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Obama’s Cuba Surprise


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"What should come most clearly into focus, in the next few days, is the incredible nearness of Cuba. For the first time in half a century, after a major diplomatic shift announced Wednesday, one can remark on that without irony or thoughts of missile trajectories. Cuba is ninety miles from the United States; the island is closer to Florida than New York is to Philadelphia by car. It was near enough for Cubans to try to escape by raft, and far enough for too many of them to drown; near enough to seem like a sibling, especially in Florida, and far enough to divide families. That acknowledgement of proximity will come as a shock to some—“This is an incredibly bad idea,” Senator Lindsay Graham tweeted—but most of the new measures, which involve restoring diplomatic relationships and loosening restrictions on travel and trade, are just what would, with regard to any other country, even a very bad one, be considered sensible.

“I was born in 1961—just over two years after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba, and just a few months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, which tried to overthrow his regime,” President Obama said in his statement announcing the changes.

He acknowledged the countries’ toxic intimacy—“a unique relationship, at once family and foe”—while saying that the United States had “proudly” supported human rights and democracy on the island. The problem with the way we’d been dealing with Cuba, he said, was not with our intentions; it just didn’t work. “No other nation,” he said, “joins us in imposing these sanctions, and it has had little effect beyond providing the Cuban government with a rationale for restrictions on its people.”

Our lack of basic diplomatic relations, an embargo and a travel ban, and its own ideological recalcitrance had helped to place Cuba in another dimension. Fidel Castro seemed to change even less than the only heads of state on the job longer than he was, the Queen of England and the King of Thailand. (All seemed like characters from archaic stories, like one about missiles on Russian boats, that somehow kept being repeated by people who wanted everything to stay the same.)

In 2008, Fidel’s brother, Raúl, took over as Cuba’s President, in what seemed, at first, more like a continuation than a shift. But some doors, somewhere, must have opened. The first announcement, Wednesday, was that Cuba had freed Alan Gross, an American contractor whom the Cubans had claimed was a spy and imprisoned for five years, and that America had freed three Cubans held here. Then there was word that something bigger was happening—that this was not just the opening for diplomacy that many had hoped for, but the culmination of that diplomacy, which, it turned out, had been well under way in secret. Pope Francis had been involved, and had made personal appeals to both Obama and Raúl Castro. Francis is an Argentine, and brings a sense of the region and, presumably, of the sad absurdities of the American-Cuban drama. The Canadians helped, too. It emerged that the Cubans would also be freeing fifty-three political prisoners, and another, unnamed man, whom Obama described as “one of the most important intelligence agents that the United States has ever had in Cuba, and who has been imprisoned for nearly two decades.” (That sounds like quite a story.) There were other elements that seemed to have nudged the whole process forward, however invisibly—Obama mentioned Cuba’s undeniably impressive work fighting Ebola. The breadth of the change was laid out in simultaneous speeches staged, like an inverted showdown, at noon by Obama and Raúl Castro. Earlier, the two men had spoken by phone to confirm the plan.

First of all, we will have an ambassador in Cuba for the first time in decades. That this is a major change is a sign, again, of the oddity that the new policy seeks to correct. (We have an Ambassador to Russia.) As the White House noted in a release accompanying the President’s announcement, there are two million people in this country who were born in Cuba or are the descendants of those who were. Not even to have a diplomatic installation in your cousins’ country is hard on families. And it will be easier for people to send money to their families, and to visit those they love. There will still, technically, be a ban on ordinary tourism, and a shell of an embargo, but with many more exceptions to both. Many restrictions on what technology can be sold to Cuba will also be removed; to the extent that this gets more Cubans connected with each other and the world, it can only help to bring about the democratization that the embargo failed to force.

Cuba may be where Obama is finally getting to apply whatever lessons he learned from Iraq and the Arab Spring. “It does not serve America’s interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba toward collapse,” he said. “Even if that worked—and it hasn’t for fifty years—we know from hard-earned experience that countries are more likely to enjoy lasting transformation if their people are not subjected to chaos.”

Obama ended his speech with a paean to Miami, and the line “Todos somos Americanos.” The line might have been a gesture to divides in this country as well. Almost instantly, Senators Robert Menendez and Marco Rubio were making angry comments. Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, had announced a day earlier that he was “actively exploring” a Presidential campaign; Obama’s move will instantly reorient that exploration. Bush, and the other candidates, will have to decide whether they want to make “losing the embargo” (they are a half century late for “losing Cuba”) a rallying point. Hillary Clinton will have a particularly delicate choice—will she try to take credit, for wheels put in motion while she was Secretary of State, or mutter about how much savvier she would have been as President? (Speaking to another constituency, Major League Baseball put out a statement saying that it was “closely monitoring the White House’s announcement.”) All of them, in framing the issue, need to be careful not to settle on a cartoon of Cuban-American intransigence. The views of this community, between individuals and generations and within families, are more complex and varied than is often acknowledged. A poll conducted by the Atlantic Council, conducted earlier this year, asked Floridians if they would support more engagement with Cuba: sixty-three per cent said yes. Nationally, the number was fifty-six per cent—and sixty-two per cent among Latinos. (Fifty-two per cent of Republicans agreed, too.) Americans whose families came from other countries in the region tend to have different priorities—immigration reform, for example. Florida may be where the political fight over this shift is joined, but it won’t be the only place where Latino voices are heard on the issue. And what they have to say may be as surprising as Wednesday morning’s announcement." http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/obama-administrations-cuba-surprise?mbid=social_twitter

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I think it's time after half a century of trying the same thing.

Whatever! Some countries need to be kept in check. For all the Cubans who fled that despot and his cronies...I'm sorry.

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A triumph for common sense!

This will have far greater impact on the liberalization of Cuba that maintaining status quo.

"liberalization".....perfect. ;)

Seems like you would like to be a part of their experience. Hope you like the trip.

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A triumph for common sense!

This will have far greater impact on the liberalization of Cuba that maintaining status quo. We need to allow for tourism asap.

Heck, Cuba's communist, doesn't get more liberal than that.
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You know, when I was typing that I figured some of you would try to make a play on it.

Equating liberalism with tyranny of any sort is just ignorant. So there was little doubt that someone on this forum would consider that a clever jab. Thanks for not disappointing me.

And yes EMT, I am looking forward to visiting there some day.

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Obama got schooled by Raul, and now the world knows it can deal w/ Obama and get something for nothing.

Human Rights remain locked up in Cuba, thanks to Obama. This tyrannical , unilateral move by the Child in Chief just shows how naive and out of touch Obama has been.

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Democrat Bob Menendez and republican Marco Rubio both Cuban-Americans are opposed and feel this is terrible policy. Cuba is a terrible human rights violater and both feel the idea is ill conceived and will do nothing but reward the Cuban regime and provide absolutely no relief for the victims of the tyranny of Castro's dictatorship.

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Democrat Bob Menendez and republican Marco Rubio both Cuban-Americans are opposed and feel this is terrible policy. Cuba is a terrible human rights violater and both feel the idea is ill conceived and will do nothing but reward the Cuban regime and provide absolutely no relief for the victims of the tyranny of Castro's dictatorship.

Hey, Obama really IS bringing Americans together ... against him !

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Democrat Bob Menendez and republican Marco Rubio both Cuban-Americans are opposed and feel this is terrible policy. Cuba is a terrible human rights violater and both feel the idea is ill conceived and will do nothing but reward the Cuban regime and provide absolutely no relief for the victims of the tyranny of Castro's dictatorship.

Well, heck, lets just keep doing what we've been doing. For fifty years.

The very fact that Cuba is opening up will accelerate change. It's inevitable. The same is true for North Korea, only much more so.

Here's a proposition:

Let's try this for the next few decades - much less 50 years - and see what happens. We can always revert back to sanctions and isolation. :-\

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Democrat Bob Menendez and republican Marco Rubio both Cuban-Americans are opposed and feel this is terrible policy. Cuba is a terrible human rights violater and both feel the idea is ill conceived and will do nothing but reward the Cuban regime and provide absolutely no relief for the victims of the tyranny of Castro's dictatorship.

Well, heck, lets just keep doing what we've been doing. For fifty years.

The very fact that Cuba is opening up will accelerate change. It's inevitable. The same is true for North Korea, only much more so.

Here's a proposition:

Let's try this for the next few decades - much less 50 years - and see what happens. We can always revert back to sanctions and isolation. :-\/>

Republicans prefer to restrict Americans freedom of movement.

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According to some statistics around 20,000 to 30,000 Americans illegally travel to Cuba every year, while the Cuban government puts it higher at over 60,000. While technically illegal, it does not deter a large contingency of US citizens that frequent Cuba.

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Obama got schooled by Raul, and now the world knows it can deal w/ Obama and get something for nothing.

Human Rights remain locked up in Cuba, thanks to Obama. This tyrannical , unilateral move by the Child in Chief just shows how naive and out of touch Obama has been.

Hopefully your posts will improve once you get your talking points. That's pretty crude stuff. ;D

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Democrat Bob Menendez and republican Marco Rubio both Cuban-Americans are opposed and feel this is terrible policy. Cuba is a terrible human rights violater and both feel the idea is ill conceived and will do nothing but reward the Cuban regime and provide absolutely no relief for the victims of the tyranny of Castro's dictatorship.

Well, heck, lets just keep doing what we've been doing. For fifty years.

The very fact that Cuba is opening up will accelerate change. It's inevitable. The same is true for North Korea, only much more so.

Here's a proposition:

Let's try this for the next few decades - much less 50 years - and see what happens. We can always revert back to sanctions and isolation. :-\/>

Republicans prefer to restrict Americans freedom of movement.

Maybe they have all their money tied up in collectible cars from the 50's. B)

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Obama got schooled by Raul, and now the world knows it can deal w/ Obama and get something for nothing.

Human Rights remain locked up in Cuba, thanks to Obama. This tyrannical , unilateral move by the Child in Chief just shows how naive and out of touch Obama has been.

Hopefully your posts will improve once you get your talking points. That's pretty crude stuff. ;D

Did you forget how Putin "schooled" Obama?

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Obama got schooled by Raul, and now the world knows it can deal w/ Obama and get something for nothing.

Human Rights remain locked up in Cuba, thanks to Obama. This tyrannical , unilateral move by the Child in Chief just shows how naive and out of touch Obama has been.

Wait! Human rights? From the guy who was advocating torture a few threads back? I'm ready to buy some Habanos.

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Obama got schooled by Raul, and now the world knows it can deal w/ Obama and get something for nothing.

Human Rights remain locked up in Cuba, thanks to Obama. This tyrannical , unilateral move by the Child in Chief just shows how naive and out of touch Obama has been.

Hopefully your posts will improve once you get your talking points. That's pretty crude stuff. ;D

Did you forget how Putin "schooled" Obama?

Haven't heard much about Putin the superman lately. <_<

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Obama got schooled by Raul, and now the world knows it can deal w/ Obama and get something for nothing.

Human Rights remain locked up in Cuba, thanks to Obama. This tyrannical , unilateral move by the Child in Chief just shows how naive and out of touch Obama has been.

Wait! Human rights? From the guy who was advocating torture a few threads back? I'm ready to buy some Habanos.

I am looking forward to the cigars. :lol:

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Obama got schooled by Raul, and now the world knows it can deal w/ Obama and get something for nothing.

Human Rights remain locked up in Cuba, thanks to Obama. This tyrannical , unilateral move by the Child in Chief just shows how naive and out of touch Obama has been.

Hopefully your posts will improve once you get your talking points. That's pretty crude stuff. ;D/>

Did you forget how Putin "schooled" Obama?

Haven't heard much about Putin the superman lately. <_</>

His currency's collapsing.

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Obama got schooled by Raul, and now the world knows it can deal w/ Obama and get something for nothing.

Human Rights remain locked up in Cuba, thanks to Obama. This tyrannical , unilateral move by the Child in Chief just shows how naive and out of touch Obama has been.

Wait! Human rights? From the guy who was advocating torture a few threads back? I'm ready to buy some Habanos.

:laugh: Yeah, I hafta admit, they are entertaining. At least if you are into irony. ;)

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