Word: nicaragua
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...Nicaragua's Sandinista government may have been trying to send an important signal to someone last week. The question was, to whom, and what did it mean? In carefully worded conversations, some officials in Managua, the capital, let it be known that they were considering the temporary suspension of the country's 15-month-old military draft. The move, coming only a week after imposition of a U.S. trade embargo against Nicaragua, was interpreted by some as a potential peace offering from the Sandinistas to a hostile Reagan Administration. Others preferred to see it as a propaganda ploy, aimed...
However, whereas the national interest groups fight over such issues as Nicaragua and the MX missile, the violence at House Committee meetings usually rages over such issues as the cost effectiveness of Styrofoam cups...
...Moscow's closest allies. The example is mentioned by Carmelo Mesa-Lago, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, as evidence that trade sanctions are at best only temporarily damaging. In the long run, he believes, the embargo against Nicaragua "will not work. History shows it did not work in the case of Cuba...
...situation most similar to Nicaragua's is that of Fidel Castro's Cuba. Some U.S. officials argue that the Cuban embargo continues to be effective because it hampers Havana's ability to earn hard currency and thus raises the Soviet Union's costs of supporting the island country. Because about 85% of Cuba's trade is with the Soviets and its East bloc allies, transportation costs are high. The U.S. embargo has also forced the Cubans to devote much of their light and heavy industry to manufacturing spare parts for their U.S.-built transportation systems and factories. Indeed, Assistant Secretary...
There are some differences between Nicaragua and Cuba, to be sure. Nicaragua (pop. 3 million) is smaller than Cuba (pop. 10 million) and has fewer resources and is a less developed economy. Unlike Cuba, Nicaragua still has a large private sector (at least 60% of its economy), which is likely to be severely hurt by the U.S. embargo. That is one reason, warns Mesa-Lago, why sanctions may serve to rally some Nicaraguans around the very government that Washington finds so repugnant...