CUBAN TRADE EMBARGO.
BIG-OIL and GLOBAL WARMING

Allan J. Yeomans (first release 10 March 2008)

The United States trades with Communist China, so why not Cuba?

A United States arms embargo on Cuba was established in1958, resulting from the uprising against the Batista Government. It was progressively extended to a total embargo and travel ban following the USSR generated Cuban missile crisis in 1963. Today the USSR doesn't exist. But most of the embargos do; why?

There is a sick but logical answer. Sherlock Holmes said “first look for he who will benefit”, or “Cui Bono” which is another way of saying the same thing. Cuba's most successful business is growing sugarcane. Using sugar is the cheapest and most practical way to produce ethanol. Every year from an acre of sugarcane you can produce 750 gallons of ready-to-use ethanol. (And it can be done organically.)

If Cuba was allowed to trade freely with the US it could supply ethanol to US motorists at half the price US motorists now pay for gasoline.

When you look at the figures for Cuba you find that 75% of Cuba is sugar cane country. That's like a paddock one hundred and seventy miles square. It would produce enough to continuously run 30 million cars on straight ethanol. Or 35 million cars on E85, which a lot of modern American cars are designed for.

It is thus very logical for the Middle East oil States and their oil conglomerate associates, to insist, and demand, and to connive, to insure that the Cuban Embargo continues indefinitely.

Other things have also been “arranged” that suit the consortium. There is a 2.5% duty on both imported oil and imported ethanol into the US. So on face value that seems fair, but (and it's a big “but”) if you import ethanol you pay an additional 54 cents duty on every gallon imported.

With sugarcane ethanol you harvest the sap. With grain ethanol you harvest the nutritious seeds. So sugarcane is the logical choice.

Corn farmers and the oil conglomerates in the US are now subsidized to produce and blend ethanol from corn. The costs have been astronomical and the impact is that just a tiny 1.5% of US fuel is derived from corn farming. Coincidently, the oil industries' receive corn ethanol subsidies more than sufficient to offset the 1.5% loss in oil sales revenues.

Oil deposits may exist in significant quantities, off-shore in Cuban territorial waters. Oil interests benefit from the inflated oil prices generated by maintaining world supplies one or two percent below world demand. So opening new oil fields should not be unduly rushed. But now countries like China are negotiating for drilling rights and leases in these Cuban waters. Will the US oil majors have the US Government modify the embargo to allow them to legally acquire Cuban off-shore oil leases and start drilling? Ideally for them it would icing on the cake if Cuban ethanol was structured to be extremely difficult and expensive to import into the United States.