Heavens no, I'm not suggesting that you "turn your back on an entire country" or "write off a whole nation of peoples". If you want to "help CUBANS", I can find you plenty of addresses and contacts where you can feel good about making a contribution instead of handing over your money to a Communist regime who has oppressed said peoples for 40 years and will continue to put anything they get from you into the same purpose. You can tip a Cuban busboy at a restaurant in Miami and get more money into the Cuban economy than you will in any hermetically-sealed tourist compound there. Slang also thinks he is helping the Philippines economy while I firmly believe he is merely being separated from his money in a country where that is a way of life. But he's not going to listen to me either
Of course, everybody thinks they made their choices for good reasons, and everybody is certainly entitled to do things their way. My problem is I have spent my entire adult life either in school with, working with, or socializing with Latinos from many countries and the only news programs I watch and the only radio I listen to is in Spanish. So I have constant exposure to the situations in many countries of Central and South America and get to discuss it constantly. No doubt you can say the same about the UK and the adjoining countries
