Dan Burton: “Mr. Speaker, the reason I waited until near the end of the debate to take my time is because, as is always the case…”

“Mr. Speaker, the reason I waited until near the end of the debate to take my time is because, as is always the case, there is a lot of misinformation that takes place in this debate and I wanted to make sure I clarified these arguments. First of all, a lot of my colleagues have said we are going to hurt the people of Cuba. When Castro has a foreign investor invest in Cuba, the money that is paid by the employees of that firm goes to Castro. Let us say that they get $400 a month. Castro gets the $400 a month and then he pays them in the local currency, $400 of that local currency. But the exchange rate is 700 to 1, which means the average Cuban is making less than $5 a month. We cannot hurt those poor people much worse than Castro has hurt them. The embargo is not going to hurt the Cuban people. Castro has murdered the Cuban people economically, and literally in many cases. And I would like to say to my colleagues who opposed the embargo, when we talked about these same issues when we had the embargo against South Africa, they took a different position. There is no consistency in their arguments. When Castro took power, Cuba had the highest standard of living in Latin America. Today it is the lowest, not because of the United States embargo, because for the past 35 years they have been propped up by the Soviet Union, but because of Castro's Communist government control policies that do not work.”