The standard literary definition of insanity is to continually repeat the same action and expect a different result. Our country has been doing that with Cuba for over 50 years. This week Barak Obama made good on an electoral promise, stepped in and through a series of covert moves, helped along by the Pope, started the process by which we will resume diplomatic, business and social relations with Cuba. This is a move, long overdue, that will be good for the United States, good for Cuba, good, in fact for the whole Western Hemisphere, but do the loyal opposition step up and say, well done, good job, something that needed to be done for years? Are you kidding?
The Cuban spitfire, Marco, The Miami Mook, Rubio, steps up and shows us that he is one gene behind Sarah Palin in the intelligence department by attacking the president for fixing a festering problem that has existed since before he was born. His biggest argument is that Cuba is violating its citizen’s human rights. That’s true Marco and you think that continuing the same policies we have unsuccessfully followed for the last 50 years is going to change that? How about we get in there, spread a little money, turn all those little communists into flourishing capitalists and engender a hunger for freedom among them? You think that may work better than the policy we followed for 50 years with no change or hope of change. And since when did human rights violations make a country our enemy except when we wanted to invade them for their natural resources? Do we hate Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, China, almost any nation in Africa, because of human rights violations? That list could go on for pages and it would include us.
Then little Marco speaks to the Communism problem. Now we all know that he wasn’t around when this problem erupted but that never kept a Republican from being an expert. The fact is that Castro didn’t want to be a good little communist. We made him one. That’s right. Fidel came to us first for help. We were Big Brother and he wanted us to help him overthrow the dictator Batista. In those days Fidel was very naïve. It never occurred to him that the United States would want to keep a dictator in place just because American business and American crime made a shitload of money off him.
Kennedy put out feelers and got a resounding NO from American Sugar Refining, the tobacco industry, the olive oil industry and oh yes, the Mob who ran all the casinos in Havana and were hooked up with a small but powerful coterie of American politicians just like the Koch’s are now.
For Fidel it was get help or get killed so he turned to the Soviets who were drooling over a chance to get into the Americas but their price was that Fidel had to create a communist state right off the cost of Florida. And that kids is how Cuba got to be a Communist country. It was Kennedy’s biggest blunder. The Bay of Pigs was only his second biggest. If we had helped Castro free the Cuban people from Batista’s dictatorship there never would have been a problem. We didn’t help and he didn’t forget how we helped his enemy. Don’t get me wrong. Castro isn’t some kind of saint but if we had done the right thing he would have been our sinner, not Nikita Kruschev’s. It’s just another example of how the corporate culture, in search of profit at any cost, works against the real needs of our nation.
What Rubio, Cruz and the other GOP deniers don’t understand is that capitalism and freedom are too big a prize for greedy humans to pass on. The big Republican fallacy, that Reagan ended the Soviet Union, is the perfect example. Actually Reagan had about as much to do with ending the Soviet dream as my cat. Television and its influence are what killed communism. People in the Soviet bloc saw what they were missing and because most of them weren’t true believers anyhow, they just passed on what Russia was selling them. The same thing will happen in Cuba when we get in there and start selling the dream.
Fidel the marathon orator is in retirement. Rafael the realist will be more than willing to adjust his dream just to stay in office, and maybe even to help his people. Obama has added one more accomplishment to a list, that even as a lame duck, is growing and promises to expand even further, given the fighting within the GOP. The Republicans have set the record as the least productive congress in the history of the nation but maybe, if they just sit quietly and keep their mouths shut Obama can continue to help the country.
It’s interesting to watch Republicans get pissed off at Rand Paul for his support of Obama’s policy. Why is it that the Right can never look at anything from the point of view of how does this work for the United States and its citizens. They must always look at any problem from the POV of how does it meld with the ultra right wing philosophy.
Yes Cuba is still a communist country, which is only one of the reasons that it has failed. Yes, it’s run by a couple of bad guys, which makes it just like most of the other nations that we do business with, but the policy we have been pursuing for the past 50 years hasn’t worked so maybe someone with a modicum of intelligence like Obama should do exactly what he has done to supplant it. Maybe, horror of horrors it’s time to change.
But no, the fanatic right wing idiots like Rubio, Cruz, McConnell, etc. see nothing but two old men who have become bad guys, with not a little help from us, and fail to see all the benefits to both countries and indeed the entire hemisphere that can be accomplished by welcoming Cuba back into the functioning world.
Sure the Castro’s are dictators. How many other dictators have we supported in Central and South America over the years? For decades that’s all we did business with down there as any rebel group was accused of being Communist so the American capitalists who made big money with the dictators could keep the green pipeline flowing. For Christ sake, can’t we, for once, do something that’s good for people instead of just stuff that makes corporations richer?
It’s interesting that the older Cuban population of the U.S. is made up mostly of people who were against Castro because they saw him as endangering their positions in Havana where they took advantage of their fellow Cubans to get rich during the Batista regime. Everyone talks about how the Castro’s are violating man rights down there. Most of the people who make this argument have not been alive long enough to have been in Batista’s Cuba. But, in many ways, Castro’s Cuba is no different than Batista’s. Economically, the right people did better under Batista but socially it was just as oppressed if you weren’t a Batistero. What basically happened was that one dictator was replaced by another and the people who came here as refugees were just the favored few who were replaced by a different favored few. The basic problem for most of the Cuban refugees was about economics, not about freedom. They were the business class that flourished under Batista and they would lose their business under Castro because they had supported Batista. Castro actually promised more freedom than Batista had allowed; he just didn’t deliver but those refugees were already here when that happened.
One of the big GOP whines is that Obama didn’t make a good deal, that Cuba got more out of this than we did. Why is it that no Republican ever looks at the big picture, only at who got more? We know they are a bunch of greedy, acquisitive pigs that look at everything from the point of view of what will it do to enrich me, but there are other considerations, especially when eleven million people’s futures are at stake. The Cuban people deserve a shot. For 50 years they have been the victims of Castro’s dictatorship and America’s fear and loathing of Communism. Why the hell don’t we all sit back and see if a new approach will help. Maybe Rubio’s backers won’t get any richer by this change, but maybe our two nations will benefit. That should be enough for anyone.