Tag Archives: Cuba

International news, political news

No surprise at GOP balking over Cuba proposal

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Imagine my huge surprise that two leading Florida politicians, both Republicans, would be critical of President Obama’s decision to begin normalizing relations with Cuba.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, whose parent fled Cuba to the United States, and former Gov. Jeb Bush, a probable candidate for president in 2016, both have come out against the president’s plan.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/alan-gross-released-113635.html?hp=c2_3

I get it. Really, I do.

They’re appealing to their home state political base, which includes a seriously anti-communist Cuban-American community that cannot stomach the thought of their communist former homeland getting any kind of overture from the United States.

OK, I’m just kidding about the surprise.

Obama is going to hear more angst from other Republicans. Some of them are going to openly oppose any effort to end the economic embargo because they, too, are afraid of the party’s base.

The effort got kick started when Cuba released Alan Gross from five years of wrongful imprisonment. In return, the United States sent three Cuban prisoners back to the island nation.

Given that Cuba poses zero threat militarily to the United States and that regular, run-of-the-mill Cubans deserve a chance to see their country improve its economic standing when the U.S. embargo is lifted, the decision seemed prudent and compassionate.

Yet some in Congress only heard part of the president’s remarks today. He said he intends to keep pressuring the Cubans to improve human rights and that the Havana government must allow people to express themselves freely. Did I hear the president correctly on that? I believe so.

Why didn’t Rubio and Bush hear it? Oh, that’s right. One is a probable candidate for president and the other, Rubio, might jump in, too.

An upcoming political campaign appears to be hard on politicians’ hearing.

 

International news

Yes, we won the Cold War

Barack Obama’s announcement that the United States will begin normalizing relations with its long time enemy Cuba brings to mind a truism that plays into this development.

It is that the Cold War is over. We won! The communists lost it.

Indeed, long before the Cold War was declared over — with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 — we had relations with communist countries. China and the Soviet Union are the two examples.

The president noted today that we even restored relations with Vietnam, a nation with which we fought a long and bloody war that cost more than 58,000 American lives.

Cuba? Until today, it remained on our list of nations non grata.

And why? Well, it didn’t pose a military threat. Its economy is in shambles. Its people still are suffering from lack of freedom and the depravity brought on it by the repressive economic policies of the Marxists who run the island nation.

We’ve made our point. Our system is better than their system.

We outlasted the communists by forcing the Soviet Union to spend money on its military while its people suffered. Then came its restructuring and its newfound openness policies.

All the while, we maintained an embassy in Moscow and they had one in Washington.

The Cubans? We continued to punish them.

President Obama has done what should have been done — could have been done — many years ago.

It’s no doubt going to anger many members of the Cuban-American community who hate the communists who govern the nation of their birth. Will it matter in the grand scheme to the president? Not one bit. He’s a lame duck. He’ll be out of office in two years. The Cuban-American voting bloc supports Republicans overwhelmingly as it is.

The normalization should proceed quickly nonetheless. We won the Cold War. It’s time to move on.

 

International news

Common sense returns to U.S.-Cuba relations

It didn’t work. The United States sought for five decades to punish Cuba because it went from being an old-fashioned autocratic dictatorship to a Marxist tyranny.

The aim was to bring Cuba to its knees and to send a message to its major benefactor — the Soviet Union — that we just wouldn’t tolerate a communist dictatorship at our doorstep.

Well, five-plus decades later, that idiotic non-relationship took a huge step toward its end. President Obama today announced that the United States is going to begin “normalizing” relations with the island nation.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/obama-us-re-establishing-relations-with-cuba/ar-BBgUJV0

It … is … about … damn … time!

An American aide worker, Alan Gross, who had been imprisoned for five years in Cuba was released today. In exchange, we sent three Cubans back to their homeland. They all had been accused of spying. Gross’s release apparently removed the final impediment to the normalization of relations.

Obama made sense on virtually every point he made this morning in a brief televised announcement.

Cuba poses zero military threat to the United States. The Soviet Union has vanished. Russia’s economy is imploding. The Cuban people remain shackled by the tyranny that governs them, but Obama today insisted today that the Cuban government start loosening the binding that keeps Cubans from expressing themselves freely.

The president noted that the United States is virtually the only nation on Earth that honors the embargo slapped on Cuba in the early 1960s. Yes, Cuba trades with the rest of the world, but its totalitarian government has impeded prosperity from flowing to the people. That, too, should change, Obama said.

The president noted today that Cuba is still governed by someone named “Castro,” but it’s Raul, not Fidel.

He said he called Raul Castro today to tell him of the impending change in the U.S.-Cuba relationship. I’ll presume Fidel’s brother agreed to it.

The question now is whether Congress will agree to legislate an end to the economic embargo. The president can establish diplomatic ties with another nation all by himself, but Congress has to agree to end the embargo, as its enactment was done legislatively.

Here’s hoping the common sense caucus of Congress will agree to what is a profoundly sensible course of action.

Continuing to do the same thing repeatedly while hoping for a different result means it’s time to change what you’re doing. We can continue to have ideological competition between the two countries, but we ought to do so face to face.

Congratulations and thanks, Mr. President, for restoring some sense to our nation’s foreign policy.

 

International news, military news, national news

Where have you gone, Sgt. Bergdahl?

Bowe Bergdahl has disappeared, more or less, from the public’s sights.

You might remember the name. He is the U.S. Army sergeant who had been held captive for a couple of years by the Taliban. Then he got released in exchange for five prisoners who were being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — or more specifically, at the U.S. Navy detention center set up there.

Some of the former prisoners reportedly returned to the war against the United States and one of them is believed to be a leader in the Islamic State terrorist group that has been beheading captives.

Bergdahl’s release became the subject of much discussion by Americans. Why were we negotiating with terrorists? Was the price too great to pay for a single U.S. soldier? Did Bergdahl give away too many secrets to his captors? Did he abandon his post and, in effect, desert the Army?

It’s the final question that seemed to cause the most angst among Americans who thought the government paid too much to gain the release of a soldier who they believe wasn’t worth bringing home.

Well, he was returned to U.S. hands, went into seclusion, then went home to Idaho to be with his friends and family and has returned to active duty.

The Army brass said it would investigate the entire sequence of events and determine whether Bergdahl did what the critics said he did.

I’m still waiting.

Meanwhile, the nation’s attention has been pulled in so many directions, I cannot keep track.

Crises erupt here, there — and everywhere.

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s story still hasn’t been told. If it meant so much at the time of his release to learn all the details of his captivity and his return to freedom, then it still ought to matter.

Uncategorized

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?

Uncategorized

Shaking hands with a foe? Stop the presses!

I can hear it now from the conservative media.

There he goes again, shaking hands with our enemies.

President Obama today took a moment at Nelson Mandela’s memorial service to shake hands with Cuban president Raul Castro, who was among the 100 or so heads of state and government who traveled to South Africa to honor the life of one of history’s greatest liberators.

Obama took his seat among the dignitaries and shook hands with a number of them. One of them happened to be Castro, the brother of Fidel Castro, the communist dictator who outlasted 10 U.S. presidents — all of whom sought to remove him from power in Cuba. The United States still has a trade embargo in place against Cuba, a nation we still regard as some kind of geopolitical threat — even though the Cold War ended more than two decades ago.

Then the commentators made an important point about Obama’s fleeting gesture of good will toward Castro: It is totally in keeping with the life of the man they all were gathered to honor.

I’ve said it here already, but it bears repeating. Nelson Mandela emerged from imprisonment in February 1990 with his head held high and his hand held out to those who held him captive. He could have fomented violence. He could have returned to freedom an angry man bent on revenge.

Instead, he reached out to his foes and said, in effect, “Let’s build a new nation together. I need you and you need me.”

No one on Earth — except Barack Obama and Raul Castro — know what they said to each other for all of about two seconds. It doesn’t matter. The nations still are at odds over a whole host of issues. The two men weren’t present in that massive Soweto stadium to argue with each other. They were there to honor a great man’s memory and his glorious life of reconciliation.