You obviously don’t know the history but Obama started a process that for a while looked promising until it was scrapped a bit by Biden and then totally by Trump
well darn you were takling about how the recient arrival of the russian oil tankers possibly ruined a beautiful relationship. so went from several days events to years and years ago.... wanna talk about Flugencio??? how far back should we go i gotta try and locate the goalposts
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/...ps-up-secret-cuba-planning-trump/89623722007/ Now they're talking about attacking Cuba to install a compliant government.
The last time they did this with Batista a lot of people died, and that was how Castro gained power. The US never learns from its past actions. Never.
That chance was bungled from the start of the revolution. Harry Truman told a biographer that the first thing he would have done if he were president at the time would be to get on the phone with Castro: Fidel, it looks like you've won yourself a revolution. Now we both know you're going to need a lot of stuff and there's only two places you can get it. Now, what do you need?" I'm always suspicious of "easy" solutions to complex problems and that wouldn't guarantee that Castro wouldn't have been a long-term pain in the ass, but that sure as hell would have been a better response than the Bay of Pigs.
It always amazes me how there are people in power who are like "if we murder their leader in the middle of the night, they'll surely love us" like Dubya's "they'll greet us as liberators!" bullshit back during the 2003 Iraq war.
Short election cycles and a kneejerk reactive voting public. This isn't exclusive to the US, but it means that doing what is better for the long term can mean incurring a short term loss of risk of losing the next upcoming election by giving your opponents an opportunity to label you as WEAK ON X. If the US had gone "we don't support your system, but lets trade and exchange ideas anyway" then Cuba would have been capitalist AF and super friendly with the US by the 90s.
See also the US towards Iran. Where yeah, Iran's leadership are regressive theocratic fuckwits. But the US policy for 50 years has been openly about still being butthurt and wanting revenge for some hostages held for a whole in the 19 fucking 70s.
I mean, they did initially greet us as liberators. We just completely fumbled the post-liberation situation. The people actually gave us about a year and a half to get shit straight before the real insurrection took off.
Bullshit. Though attitudes were more positive initially than they would become, there were never a majority of Iraqis who saw American invaders as liberating them. The figure was 43% after one month and fell to 15% after six months, and obviously those numbers would be even worse if you excluded the Kurdish north. Link.
There were plenty of anecdotal reports of warm greetings. That doesn't = the mass greeting of our troops as "liberators", but it does suggest that there was a window of opportunity for a competent post-war administration to gain ground with the overall population. As it turned out, the neo-cons who were put in charge never bothered to read boring historical stuff about what makes the difference between successful and unsuccessful occupations and fucked things up in a manner that matches any of Trump's incompetence. It certainly could have turned out differently. No, I am not saying Iraq would have been the beacon of democracy the GWB idiots promised, but it might have turned out better...how much better?
So, a Miami Hetald headline today stated a strong majority of Cuban immigrants and Cuban-Americans support military invasion of Cuba for regime change. My response is: Do it yourself. You care so much? Put your money where your mouth is. Otherwise, fuck off. These are the same assholes that were holding protests and flying the US flag upside down because we gave a kidnapped kid back to his dad. These are the same people that would happily decamp back to an overthrown Cuba, as long as they aren't the ones who have to do it. They've never been interested in assimilating.
Why would you exclude the Kurdish north? That seems a bit like when the Republicans were all saying "Hillary didn't get the most votes if you exclude New York and California."
I didn't exclude it. But its worth noting the effect it had on the overall numbers as an area with preexisting self-rule which was much more lightly occupied, and therefore how little support the US enjoyed in the rest of the country, including the most politically important centred on Baghdad. (Kurdistan is not the CA and NY of Iraq.)
Now they've farcically indicted 96 year old Raul Castro in a US court, implicitly threatening another abduction along the lines of Maduro.
While I agree that the Cuban regime is not as polyanic as the left tries to paint them( these are people who literally executed remnants of the previous regime and stifles political opposition), US has no right to deny trade between two countries. Ive never been a fan of the embargo nor the fascist shit that is being done now.
Can’t have them shooting back when we invade, now can we? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/10/hegseth-warns-cuba-weapons-guantanamo-bay
Yeah, this is the Paladin doctrine. The whole "just lay down, and be a good boy, and take everything we dish out, and it won't be so bad. We'll only hurt ya a little, we promise" line of bullshit. Y'know, wifebeater shit.
"It would be unwise for the government of Cuba to try to procure or get access to the types of weapons that could reach this base..." Does Hegseth have any idea what he is talking about? "This base" is in Cuba. A hand-thrown rock from the other side of the fence could "reach this base"! And that is in addition to the arrogant nonsense of telling a foreign government, which has been explicitly and openly threatened, that they shouldn't try to defend themselves.
