All available data...show that before Castro took power, Cuba was far from being in a disastrous situation. In 1958, the Cuban income per capita was double that of Spain and Japan. Cuba had more doctors and dentists per capita than Britain. Cuba was second per capita in Latin America in ownership of automobiles and telephones, and first in the number of television sets per inhabitant. Cubans could enter and leave the country freely. Fulgencio Battista was a dictator, but Battista's dictatorship was so "fierce" that Fidel Castro, arrested in 1953 and sentenced to 15 years in prison for a failed coup d'état was pardoned and released by Battista in 1954. Under his own dictatorship, Castro would not have been so lucky.

The Cuban economy was rapidly destroyed. All businesses, until recently, have been state-owned. Wages in Cuba are abysmal; the population is effectively destitute. The average monthly salary in 2015 was $18.66. Persecution, imprisonment and torture of anyone who dares to criticize the regime are routine. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans have passed through Cuba's reeducation camps since 1959. More than 15,000 Cubans have been executed by firing squad. The health system is good for members of the regime and for medical tourists who pay in American dollars, but in a sordid state for ordinary Cubans.

The Cuban government under Battista was corrupt, but it is difficult to believe that the dignitaries of the Castro regime did not enrich themselves. At the end of his life, Fidel Castro's fortune was valued at $900 million.

In "36 hours in Havana", a report in The New York Times on January 5, 2016, Cuba's capital city is described as full of "classic American cars and salsa singers" and as "an old city where the old and the modern are in contrast". The decay of many buildings, the immense poverty of the bulk of the population, the crushing weight of the communist dictatorship are completely left out.

US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, himself a refugee from Castro's Cuba, immediately threatened his fellow Cubans: While everyone, including criminals who have previously been deported, may freely enter the United States through America's wide-open southern non-border, all Cubans and Haitians fleeing by sea will be returned to their squalor. "The time is never right to attempt migration by sea," he warned them on July 13. "... Allow me to be clear: If you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States."

On July 12, the Cuban regime cut the Cubans' access to the internet. The regime's police will therefore able to crush the uprising without one image coming out of Cuba.

[T]he so-called "nuclear issue" has always been a diversion designed to focus attention on a phantom while the living monster, wielding blood-soaked dagger, goes around spreading mayhem and murder.

[Obama] failed, or refused, to ask the real questions: is the Islamic Republic not a threat to regional peace and the global rule of law with or without its ridiculous uranium enrichment show?

Hasn't the Islamic Republic been the world's number one sponsor of international terrorism for four decades with or without enriching uranium? Was the seizing of over 600 hostages from 32 countries, including the US and all major European states, ever linked to uranium enrichment?

The mullahs assume that as long as they can hoodwink the world, notably the Americans who are suckers for self-deception, by propelling the "nuclear" phantom they could have a free hand to kill and kidnap and destroy the very fabric of statehood in several regional countries while receiving cash rewards from the US and its major allies who pretend to be guardians of global law and order.

That long spoon could be made of a simple reversal of the order in which the talks are held. First, let's talk about terrorism, exporting revolution, money laundering, kidnapping and hitmen without frontiers. Only then we could talk about uranium enrichment and the unfreezing of assets.

There is even no need for Biden and allies to talk about "human rights" and things like that which have become a staple of hollow global diplomacy, because those who demand respect for such rights don't really mean it and those who hear them know that they don't.