Following this article, I wonder yet again about the purpose of maintaining a trade embargo with Cuba.
Am I missing something very important? Help me understand, blogosphere! This issue seems as irrelevant as communism!
(I know, politics??!)
UPDATE: Holy crap! Apparently, this blog kills fascists.
2 comments:
Well, considering how the Republican party and their public proxies, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, have been reduced to calling Obama a communist in place of putting forth any policy recommendations, I imagine the Obama administration is going to be cautious about giving the appearance of coddling everybody's favorite Cold-War era communist dictator and boogeyman. Further complicating this is the fact that thawing relations with Cuba has historically proven problematic in Florida with its 27 electoral votes and large expatriate Cuban population.
So they'll probably proceed slowly but surely in the direction of rapprochement. In the past this has started with things like lifting travel bans and other seemingly-token "cultural exchange" gestures.
It was always my understanding the embargo has been primarily driven by three factions: 1.) pissed-off ex-pat Baptista cronies who fled to Miami after the fall; 2.) ex-Kennedy administration insiders, (both of whom wanted to punish Castro for kicking them out of power, and/or making them look like idiots to the general public), and; 3.) hard-line anti-Communist Republicans who viewed Cuba as a Soviet foot-in-the-door to encroaching on the rest of the Western Hemisphere.
Of course, it was really the Cuban people who suffered the most under this policy, but so long as Castro remained in power, and these factions retained influence, the embargo held.
Now that the major players in all these constituency groups are beginning to die off, and there's an entire second-generation of Cubanos in S. FL who've never even BEEN to Cuba, let alone have any sort of familial or financial ties to the island - in addition to the fact that Castro himself is no longer running the show down there on a day-to-day basis - I think there's a lot less pressure on the White House to continue the policy.
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