Trade Embargo

President Obama will have to decide by next week whether to continue, for yet another year, provisions of the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. Without a presidential extension, these provisions — though not others that were instituted by congressional action — will end this month. The ending of the embargo is long overdue. The current economic crisis provides a useful rationale for doing so. There is precedent for taking such a step with a communist nation during hard times. In the face of the Depression, prominent American businessmen began arguing that recognition of the Soviet Union would lead to a substantial increase in trade and so provide a much-needed boost to the U.S. economy.

WASHINGTON - Ryan Crocker has long been viewed as America's indispensable diplomat in the Muslim world. President George W. Bush named him ambassador to Iraq in 2007 to rescue a failing policy, and four years later, President Obama dispatched him to salvage the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. But Crocker, who Bush once lauded as "America's Lawrence of Arabia," now says his former bosses are fumbling the most worrisome Mideast threat America faces: Iran's nuclear program. Tougher sanctions won't persuade Tehran to stop enriching uranium, Crocker contends.

Reagan's trade embargo against Nicaragua serves as another example of our vain (in both senses of the word) attempt to make Central America over in our own image and keep it under our control. Accompanied by threatening U.S. military maneuvers in next-door Honduras, U.S. building of seven air bases along the Nicaragua-Honduras border, previous U.S. covert aid to the contras and the CIA-supervised mining of Nicaraguan ports, Reagan cannot forever fool Americans as to who the real aggressor in Central America is. The justification for the embargo?

Washington and Havana have taken baby steps over the last four years to end some of the more destructive elements of their relationship, like a U.S. prohibition against Cuban Americans' visiting their homeland more than once every three years and Cuba's demand that citizens get exit visas to go abroad. But this week's overwhelming international censure of the U.S. embargo against Cuba -- a 188-3 vote of condemnation by the U.N. General Assembly -- was a sobering reminder of how little has changed between the Cold War adversaries despite President Obama's 2008 campaign vow to end half a century of ideological standoff.

Foreign leaders have jostled to be in pictures with him and pressed for autographs. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who called the last U.S. president the "devil," gave Barack Obama a book on Latin America and clasped hands with him as if he'd been reunited with an old friend. Obama proved an able statesman during his trip to Mexico and Trinidad and Tobago, which ends today, as he did early this month in Europe.

Vietnamese quaffed Pepsi-Cola legally for the first time in 19 years on Friday as the country celebrated President Clinton's decision to lift America's trade embargo against its old Communist foe. The government in Hanoi issued a restrained statement saluting Clinton's move and offering to exchange liaison offices as a first step toward normalizing diplomatic relations. "This is a positive and significant decision, which contributes to opening a new page in U.S.

The federal agency charged with implementing U.S. trade embargoes, under investigation for its own action in several cases, has been stripped of its investigative and enforcement division. Treasury officials said the action was designed to make trade embargo enforcement more efficient and was unrelated to the ongoing investigation of the Office of Foreign Assets Control. OFAC's enforcement division, and its five criminal investigators, will be reassigned to the Customs Service this month.

President Reagan said today he will not rescind the trade embargo he imposed on Nicaragua no matter what action the leftist Sandinista government takes, including an appeal to the World Court. Reagan, in the West German capital for the economic summit of industrialized nations, said he will go ahead with the embargo he signed Wednesday banning all trade with the Central American nation and abrogating a friendship treaty. "It won't make much difference whatever they do," Reagan told reporters.

The Organization of American States, angered and frustrated by the defiance of Haiti's military government, voted Sunday to tighten its embargo against the tiny Caribbean nation as punishment for its continued failure to end dictatorial rule and permit the return of ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

An unprecedented international embargo, in which the United States has enlisted nations as diverse as the Soviet Union and Singapore, Britain and Brazil, effectively has shut down Iraq's vital oil industry and is well on the way toward strangling its food supply, according to government officials and private monitors.

Once again, Cuba was absent from the Summit of the Americas. Yet the communist nation might as well have attended the gathering last weekend in Cartagena, Colombia, because it took center stage, despite U.S. efforts to focus on other issues. Ecuador's president refused to attend the summit in protest of Cuba's exclusion. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Brazil's Dilma Rouseff, both moderates rather than left-wingers, said there should be no more Summits of the Americas without Cuba.

President Obama will have to decide by next week whether to continue, for yet another year, provisions of the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba. Without a presidential extension, these provisions — though not others that were instituted by congressional action — will end this month. The ending of the embargo is long overdue. The current economic crisis provides a useful rationale for doing so. There is precedent for taking such a step with a communist nation during hard times. In the face of the Depression, prominent American businessmen began arguing that recognition of the Soviet Union would lead to a substantial increase in trade and so provide a much-needed boost to the U.S. economy.

Cuban President Raul Castro has been moving slowly but steadily over the last couple of years to relax his government's grip on the country's ailing economy, yet it is the news that half a million state workers will get pink slips in the coming months and will be expected to find jobs in the private sector that has created a front-page buzz in the United States. Change is underway in the Cuban economy. It is time for Congress to end the archaic and ineffectual U.S. trade embargo and get out of the way of U.S. investment in Cuba before American firms lose out to those from Europe, Brazil and elsewhere.

Glenn Shadix Character actor worked with Tim Burton Glenn Shadix, 58, a character actor best remembered for his portrayal of the portly, pretentious interior designer Otho in director Tim Burton's 1988 ghost comedy "Beetlejuice," died Tuesday at his home in Birmingham, Ala., according to his personal manager, Juliet Green. Shadix's sister, Susan Gagne, told the Birmingham News that he had been using a wheelchair for mobility and appeared to have fallen in his kitchen and struck his head.

Fidel Castro is back from the dead (his words) and has been reincarnated as an Internet junkie. Not only is he a prolific blogger on Cuba's online Granma newspaper but, it turns out, the 84-year-old greybeard consumes 200 to 300 news items a day on the Web and is fascinated by the WikiLeaks site, with its trove of 90,000 formerly secret U.S. documents on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The "resuscitated" revolutionary is smaller and shakier than he was before the intestinal illness that prompted him to hand power to his younger brother in 2006, but no less verbose.

To his defenders, Mahmoud Reza Banki is the accomplished son of Iranian American parents, with degrees from UC Berkeley and Princeton and a business acumen that made him the logical person in the family to trust with more than $3 million. "My family is unusually generous to me, certainly beyond what is customary among U.S. families," Banki, 33, told federal authorities after they asked about the hundreds of thousands of dollars dropping into his bank account. Banki said the money came from his cousin Ali in Tehran.

The Republican candidates for U.S. Senate traded foreign policy insults in a tense first debate Friday, with businesswoman Carly Fiorina hitting former Rep. Tom Campbell for associating with supporters of terrorism and Campbell accusing Fiorina's campaign of smearing him as anti-Semitic. "That whispering campaign, that silent slander stops today," Campbell said, his hands and voice shaking in the first minutes of the hourlong debate on "The Capitol Hour" on KTKZ-AM (1380). Campbell called for the debate after earlier Fiorina attacks on his congressional record on Israel, including two efforts to trim economic aid to the nation, and for connections with men who later pleaded guilty to or were charged with crimes associated with terrorism.

The U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba, an annual ritual that highlights global opposition to the policy. This year's vote was 187 to 3 in opposition to the embargo, up from 185 to 3 last year, with only Israel and the tiny Pacific island nation of Palau again supporting the United States. It was the 18th year in a row that the General Assembly has taken up the symbolic measure, with Washington steadily losing what little support it once had. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez ticked off a long list of grievances in his speech before the world body, saying the 47-year-old embargo -- which the Cubans refer to as a blockade -- had cost the island's fragile economy tens of billions of dollars over the years and prevented Cuban children from getting needed medical care.