Eddie, EVERYTHING we have access to in the USA is based on Imperial REPRESSION of other countries AND the majority of non-wealthy Americans.
How can I say such an "outrageous" statement?
Ask yourself a simple question? How would you feel if you HAD TO buy and sell everything you depend on with Russian Rubles?
Would that bother you a teensy weensy bit?
I think it would put a MOUNTAIN SIZED BURR under your Texas saddle.
It's NOT "okay" because War loving Incarceration Nation USA does it to everyone that ain't rich here and everyone that don't live in the USA.
Please DO NOT tell me that we "had to do that before some other country did it to us 😇

". That is not a justification for routine repression. And yeah, economic repression DIRECTLY translates into slave wages, poverty, lack of freedom, strife, wars, murder, and so on HERE and abroad. To pretend it doesn't is sophistry.
Cuba is simply not in the same ball park with the
level of repression the
USA is NUMERO UNO at on this planet.
We did not get our World Reserve Currency “exorbitant privilege” by being the "land of the free". We GOT THAT BY REPRESSION here, there and everywhere, period. Everything the American Imperial Economic Hitmen have done is repression, whether you wish to admit it or not. No other country on the planet, no matter how many they killed for this or that reason, comes close to our level of despotic behavior, except for England and Spain a couple of centuries back, on a much, much smaller scale.
The phrase “exorbitant privilege” was originally coined in the 1960s by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, then the French Minister of Finance. He was referring to the massive benefits imbuing to the United States for having the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California Berkeley, summarized it thusly:
“It costs only a few cents for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to produce a $100 bill, but other countries had to pony up $100 of actual goods in order to obtain one.” Commodities are priced in dollars; trade exchange takes place in dollars; current account deficits are priced that way too. Enormous benefits accrue to the USA because of it.