US To Normalize Relations With Cuba

The Washington Post editorial board is dismayed

The Vietnam outcome is what the Castros are counting on: a flood of U.S. tourists and business investment that will allow the regime to maintain its totalitarian system indefinitely. Mr. Obama may claim that he has dismantled a 50-year-old failed policy; what he has really done is give a 50-year-old failed regime a new lease on life.

Count me in.

Interesting take from the Washington Post. But I think that proximity to the US as much as anything will cause Cuba to open up faster than Vietnam has.

Fascinating times ahead, and I'm thinking that anyone wanting to see the "old" Cuba (which includes me) should go there sooner rather than later before it changes forever.

I hear that the only way Congress will agree is if Cuba takes Miami. Cuba balked at the idea

Well, at least Obama has come to realize that there's nothing wrong with torturing people in Cuba.

And Obama's actions have just earned the Jimmy Carter stamp of approval.

He's still alive?

I would like to catch a Camel Bus before they are all gone.

Castro's Hipster Apologists Want to Keep Cuba ‘Authentically’ Poor

Goddamn pussies. There's only two places that matter in Cuba. One is any decent brothel, the second is Hemingway's house.

That's what happens when you play too much Tropico 5

Only 90 miles south from Florida's southernmost point in the Keys! Never mind aircraft, WILL BE an easy trip for watercraft as well.

Also, IIRC, Cuba has alot of interesting fauna & flora to explore & look at, before difficult to do. And going to Cuba to study its wildlife would, & should, fall under Education(al), yes?

Good rundown of the Ozzy situation. http://www.espnfc.us/blog/espn-fc-u...o-alonso-have-a-future-with-the-united-states

Wow, I agree !

You should totally go and have a real good look inside while it's still a shithole legacy of the policies you apparently embrace so often. Lots of doctors but no meat in the diet. And people literally dying to get out. Go for it dude !!

I'd like to see it, too. I visited Russia both during ('87) and after ('94) the Soviet era. Witnessing that transition was fascinating.

Yeah, it'll be crowded soon with all the american riffraff heading down for vacations.

That is true, but to maintain some perspective, the change won't be all that radical. Even if the Castros were to renounce communism and open Cuba completely to free market capitalism, it would still be a third world shithole. Even US Caribbean possessions are dirt poor, despite our efforts to showcase them as anti-Cubas.

Having spent time in Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, British VI, Grand Cayman, Barbados, Aruba, Bon Aire, Cozumel, Yucatan, Panama, and Miami, I think your characterization is unfair.

I assume you mean except for Puerto Rico?

Their HDI is on par with Greece and Spain, higher than Italy and Austria.

http://www.estadisticas.gobierno.pr...eticket=opph7VojUJc=&tabid=360&language=en-US

Mostly talking about USVI, but Puerto Rico is also a bit misleading if you go by aggregate statistics. Yes, better off than Cuba or Haiti, and probably comparable to Greece (also a third world shit hole). But there is what the mainlanders see, and there are many pockets of high poverty outside those enclaves. More third world than Mississippi, for example.

The Washington Post editorial board fires again, saying Obama betrayed the Cuban democrats.

The wapo's editorial board is disappointing me. Gonna have to go with NYTimes.

And that's why the WaPo replaced the New York Times as the Newspaper of Record. The New York Times presents a shallow piece of partisan cheer leading, calling Obama's actions "a historic move" while providing absolutely no reason to think that the "historic move" is not a "historic fuck up." The Times writers should have confessed to feeling a tingle down their legs when they see the crease in Obama's pants.

In contrast, the WaPo went back to Obama's examples of China and Vietnam and showed that we didn't reward them with tighter relations until they'd made some concessions toward human rights and freedom, and yet even now those governments continue to crack down. The theory that Obama is using as a basis for his actions was already discredited, and yet he didn't even try to use his leverage to improve or change anything at all for the Cuban people. In fact, the previous WaPo editorial argued that he'd thrown a lifeline to Cuba's oppressive regime when it was teetering on collapse.

Part of me wants to say a piecemeal approach is just that, a lifeline to a crumbling dynasty. I want to say that a whole hog approach would be better. But, if the US was to lift all restrictions and completely remove the embargo tomorrow, I don't think Wal-Mart, Walgreens, et al would start sending scouts any time soon because the regime is still so restrictive. So, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Either way, the embargo and restrictions need to go. So long as there is some sort of plan to accomplish that, I think this is a good thing.

horseshit. What concessions towards human rights and freedom did China make before we crawled into their back pocket? We lost the Vietnam war. The only support for the continued embargo of Cuba after 50 years is from the Cubans in south Florida. While they may hold a valid grudge, the rest of us don't.

The embargo restrictions need to go after the reason for them is gone, which is the oppression and abuse committed daily by a revolutionary totalitarian communist regime from the Kruschev era. What we've seen in prior cases is that until an entrenched communist regime is dismantled, any opening with foreign business amounts to a slave-owning ruling class farming out their country's workers as slaves. All the profits go to the state, which then turns around and uses the money to further entrench through increased coercion (now there are things worth stealing!), oppression (whip the slaves until morale improves - because daddy wants a new car), and pay offs.

Russia had cut Cuba off from subsidies because the country was just a money sink. Venezuela took up the slack to promote their third way socialism and hire Cuban advisers to teach Venezuelans how to self-oppress, but Venezuela isn't going to survive the plunge in oil prices and its shelves are already empty. The only place the Castro regime can turn to keep totalitarian communism alive is the US.

That's nice, but what concessions did China and Vietnam offer? How did moving US manufacturing to China force this?

China made a shit ton of changes. Nixon and Kissinger went there in the early 70's to drive a wedge between the Soviets and China so communism wouldn't have a unified front. It wasn't until the late Carter era that we normalized relations, and during that interim China had drastically improved from the Stalin/Mao model of beating or starving the peasants until they met their quotas. We maintained our engagement and increased Western ties to China up through the Tienanmen Square massacre of 1979, when the Chinese government faced a real threat of overthrow and replacement by open Western-style democracy. The resulting crack down kept their regime in power, and the Western money took the pressure off the government because living standards kept rising. Their government used a lot of that money to tighten down on the freedoms that the Chinese can enjoy, funding a more advanced police state. And that's what happened after the Chinese had turned away from the hard-line oppressive policies that were akin to North Korea's.

And when they use the example of Vietnam, they are not talking about the Vietnam war era. We kept them isolated, as did the Chinese, until they had made a lot of concessions and moderated their oppression, requiring a pull-out of their forces from Cambodia, among other things. Now a higher percentage of Vietnamese believe in free market capitalism than Americans do, yet to get there required a lot of pressure, and their government is still communist and still in power.

This is true, but while your post lists some of these, none were concessions to the US as you claimed.
Also FYI the Tienanmen Square massacre was in 1989 and the protestors in that case were not proposing western-style government.

The Chinese weren't making concession to us, but they were backing down from the harshest abuses that caused us to treat them as a pariah. The Cubans have made little or no changes, so we shouldn't be rewarding them as if they had.

The Tienanmen square protesters were certainly advocating for some freedom, openness, and power to the people. The Chinese government saw what happened with Gorbachev, the military coup, and Yeltsin and the people of Moscow overthrowing the whole system, and they weren't going to allow a repeat of that.