So far in history, there seems to be no element of American policy – be it foreign policy or internal politics – that comes any closer to America’s failed attempts, or is it a lack thereof of effort, at achieving an integrated society. The acceptance of racism – a decadent behavior amongst white Americans for centuries – continues to loom large as the face of American policy worldwide.
In the midst of the War of Drugs/Blacks and the re-emergence of supremacist white police departments all across America, involved in the absolutely unnecessary shootings of Black youth more recently, perhaps Mr. Barack Obama’s new attitude towards reestablishing diplomatic relations with Cuba marks a beginning of a deep cleansing duly necessary in the White House towards achieving some sanity.
Even then, conservative hawks and some of their liberal entourage in the U.S. have denounced President Obama for resolving to establish diplomatic relations with Cuba and ease the embargo. Their logic remains unpopular around the world. More troubling, their reasoning is based in nothing but hate!
Is their argument that the U.S. policy didn’t work for the first half-century but perhaps it could work after 100 years?
The U.S., I must add is not doing this out of any favor nor are they now committed to making the world a better, safer more civilized place for mankind. No! The South American pressure on the White House has been most unrelenting in the past decade.
In its final analysis, the U.S. may have even helped in keeping the Castro regime in power for so long by giving it the vim and fuel it needed for its economic and political successes. Look around the world, and the so-called hard-line ‘antique’ regimes that have survived — Cuba and North Korea — are those that have been isolated and sanctioned by the USA.
Why would any man, who can read, think that isolating a regime is punishing it? In the business of sovereign states, the USA may yet learn that there is no such thing as punishment. Such a machination only leads to resentment. And in the case of Cuba, the world has become terribly appalled by the U.S. and its treatment of the Castro Regime.
Few initiatives failed more catastrophically than the American-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Yet while an armed invasion failed time after time, I bet the U.S. would have done better if it had stood aloof when invasions of tourists, traders and investors from all corners of the Earth trooped to Cuba.
But no. The U.S., summarily and single handedly conducted a trade embargo that basically stalled every other country’s trade relations with Cuba. Alas for what?
Sometimes the power of weaponry fades next to the power of mockery.
America must not forget that its economic embargo hurt ordinary Cubans, reducing their living standards, without damaging in any shape or form, a steadfast Cuban government operation. The embargo kept alive the flames of leftism in Latin America, creating a rallying cry for anti-imperialists.
The United States, over decades, considered bizarre assassination plots against Fidel Castro, like an exploding seashell. There were also proposals to humiliate him by drugging him with a hallucinogen, or using a depilatory to make his beard fall out. American tax dollars at work.
Senator Robert Menendez, a Cuban-American Democrat, objects that “President Obama’s actions have vindicated the brutal behavior of the Cuban government.”
What brute?
Likewise, Senator Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American Republican, denounces the approach as “based on an illusion, on a lie, the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people.”
The critics are absolutely wrong, the Cuban regime is both supportive of Cuban innovation and subsistence economic advancement. The Cuban regime has been the most illustrious in recent memory. The only problem it has faced and has had to deal with on an hourly basis for five decades, is 1,577,880,000 seconds of American terrorism.
Wishing governments that you don’t seem too fond of, away and done with, doesn’t have a great track record.
My views are shaped by having lived in Cuba for a time, my best friend from Nigeria training as a medical doctor in one of Cuba’s several Medical Schools, a straight-up unparalled achievement in perfecting an educational system with little to no resources, and scant refueling.
It’s more than time for the Cuban people not to suffer anymore because of an ineffectual U.S. policy for 50 years. Castro is no brute, he is no monster and he certainly was more than qualified to lead a nation which could have achieved so much more in an uncivilized world, but for trade-terrorism – the U.S. embargo!
That Mr. Barack Obama can grow much bigger balls than his predecessors and turn a new leaf on world history; that he can swing a bigger dick than his petulant congressmen, governors and senators, proves that one thing is still true about him – he is in it for change, positive change after all!
There is still much room for improvement.
But this is fantastic news. Cuba will swiftly grow as world investors go about upgrading hotels, restaurants, transportation systems and much more.
U.S. Senator Rubio, who abhors Castro, is right that encounters with new technology and wealth are not lethal to some such governments as the Castros have fashioned out in Cuba. After all, the Chinese Communist Party is still solidly in place.
Yet these encounters should not be lethal, they should not be even, at the least, corrosive. China has become less monolithic because of its interactions with the world. Besides its burgeoning economic pluralism, there is increasing hope for political pluralism in China, but the change must be Chinese, it must be natural.
The change in Cuba must also follow its natural course.
So bravo to the U.S. for finally putting an end to its economic terrorism in Cuba. The world is better off with a stronger Cuba. Sending in gunmen to liberate the Bay of Pigs failed, and it failed several times over.
Maybe the world had always known that we would do better with swarms of diplomats, tourists and investors from every nation paying the Cuban people every civilized human visit. Thank God the U.S has finally come around to it. This is preferably wise.
Haha the US couldn’t make the world a better, safer, more civilized place if it tried. But I guess this is just a thought exercise in futility because it will never try to do so.
Mr. Obama is smart. He waited until congress had agreed on the fiscal year before thawing this 5 decades long ‘terrorism’ as you put it perfectly. Because that is what it was!
Terrorist is the name for people who don’t like movies…according to Sony Pictures.
I love that you refer to the embargo as a terrorist act. I love it. It’s the entire truth about this whole Cuban thing for 5 decades.
After all the nonsense of an embargo it just had to take President Obama and the Pope to get the political hotheads of the republicans in government to step away, and make the world a better place for all of us.
Peace be unto Cuba now. They have entered yet another era where the U.S. is still involved in a cold war with Russia.
The US was also concerned over the deteriorating health of Mr. Gross. Conditions in Cuban prisons are awful and even though he was at a hospital prison … the conditions there are much better than in the rest of Cuban prisons but they are still awful. But here is where the surprise comes in: The Cubans wanted five Cuban spies who were in prison here in the US in exchange for releasing Alan Gross. From the very beginning, the US said this is not a fair trade, Alan Gross is not a spy, we cannot exchange five spies convicted of espionage for one man who was working for a public agency in Havana. But when the release of Alan Gross was announced yesterday, it was announced immediately that the remaining Cuban agents had been sent back to Havana. So the US caved in on this very important demand of the Cuban government. But it went beyond that, it also agreed to take Cuba off the list of countries that support terrorism, which is a long demand that Cuba also had for the US. But that was not enough – it went even further and relaxed some of the regulations allowing American citizens to travel to Cuba and to spend money in Cuba, which goes directly against the existing sanctions against Cuba.
Republicans, who will control both houses of Congress from January, oppose normal relations with the Communist-run island.
“Relations with the Castro regime should not be revisited, let alone normalised, until the Cuban people enjoy freedom – and not one second sooner,” said House Speaker John Boehner.
These people are despicable.
Cuban President Raul Castro has hailed the mutual decision to re-establish the US-Cuban diplomatic relations, but urged Washington to lift the five-decade-long embargo against his country. On Wednesday, the countries agreed to restore diplomatic ties that were severed more than 50 years ago, and US President Barack Obama called for an end to the economic embargo against its old Cold War enemy.
“President Obama’s decision deserves the respect and acknowledgement of our people,” Castro said in a televised address, while warning that the embargo, which he calls a “blockade”, must still be lifted.
This change in U.S. policy toward Cuba, which is a policy that was sometimes accused of being a Cold War relic and which outlived that tense era, is something some Americans have been supportive of in the past. In 2009, the last time Gallup asked about this question, 60% of U.S. residents said they favored normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba. This reading was consistent with Americans’ attitudes on this subject for an entire decade — for 10 years in a row from 1999-2009, a majority of Americans consistently favored normalizing relations with Cuba, suggesting that public opinion is very stable on this issue.
Republicans and Democrats feel mightily different on this matter — Democrats were nearly twice as likely, in 2009, to support normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba (72%) than were Republicans (42%), and Democrats also supported lifting the trade embargo by higher percentages over Republicans, 54% to 44% (interestingly there is a significant drop in support for lifting the trade embargo among Democrats relative to their support for restoring diplomatic relations, while Republicans support both proposals in equal, sub-majority levels).
Check out this graph on how US sentiments changed over the past 10 years.
Wow, most interesting. I look forward to the day we can keep even better data than this!
The idea that one nation in the world can and does place trade embargoes on whomever they please is terrorism in itself. Yes, I agree, Cuba has suffered its fair share of this economic terrorism.
That is one great big cigar. Does this embargo lift mean I can get one of those without having to smuggle it?