> Democracy and freedom are never granted; they are fought for This is not quite correct; sometimes they are both fought for and granted—as, e.g., in every mos

> Democracy and freedom are never granted; they are fought for This is not quite correct; sometimes they are both fought for and granted—as, e.g., in every mostly agreed decolonisation, or the path from Groote Schuur to the interim constitution, &c. &c. More to the point, that is precisely why I quibble with the claim that the people of Cuba ‘can stop this embargo tomorrow morning’; they could tomorrow start to fight for democratisation (which plausibly leads to the end of the blockade)—with no guarantee of success. > If they would rather trade with Cuba than the US, that's their decision. This is more goalpost-shifting; the initial claim here is ‘Cuba is also free to trade with 179 other countries in the world’, which it isn’t in the case where all the other countries decide not to trade with Cuba because of American pressure. Of course in this case it is also other countries’ decision quite how to respond to American pressure. Now it so happens that sanctions on Cuba do not seem to have as much extraterritorial effect as e.g. those on Iran, so the question does not in practice arise to the same extent as in this hypothetical. But your original point seems to be that a blockade by one country couldn’t be to blame for that much economic difficulty because other countries may not have instituted such a blockade themselves; this is, as a general point, wrong. (Incidentally, where does the number 179 come from? The UN alone has 193 members—and presumably one ought to add Taiwan &al.)