If you live in Cuba, apparently you can’t have a Nikon camera. Or at least that’s what Nikon is telling a young Cuban boy who won a contest for one. Nikon is citing the U.S. government’s restriction of entry into Cuba on products produced in the U.S.:

A 12 year-old Cuban boy, Raysel Sosa González, won a Nikon digital camera as a prize for an international environmental painting contest held in Algeria and organized by the United Nations.

Nikon, the company who makes the digital camera, refused to delvier the gift to the child citing the content of a clause from Washington that prohibits the entry into the island of products with components from the United States.

It seems that the digital camera contains elements that are included in the list created by the U.S. during the 1962 Cuban Missle Crisis.

According to Spain’s 20 Minutos, the Cuban government is milking this for all its worth, and Castro himself sent the boy a digital camera. Judging from an article from the revolution’s newspaper, Granma, I can’t say that I disagree:

By brutally humiliating a Cuban child, the Japanese company has demonstrated how euphemistic it is to call the Yankee blockade of the island an “embargo”…

“Our child is not a terrorist; he does not plant bombs, and nor do any of the people who live and work in my country toward the magnanimity of humanity, taking healthcare and well-being to millions of human beings around the planet; our child still does not know about the evil that abounds in this world – well, now, in one single blow, he has come to know one part of that – because, since he was born, he has been surrounded only by love in his school, in the hospitals that he frequently visits and in his neighborhood, where he runs around without the fear of drugs, of kidnappers of children to remove their internal organs, or in fear of his life because a common criminal could murder him. Nobody is frightened of that because in his country these things are not an everyday occurrence, like in the United States, the government of which is incapable of controlling these evils on its own doorstep and tries to give lessons to the whole universe, when it is the main promoter of terrorism, of the mass murder of innocent children and of all that is bad on this marvelous planet, marvelous in spite of all these things.

Whoa. All this because of some camera parts.

Whatever you think of the embargo (or blockade), it seems to me that Nikon was a little too nit-picky. Was it really worth drumming up all this bad publicity? You really can’t win in the court of public opinion when you are denying a child something.

Via / 20 Minutos and Granma.cu

Image via STOP BLOQUEO