Castro's Triumph Over Illness Fails to Make Him Grateful to Uncle Sam
As Castro recovers from his recent illness and returns to health, it is amazing that even now he refuses to thank the US Government for keeping him in power for over 46 years. Without the protracted US embargo put on Cuba long ago and its ability to enhance Castro's control over every aspect of life on the island, well he'd have been put out to pasture long ago by his own people. If the US Government had said back in...oh any time in the 60s...that the US was open for business with Cuba...well that would have been the end of Castro and Cuban communism within months. On the other hand, it is true that if Castro and Cuban communism had been lost before the official start of the Vietnam War then a very necessary and important Communist threat just 90 miles from Florida would also have been lost along with all of the fear-mongering opportunities that came with it, and it may have been much harder to sell to the US voters the illusion of an imminent international communist threat to the US.
'You know which Cubans WILL be able to show their gratitude to Uncle Sam? The Miami Cubans that will be given the island as a present in about 5 years. And they will be thankful for the clever PR campaign that will create a new Cuban mythology that will paint THEM as the heroes of Cuba while painting those who had the strength and stamina to stay on in Cuba as being the weak, hapless dupes of Cuban communism who deserve to be kicked out of their houses by wealthy Floridians reclaiming their grandparents' villas and plantations.
'You know which Cubans WILL be able to show their gratitude to Uncle Sam? The Miami Cubans that will be given the island as a present in about 5 years. And they will be thankful for the clever PR campaign that will create a new Cuban mythology that will paint THEM as the heroes of Cuba while painting those who had the strength and stamina to stay on in Cuba as being the weak, hapless dupes of Cuban communism who deserve to be kicked out of their houses by wealthy Floridians reclaiming their grandparents' villas and plantations.
Posted at 3/01/2007 07:47:00 PM UTC
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7 Comment(s):
Our approach with Cuba post Soviet downfall is one of the foreign policy decisions that has long since ceased to make any sense.
Have you read 'Get Your War On II' by David Rees? Brilliant. Look up the review on Amazon if not, and please get it. Bought it for my 15-year-old, and he LOVES it.
Anonymous office workers, endlessly on the phone, satirize and deconstruct everything political-of-late.
Sample conversation:
(Woman on phone, who has reportedly lost her 'Book of Virtues):
-Hola, is this Fidel Castro? Yes? Fidel? Fidel, have you seen my Book of Virtues?
(He says something)
-Uh-huh.OK. Hmmm. Well, do you have any idea when you'll release it from prison?
(He says something else)
-How's everything over at the Human Rights Commission, by the way? Do you and Libya and Sudan and Zimbabwe just sit around jailing and starving each other? Yeah? Oh. HMMM...I heard bleach can help with that.
End of page.
'Diverticular disease'? Give me a break. He likely has advanced colon cancer and has just finished
a round of chemo.
I think it will be far sooner than five years...
How many electoral college votes does Florida have? It might be that winning Florida's votes is the only reason to keep doing this isolation of Cuba thing. Even Clinton schmoozed with the Miami Cubans. Of course as my posting alludes to, the irony is that the main reason Castro has stayed in power is precisely because of the US embargo. I've spoken with so many people with extensive policy experience both from the Right and the Left (well actually the Center since there is no American Left) who've said that Castro's regime never could have withstood the pressures that would have been created by a US policy of commercial openness regarding Cuba. So the question is then why did they do it? I have to believe that many successive Administrations found it useful to have a supposed enemy so close to home. 'Sort of the same way that it was expedient for domestic political purposes to pretend that Saddam Hussein was a theat to the US.
Consider how this differs from the policies toward communist China.
Yeah, from Nixon onwards, all American Presidents have had a policy of general tolerance towards the People's Republic of China even going so far as indulging China in its own irrational nearby island phobia (i.e. Taiwan). It's amazing to which lengths even the Reagan Administration went to not anger the Chinese.
Bush (the Younger) tried for about 5 minutes to make an enemy out of China over the spy plane incident in 2000, but he must have gotten a few calls from the CEO's of Ford, Proctor and Gamble, Kraft, Mattel, Fisher-Price, North Face, Walmart, and Nike to bring him back into line with the true interests of the US.
First, Florida has 27 electoral college votes. I don't know if that was a rhetorical question or not.
An interesting take on Castro's regime as seen by loyal Cubans (still in Cuba) and a fierce disdain of US policy towards the country is expressed often by none other than Che Guevara's daughter, Aleida, a medical doctor like her father. She is convinced that pure socialism is still possible throughout Latin America. And, oh! does her long-dead father remain a hero...among the young (my son included)and anyone with a revolutionary spirit (in a Sinn Fein bar in Belfast recently, I was stunned by the number of Che! t-shirts.)
A British article about her views can be found at www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1016-03.htm
Don't even get me started on our policy towards China. I lived in Taiwan just before Carter's announcement that he was 'normalizing' relations officially with what we referred to back then as 'mainland China.' The Taiwanese were crushed, naturally, and were so looking forward to a different scenario after Reagan took office...
They now compete in the Olympics as 'Chinese Taipei.'
I take my kids regularly to a Chinese restaurant where they have Chinese TV (in English...CCTV, perhaps?)running 24/7. Reminds me of the old 'Radio Moscow' days. I didn't even have to point out to them that its propaganda quotient makes Bill O'Reilly look like Mother Teresa before they started to groan and laugh.
Just more proof of our profound, self-centered hypocrisy; we don't give a f*** about human rights violations, period. Crowds still go wild as heads are lopped off each Friday in Riyadh...and they're BFFs, too.
Off to get Chinese take-out!
I'd say that 27 electoral votes could be considered by current and aspiring politicians as reason enough to keep an embargo going on Cuba. And it wouldn't even count as the most cynical abuse of a third world country done for domestic purposes.
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