US rapprochement with Cuba is long overdue

[thailiketoo]

Is it so unacceptable that the new sugar daddy can be Uncle Sam?

No problem. But nothing is free is it? Each party in the relationship has responsibilities. You want a new car and new house? No problem get rid of those two other guys Fidel and Raul. Uncle Sam is an old guy and does not want much. You have a free and fair election; get anyone you want to take the place of Fidel and Raul and your Uncle is cool with that.

See, what we have here is a lack of communication. Some people posting think Cuba wants it's current rulers. They don't. The USA would like nothing better than to support a new regime that was elected by the Cuban people.

The reason Castro has not had an election in 50 years is because he knows he would not win.

[craigt3365]

Is it so unacceptable that the new sugar daddy can be Uncle Sam?

No problem. But nothing is free is it? Each party in the relationship has responsibilities. You want a new car and new house? No problem get rid of those two other guys Fidel and Raul. Uncle Sam is an old guy and does not want much. You have a free and fair election; get anyone you want to take the place of Fidel and Raul and your Uncle is cool with that.

See, what we have here is a lack of communication. Some people posting think Cuba wants it's current rulers. They don't. The USA would like nothing better than to support a new regime that was elected by the Cuban people.

The reason Castro has not had an election in 50 years is because he knows he would not win.

Isn't a big problem with all of this the Cuban community in the US? I seem to remember reading this bloc is very powerful politically and don't want close ties with the current government in Cuba. Politicians in Florida really have to listen to them, IIRC.

[thailiketoo]

Is it so unacceptable that the new sugar daddy can be Uncle Sam?

No problem. But nothing is free is it? Each party in the relationship has responsibilities. You want a new car and new house? No problem get rid of those two other guys Fidel and Raul. Uncle Sam is an old guy and does not want much. You have a free and fair election; get anyone you want to take the place of Fidel and Raul and your Uncle is cool with that.

See, what we have here is a lack of communication. Some people posting think Cuba wants it's current rulers. They don't. The USA would like nothing better than to support a new regime that was elected by the Cuban people.

The reason Castro has not had an election in 50 years is because he knows he would not win.

Isn't a big problem with all of this the Cuban community in the US? I seem to remember reading this bloc is very powerful politically and don't want close ties with the current government in Cuba. Politicians in Florida really have to listen to them, IIRC.

He took a job in real estate with Armando Codina, a 32-year-old Cuban immigrant and self-made American millionaire. Codina had made a fortune in a computer business, and then formed a new company, The Codina Group, to pursue opportunities in real estate.^. In 1983, Jeb Bush explained his move from Houston to Miami: “On the personal side, my mother-in-law and sister-in-law were already living here", and on the professional side, "I want to be very wealthy.

Codina eventually made Bush his partner in a new development business, which quickly became one of South Florida's leading real estate development firms. As a partner, Bush received 40% of the firm's profits.

In 1971 in León, Mexico, where he was teaching English as part of a foreign exchange program, Bush met Columba Garnica Gallo. They were married on February 23, 1974, in Austin, Texas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeb_Bush

South Florida is followed by the Tampa Bay Area and North Hudson, New Jersey, particularly Union City and West New York With a population of 141,250, the New York metropolitan area's Cuban community is the largest outside of Florida. Nearly 70% of all Cuban Americans live in Florida.

Cuban Americans have tended to be more Republican than other Hispanic groups. The failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and its association with John F. Kennedy, left many Cubans distrustful of the Democratic Party. Many Cuban Americans believe that Kennedy deliberately denied Cuban exiles air support, leading to a rout by Castro forces. The trauma of this event has led to speculation about possible Cuban-American involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, is particularly popular in the Cuban exile community (there is a street in Miami named for Reagan). And George W. Bush received 75 and 78 percent (in 2000 and 2004 respectively) of the Cuban-American vote.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_American

Edited December 23, 2014 by thailiketoo

[Publicus]

Socialism is the hysteria of the US right sector. The US political left of center and the further out left see a complex relationship between the US and western Europe with its Social Democrat parties, as well as with the social democracy of Canada that has a number of its citizens paying as much as half their income in taxes, federal taxes especially.

Castro offered nothing of any of the systems, whether socialism, social democracy, capitalism. The Castros are communist which means they are totalitarians who rule absolutely in the name of the people they oppress and repress while they live high off the hog. Where is the Cuban middle class....where has the Cuban middle class been from 1960 to the present....it is and has been in the United States, primarily.

The United States has had to stop the export of totalitarian communism from Cuba to Latin America. It is absurdly and superficially reductionist to say Cuba is the Mouse that Roared when it was in fact the appendage of what Prez Reagan in his typical rhetorical flourish called the Evil Empire. I didn't ever vote for Reagan and I nearly vomited each time I saw his phony face on tv or in person in Washington, but he made his point with typical flair as he stood at the Berlin Wall imploring Gorbechev. The US has a wall across Texas to control inflow, not any outflow.

I voted for Barack Obama twice and if it were constitutional I'd vote for him again...this is what he could do across the board if he were a better president and if the Republican party were better Americans.

Edited by Publicus to point out the quote attributed entirely to me was not entirely written by me. The first part of the quoted post is by another poster. My post in the quote appears beginning at line 13 from the top by my count.

OK. I will drop the socialisam/communism thing for the moment. It was just the germination of an idea anyway. I was trying to get to the reason why the US has and has had such an overbearing position on Cuba. Cuba is in many ways a US creation. US influence and foreign policies contributed to the creation of the environment for the revolution and subsequently created a bogey-man out of Castro who now seems to represent everything anti-American. I think this is wholly out of proportion to reality and is partly as a result of the ongoing snub Cuba represents to the US who believes it should have more influence over a country 90miles off its shores.

What threat is or was Cuba? I don't believe Cuba posed any threat the minute after the ships with the nuclear missiles turned around and went back to Russia. Rapprochement between Cuba and the US could have started that moment. Instead, it seemed necessary for the US to maintain the pre tense of a threat from Cuba. You citing the Axis of Evil is a case in point. Apart from some mischief making with the Mariel Exodus and maybe some covert activity in the Cuban American community (who knows?), there was never any chance of Cuba achieving any aggressive foreign policy move against the US.

The Mouse that Roared? That was a response to a hypothetical scenario that you, yourself created, postulating an invasion of Communist ideology to the US from Cuba. If such a thing happened then it would have been a Mouse that Roared.

I think much of the attitude of the US to Cuba is out of proportion and has been for decades. It seems to be expressed by people from both sides of the political spectrum and to me, it stems from a manufactured bogey-man that never really posed any threat but now the time is way past to normalise arrangements many are still held in thrall by this cold war era view.

Untold over the past 55 years, or largely ignored or dismissed for lack of interest by Western media and the Western chattering classes, is the fact a significant number of Americans have always regarded Castro's communist Cuba as an overblown and overplayed issue in the United States...grotesquely overblown Yes Castro is a totalitarian communist and yes he tried to export his 26th of July Revolution to and throughout Latin America.... yes, yes yes and yes.....

However, the US was for sure going to stop Castro exporting his revolution and did in fact stop him long ago. The turning point occurred as far back as 1967 when the CIA executed Che Guevarra in a small hut in the remote jungles of Bolivia. The New Left in the US had soured on Fidel by then but el Che was a different story. Ernesto the physician was more the Marxist than the Leninist, much more so, as he characteristically demonstrated when as new central bank governor he signed the currency as simply "Che".

There's something to be said in favor of the guy who makes one of the most famous photographs of the world.....

Che Guevara

Guerrillero Heroico

Taken by Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960

The US fanatical anti-communism of the 1950s McCarthy period carried on to morph the straight out geopolitical challenge of communism establishing itself in Cuba into an hysterical over mobilizing of national resources and the complete distortion of national attitudes toward the island and its leaders. The CIA tried exploding cigars, the generals prepared invasion plans, the media (primarily print back then) consistently represented a godless Castro as Beelzebub himself. As if that weren't enuff, the guy even had a beard and a scruffy one at that....it seemed all of the mangy bunch had rabid looking beards.....

While the exile Cuban middle class is a welcome group of enterprising achievers to the United States, their own fanaticism against Castro has contributed mightily toward the general public's distorted and grossly disproportionate attitudes toward Cuba. These mangled attitudes centered in south Florida and emanating from there have enabled the right sector in Washington to enact all kinds of legislation against Cuba while the MSM has cynically cheered them on.

Given the specifics of Cuba, to include the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis which almost blew up the world, and all of the Cold War overage before the Crisis and after it, It's always been uphill to try to move the American public back into a reasonable balance and a rational perspective concerning Cuba. The exiles in their focused single-issue determination have almost always carried the day. So it was refreshing to see the rare exception when Prez Clinton defied the exiles by removing the 10 year old Elian Gonzales from their grip to return the boy to his only surviving parent father in Cuba...that his unfortunate mother drowned to get Elian to the United States is yet another tragic and distorting aspect of the Cuba-US antagonisms to include domestically within the USA.

Prez Obama has finally begun to take this nearly 60 year old mishap and misadventure full circle by putting the US back on track toward normal relations with the island and its people and government. The polling shows the great majority of Americans want the policies of the past 55 years reversed. Most Cuban exiles want normal relations as well.

Still, it's not only totalitarian communism that was the driving force in the distortions of US Cuba policy during the terms of the last 11 presidents. It is in fact a global phenomenon that continental countries rather easily get hysterical about islands off their immediate coast. Look at Beijing and Taiwan, Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, the UK and Argentina over the Faulkans/Malvinas, the South China Sea and the East Sea between China and Japan.....etc....

[Tep]

Socialism is the hysteria of the US right sector. The US political left of center and the further out left see a complex relationship between the US and western Europe with its Social Democrat parties, as well as with the social democracy of Canada that has a number of its citizens paying as much as half their income in taxes, federal taxes especially.

Castro offered nothing of any of the systems, whether socialism, social democracy, capitalism. The Castros are communist which means they are totalitarians who rule absolutely in the name of the people they oppress and repress while they live high off the hog. Where is the Cuban middle class....where has the Cuban middle class been from 1960 to the present....it is and has been in the United States, primarily.

The United States has had to stop the export of totalitarian communism from Cuba to Latin America. It is absurdly and superficially reductionist to say Cuba is the Mouse that Roared when it was in fact the appendage of what Prez Reagan in his typical rhetorical flourish called the Evil Empire. I didn't ever vote for Reagan and I nearly vomited each time I saw his phony face on tv or in person in Washington, but he made his point with typical flair as he stood at the Berlin Wall imploring Gorbechev. The US has a wall across Texas to control inflow, not any outflow.

I voted for Barack Obama twice and if it were constitutional I'd vote for him again...this is what he could do across the board if he were a better president and if the Republican party were better Americans.

Edited by Publicus to point out the quote attributed entirely to me was not entirely written by me. The first part of the quoted post is by another poster. My post in the quote appears beginning at line 13 from the top by my count.

OK. I will drop the socialisam/communism thing for the moment. It was just the germination of an idea anyway. I was trying to get to the reason why the US has and has had such an overbearing position on Cuba. Cuba is in many ways a US creation. US influence and foreign policies contributed to the creation of the environment for the revolution and subsequently created a bogey-man out of Castro who now seems to represent everything anti-American. I think this is wholly out of proportion to reality and is partly as a result of the ongoing snub Cuba represents to the US who believes it should have more influence over a country 90miles off its shores.

What threat is or was Cuba? I don't believe Cuba posed any threat the minute after the ships with the nuclear missiles turned around and went back to Russia. Rapprochement between Cuba and the US could have started that moment. Instead, it seemed necessary for the US to maintain the pre tense of a threat from Cuba. You citing the Axis of Evil is a case in point. Apart from some mischief making with the Mariel Exodus and maybe some covert activity in the Cuban American community (who knows?), there was never any chance of Cuba achieving any aggressive foreign policy move against the US.

The Mouse that Roared? That was a response to a hypothetical scenario that you, yourself created, postulating an invasion of Communist ideology to the US from Cuba. If such a thing happened then it would have been a Mouse that Roared.

I think much of the attitude of the US to Cuba is out of proportion and has been for decades. It seems to be expressed by people from both sides of the political spectrum and to me, it stems from a manufactured bogey-man that never really posed any threat but now the time is way past to normalise arrangements many are still held in thrall by this cold war era view.

Untold over the past 55 years, or largely ignored or dismissed for lack of interest by Western media and the Western chattering classes, is the fact a significant number of Americans have always regarded Castro's communist Cuba as an overblown and overplayed issue in the United States...grotesquely overblown Yes Castro is a totalitarian communist and yes he tried to export his 26th of July Revolution to and throughout Latin America.... yes, yes yes and yes.....

However, the US was for sure going to stop Castro exporting his revolution and did in fact stop him long ago. The turning point occurred as far back as 1967 when the CIA executed Che Guevarra in a small hut in the remote jungles of Bolivia. The New Left in the US had soured on Fidel by then but el Che was a different story. Ernesto the physician was more the Marxist than the Leninist, much more so, as he characteristically demonstrated when as new central bank governor he signed the currency as simply "Che".

There's something to be said in favor of the guy who makes one of the most famous photographs of the world.....

Che Guevara

Guerrillero Heroico

Taken by Alberto Korda on March 5, 1960

The US fanatical anti-communism of the 1950s McCarthy period carried on to morph the straight out geopolitical challenge of communism establishing itself in Cuba into an hysterical over mobilizing of national resources and the complete distortion of national attitudes toward the island and its leaders. The CIA tried exploding cigars, the generals prepared invasion plans, the media (primarily print back then) consistently represented a godless Castro as Beelzebub himself. As if that weren't enuff, the guy even had a beard and a scruffy one at that....it seemed all of the mangy bunch had rabid looking beards.....

While the exile Cuban middle class is a welcome group of enterprising achievers to the United States, their own fanaticism against Castro has contributed mightily toward the general public's distorted and grossly disproportionate attitudes toward Cuba. These mangled attitudes centered in south Florida and emanating from there have enabled the right sector in Washington to enact all kinds of legislation against Cuba while the MSM has cynically cheered them on.

Given the specifics of Cuba, to include the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis which almost blew up the world, and all of the Cold War overage before the Crisis and after it, It's always been uphill to try to move the American public back into a reasonable balance and a rational perspective concerning Cuba. The exiles in their focused single-issue determination have almost always carried the day. So it was refreshing to see the rare exception when Prez Clinton defied the exiles by removing the 10 year old Elian Gonzales from their grip to return the boy to his only surviving parent father in Cuba...that his unfortunate mother drowned to get Elian to the United States is yet another tragic and distorting aspect of the Cuba-US antagonisms to include domestically within the USA.

Prez Obama has finally begun to take this nearly 60 year old mishap and misadventure full circle by putting the US back on track toward normal relations with the island and its people and government. The polling shows the great majority of Americans want the policies of the past 55 years reversed. Most Cuban exiles want normal relations as well.

Still, it's not only totalitarian communism that was the driving force in the distortions of US Cuba policy during the terms of the last 11 presidents. It is in fact a global phenomenon that continental countries rather easily get hysterical about islands off their immediate coast. Look at Beijing and Taiwan, Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, the UK and Argentina over the Faulkans/Malvinas, the South China Sea and the East Sea between China and Japan.....etc....

I agree with your comments and I think they elaborate my point very well although I have not considered the 'Island Thesis' before. Maybe scrapping over insignificant dots in the sea is less dangerous than continental armies facing off with tank battalions.

[umbanda]

I dont care what Obama does , Americans will never stand for normalizing relations with a communist country and never buy any products produced there.

Probably you are not buying in the US ......EVERYTHING selling there now is produced or hold parts made in many comunist countries ....