
Can anyone say Martin Shkreli (Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli who sparked outrage with his decision to hike the price of toxoplasmosis medication Daraprim from $13.50 per tablet to $750), or daughter of Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin, CEO Heather Bresch (CEO of Mylan, the manufacturer who jacked up the price of the EpiPen, from $58 for a single pen in 2007 to upwards of $600 for a pack of two...while her total compensation went from $2,453,456 to $18,931,068, a 671% increase....she was just a clerk there in 1992)...or the hundreds of thousands like them in Bigpharma?
You know the agenda of BigPharma. It is to keep you sick, not cure you. It is to render you a repeat customer...keep 'em coming back for more. Let's the profitable good times roll....
The New York-based Roswell Park Cancer Institute is evaluating CimaVax for use in the U.S. It’s also trying to get clinical trials underway to replicate Cuban scientists’ findings, per U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations (sure, we wouldn't want any sticky patent issues arising, would we?)
More Americans die from lung cancer than from any other type of cancer, which is why many people are eager for CimaVax to hit the U.S. market soon.
Cancer is not one disease, but a collection of hundreds of different illnesses. This makes finding one “cure” difficult, if not impossible. But over the years, scientists have developed a variety of different treatments that can transform cancer into a chronic, survivable condition.
In addition to CimaVax, Roswell Park is also investigating "Racotumomab" and "VSSP", two more promising cancer drugs invented by CIM. Racotumomab targets a molecule that scientists believe is found on all cancer cells, which means the drug could one day be effective against blood cancers as well as the solid tumors that accompany diseases like lung, breast, prostate and colon cancer. VSSP, originally designed as a compound to help boost the immune response to vaccines, also appears to enhance the anti-cancer immune response.
Racotumomab is in phase two and three trials in Cuba (these clinical trial stages assess effectiveness, side effects and adverse reactions), while VSSP is in early clinical trials.
These drugs aren’t as fully developed as CimaVax but they appear to have great potential. Roswell Park is preparing for a clinical trial to test Racotumomab in multiple myeloma, and it’s prepping VSSP for three trials, two in kidney cancer and one in breast cancer.
About 73,000 U.S. adults with diabetes had their lower limbs amputated in 2010, according to the American Diabetes Association.
Multiple studies of different populations of people who have had their lower limbs amputated show that the procedure is linked to an increased risk of early death, suggesting either that surgery is a trauma many people don’t survive, or that people who submit to this kind of amputation are some of the most vulnerable and at-risk patients in care.
Since 2006, Cuba has had a drug for foot ulcers called Heberprot-P that prevents the need for amputations. Invented by scientists at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Havana, the treatment, which its creators describe as an “epidermal growth factor,” is injected near the affected area and can accelerate the skin’s healing process, closing a wound safely over the course of about three months. By 2013, Heberprot-P had been registered in 15 other countries and used to treat more than 100,000 patients. Right now, besides amputation, the only treatment currently available to Americans with diabetic foot ulcers is a cream with a “black box warning,” indicating that the treatment has serious or life-threatening side effects.
A third Cuban medical innovation is "Nimotuzumab", patented in the U.S. in 1999 by CIM scientists, a treatment for various head and neck cancers, including squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck.
Isn't it refreshing and amazing to see what a country NOT being controlled by Big Pharma can do, while our country, the most powerful on the globe, the leader of the free world, the harbinger of democracy-by-force holds more grudges than a petulent child, and keeps being bogged down, and mired, in military conflict after conflict. The unbalanced and institutionalized hatred keeps getting integrated further into the national discourse, used intermittently for election fodder and constantly in daily interaction. Progressivism is the idea that as the process moves us forward, we look ahead still for more advances. Our political and social processes have been hijacked by exploitation, anger, prejudice, Islamophobia, extortion, and baseless hatred. The infernos in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and many other places make it inevitable that, much like the Roman Empire, self-immolation is foreseeable in the near future and not just wishful thinking. In the age of sophisticated nuclear technology in the hands of hate-filled minions of the Rothschild banking cartel, the premise of a future does not look promising.....or even possible.
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