[PentiumBug]

Yup. As a Cuban, sometimes it is annoying and sometimes go beyond that. Some cloud providers are totally off limits for us, some are fine with us (the minority and less known), some let us use some services but no others, some even have valid OFAC licenses but still deny access (because ACL complexities, I suppose)... it's all over the place. That's why I'm 95% of the time on crappy VPNs both to escape/evade US sanctions and my own country censoring mechanisms.

The thing is, I somewhat understand why the sanctions were placed decades ago, but... is that rationale still valid? Anyway, and sadly, the sanctions affect "regular" people like me the most. The ruling elite? Not at all.

Thank you for your position, BTW!

[barrotes]

Funny how everyone talks about the Chinese "great firewall" that blocks access towards some western platforms from China, and no one talks about "USA great firewall" that blocks Cuban citizen from acceding to a lot of services

[NikolaNovak]

Besides the technical differences brought up by other commenters, I'm a Canadian and I hear about USA sanctions toward Cuba on regular TV news and newspapers, never mind more specific news sources, every USA election cycle. It's a massive topic of public debate, and from what I can see it hugely influences outcomes of key seats in state and federal elections. Sometimes these claims of "nobody talks" or "mainstream media doesn't want you to know" are just... incorrect?

[mike_d]

Because the latter is not a thing. The United States does not implement any border firewalls on traffic entering the country. No law compels blocking Cuban citizens from accessing US hosted content, just preventing them from entering into financial transactions.

[PentiumBug]

I honestly have no idea how the sanctions are reflected in the actual wording of the law, but what I see is that many companies are actually overzealous and wholesale limit (block) access regardless of the outcome of the content request (that is, even if the transaction is not a financial one.)

Let me give you an example: I can't open dell.com, at all. What I want to believe is that they blocked all access because it was easy, just a geo thingy flipped on. It is their decision though, but it is supported on existing sanctions. So... yes, the law compels them to do it, indirectly or not. And there are hundreds, thousands of other examples that I can provide, if you're interested.

[actionfromafar]

Probably because they are very different things. It’s not like the US stops Cubans from reading Wikipedia.

[leesalminen]

> Anyway, and sadly, the sanctions affect "regular" people like me the most. The ruling elite? Not at all.

This confirms my secondhand knowledge of financial sanctions. It seems to universally be this way and makes me wonder why we still tout them as if they were effective. They sure don’t seem to be.

[actionfromafar]

That’s a very broad statement, almost automatically untrue. All countries, all situations, all financial sanctions?

[pessimizer]

It obviously isn't too broad, because instead of this comment you could have posted a single counterexample to disprove it.

[actionfromafar]

The onus isn’t really on me, I’m not the one making blanket statements.

[GoToRO]

The idea is that "the many", the poor, will overthrown the elite.

[allarm]

Because they have limited access to the Internet? That’s just silly.

[GoToRO]

and many other things

[allarm]

Like, what things? I'm a citizen of a heavily sanctioned country, even though I haven't lived there for years. If anything, sanctions only affect people in such a way that they hate the countries that imposed the sanctions on their country, but not their own government. That's a very naive point of view.

[GoToRO]

Like we saw recentlly with Russia, the people were not upset when they invaded Ukraine. Then when McDonald's pulled out of Russia a fat guy chained itself to the doors. So internet, fast-food, clothes, cars, movies... water pumps... and so on.