The trade embargo is the best thing that happened to Cuba's government; it gives them the perfect excuse for the economic failure of comunism when actually they can trade freely with many countries.

Exports: Many non-US countries can buy their sugar and tobacco beyond their production capacity.

Imports: most US goods are a luxury when you can import food from latin america and anything else from China.

So it doesn't make sense to say that the cubans are suffering because they don't have McDonalds, Coca-cola, Zara, Adidas and Monsanto seeds or because they don't have a market for exporting their sugar and tobacco.

One of the key words in the article's title was "secret" and further from the article "There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,". If the intention were specifically to cause unrest without drawing attention to the states, then lifting the embargo is far too public.

But that would prop up the current dictatorship.

We prop up worse with less concern.

The real reason we won't drop the trade embargo is that it's a very powerful bargaining chip, for whenever the Cuban government decides to talk.

I think the US is still holding a grudge about the little incident with the nuclear missiles, when Che Guevarra tried to convince the Soviets behind the scenes to launch a nuclear preemptive strike against the US...

Well you sure don't read the news. This is not about some old missle crisis from last century. This is about greed and expanding global putocratic control. Very similar to what's going on in Ukraine, Syria, and Libya.

One could argue that the Crimea invasion, Assad's decision to use his army to carpet bomb his citizens and Gaddafi's decision to use artillery against civilian neighbourhoods was born out of "plutocratic" reasoning.

Or would you say "plutocratic" does not apply to the use military force for personal profit? Because the US certainly didn't profit from your examples, even if this doesn't prove the absence of an intention to profit.

and here lies the problem...

There's no reason those options have to be mutually exclusive. Sadly, I doubt ending the trade embargo would by itself push Cuba to allow free speech and open dissent.

Well, you can't have free speech without media. Cuba first needs some economical growth, so that people get (physical) access to the internet, TV, mobile phones... Then we can talk about de-censoring their media. Also, I heard that they still have rationed food. Free speech is important, but survival is more important.

Contrary to building a "twitter" for them?