A tip of the hat today goes to former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who’s trying to win back his old job.
Crist, a former Republican who’s now running as a Democrat, has called for an end to the United States’s foolish trade embargo against bad ol’ Cuba.
You remember those frightening Cubans, don’t you? The country was taken over by communist guerrilla leader Fidel Castro in 1959, who overthrew the strongman who ran the island nation with the heaviest of hands. Castro then proceeded to run the country’s economy into the ocean. He sidled up to the Soviet Union, became a puppet of the Evil Empire and scared the dickens out of us all by allowing the Soviets in 1962 to start building missile launchers that could send nuclear weapons into the U.S. heartland.
That’s when the trade embargo began.
President Kennedy forced them to take the launchers down. Castro went on to further destroy his country’s economy. The United States kept its trade embargo in place.
The Soviet Union is now gone; Fidel has left office. Cuba remains a communist country.
Florida is home to a lot of Cuban expatriates — who fled the island to the nearby Sunshine State — who want the United States to keep the embargo going.
It no longer makes sense. Into this maelstrom Crist has stepped. Good for him.
Crist won’t have the Cuban ex-pat vote anyway, so why bother courting them? He’s making sense to suggest that ending the embargo would stimulate his state’s economy, which has suffered terribly from the Great Recession of 2008-09.
He’s also showing some guts in taking on the Cuban-American political juggernaut in his state by suggesting the 52-year-old embargo no longer makes sense.