Friday, March 19, 2010

Obama's embargo

Another victory for American foreign policy: Innospec, a chemical company, pleaded guilty to a series of charges including a Cuba embargo violation – sales of fuel additives by a former Swedish subsidiary. Wall Street Journal story here; the Export Law Blog covers the legal angle and provides this link to the company’s voluntary disclosure of the Cuba violation.

This is reminiscent of a prosecution a few years ago of an American who violated the embargo by arranging export of water purification chemicals through Canada.

The message to American companies is that the Obama Administration means business when it comes to embargo enforcement.

The message to the Cuban people is that because of our differences with their government, the United States will make it more cumbersome and expensive for that government to get what it needs, even from sources outside the United States, to generate power and purify water.

3 comments:

Henry Louis Gomez said...

You earned your pay today, Phil. Time to knock off and have a few brewskis with the money you earned lobbying on behalf of Castro, Inc.

Anonymous said...

I will never understand why Cuba is insisting on buying product from us if they hate the USA so much. Don't they have other countries to get their stuff from?
The technology they want has being developed and produced thanks to the same capitalist enterprises they criticize.

Bro said...

Making it hard to Cuban people to have pure water and power to cook and have some light is against people not against govermente only.
The embargo is not moral. What is US goverment afraid of? Lift the embargo and more contacts with Cuba and it's people will do more impact than generating hate against US with the embargo policy.