Time to lift Cuba sanctions

highplainsblogger_wordpressTime has this way of changing public attitudes as the old ways give way to new ideas.

Witness what’s happening in the Cuban-American community — particularly in southern Florida — as it relates to this country’s non-relationship with Cuba.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/exiles-america-soften-stance-cuba-ties-n44121

Cuban expatriates, or their direct descendants, are softening their hardline view that the United States must continue to strangle Cuba. I keep asking: To what end?

Fidel Castro overthrew a dictator in 1959. He pledged to “reform” the country. By many accounts, he made it worse. He fomented revolution less than 100 miles from the Florida shoreline. By 1961, the United States closed its embassy in Havana and clamped strict economic sanctions on the island nation.

Then, in October 1962, came the missile crisis that nearly brought the United States to war with the Soviet Union because of those missiles being installed in Cuba.

The bad guys blinked. The missiles went away. So did the Soviet Union, eventually. Fidel Castro has left office, although his brother, Raul, isn’t any better.

But why do we keep seeking to punish a nation that poses no threat to us?

Some Cuban-Americans think the time has come to restore a relationship with Cuba.

According to NBCnews.com: “’Cuba is a completely different country than what we left in the fifties. Folks here have no clue. They continue to see Cuba from Miami or New York or wherever they are located. You have to spend time there and talk to the Cuban people. The hard line position is dying and it will disappear,’” says Zamora, who was once an active member of the Cuban American National Foundation, an organization that has been a leading voice of Cuban exiles against relations with Cuba.”

That feeling isn’t unanimous, obviously. Florida state Sen. Anitere Flores, who was born in Miami, says Cuba is a sponsor of terrorism. My response? So what? So are Yemen are Saudi Arabia. We have diplomatic missions there, as we do in the People’s Republic of China, Venezuela — and, oh yes, in Moscow, the capital of a country that is provoking the United States hourly with its aggression in neighboring Ukraine.

The Cuban trade embargo is a vestige of a Cold War that no longer exists. It’s time for it to go. If more and more Cuban-Americans who comprise a huge political powerhouse in south Florida have come to that conclusion, why can’t the White House follow their lead?