Apartheid South Africa Kills Nelson Mandela!

How would the world react to such a headline if South Africa's unjust apartheid system were still in effect today? How and to what extent would the mainstream media report this news? What would the United Nations say? How about the United States administration or congress?

Well, obviously that did not happen. South Africa eventually transitioned into a Democracy, Nelson Mandela was freed, and he even served as president of the nation that once imprisoned him.

Although South Africans deserve a great deal of credit for the democratization if their country, there is little doubt that international efforts aided in that transition.

The United States, for example, passed the Comprehensive Antiapartheid Act. The legislation was an embargo of sorts that banned trade and investments in South Africa as a punitive measure against the government's unjust institutional racism. Direct flights between South Africa and the United States were also banned.

Sound familiar?

It should. The embargo that resulted from the United States Comprehensive Antiapartheid Act is very similar to the Cuban embargo.

The Antiapartheid Act was controversial at the time, since the United States was embroiled in a Cold War, and although it was an unjust regime, the Apartheid government was generally anti-Soviet. Regardless, the embargo legislation passed with support from both sides, especially from the Congressional Black Caucus. And rightfully so.

Yet today, most if not all the members of the congressional black caucus deride the Cuban embargo as unjust and want to see it lifted. Others in congress do, too.

They call for closer economic and diplomatic ties with the Cuban government as it commits acts eerily similar to the fake Mandela headline above.

Case in point: a few days ago, a Cuban political prisoner, Orlando Zapata Tamayo, was allowed to die when he went on a hunger strike to protest the repeated beatings and other blatant abuses by Castro's thug prison guards.

According to reports, the black Cuban was denied liquids by his captors as a punitive measure for daring to go on a hunger strike, and in the ultimate act of cruelty, his family was denied the opportunity to visit him during his final days.

After his death, supporters and friends were forbidden from paying their last respects at his funeral.

Meanwhile, nowhere outside Miami has the mainstream media reported this, the Castro-friendly Congressional Black Caucus and other congressional so-called "leaders" continue calling for the lift of the embargo on Cuba, and countless other political prisoners, including the black doctor Oscar Elias Biscet, continue rotting in Soviet-style Cuban gulags--not in some faraway continent, but in our very own. 90 miles away.