In this stunningly rational editorial in yesterday’s Palm Beach Post, the paper provides its readers with the answer to the question that has perplexed US administrations for almost half a century: What does the US need to do to help the innocent families in Cuba?
The exile lobby has been bad for the U.S. but good for politicians who grovel before it. In 2000, George W. Bush got an estimated 80 percent of South Florida’s Cuban-American vote. With reelection approaching in 2004, Mr. Bush figured that he could double down on the issue. He restricted family visits by Americans to one just every three years, not annually. He cut remittances, the shipment of money from Americans to relatives in Cuba.
Mr. Bush got his second term, but some of his supporters in 2000 abandoned him because he had gone too far, which he had. Yet Sen. McCain would stay out on that fringe, even though as a candidate in 2000 he criticized the embargo. Two days after Sen. McCain’s speech, Sen. Obama supported keeping the trade embargo in place but lifting the family travel and money limits. It would be in America’s best interest to also end the trade embargo, but any change would be better than no change.
There you have it, my friends: The change that is needed in US policy towards Cuba is simply CHANGE.
How could we have missed that simple answer for so long?
I love the first paragraph:
We punish Cuba’s families. What a crock of shit.
Wow. One of the worst of the worst as far as these type of OpEd’s go.
Come to think of it, it sounds just like the ongoing comment thread over at my blog.
“The exile lobby has been bad for the U.S. but good for politicians who grovel before it. In 2000, George W. Bush got an estimated 80 percent of South Florida’s Cuban-American vote.”
Notice how we are otherized: “The Exile Lobby”.. For some time now, the MSM has called us “immigrants” but every once in a while, we become “exiles” again, when the purpose is to drive in the point [as in this editorial] that foreigners NOT AMERICAN CITIZENS EXERCISING THEIR RIGHT TO PETITION THEIR GOVERNMENT AS WE ARE are running US foreign policy to the detriment of the rest of the country. I guess that doing business with a deadbeat tyrant who has defaulted on every loan given to him making Cuba the biggest debter nation in the world would be beneficial to the USA.
By the way, if the MSM spent as much time defending human rights in Cuba as they doing trying to get the embargo lifted, perhaps Cuba would be free–we’d have relations with Cuba– and there would be no need to spend so much time attacking the embargo!
Ray,
You hit the nail right on with this comment:
“By the way, if the MSM spent as much time defending human rights in Cuba as they doing trying to get the embargo lifted, perhaps Cuba would be free”
This is a main reason why so many Americans are misinformed about Cuba because the MSM spends way to much of its time attacking US policies towards the Castro regime in Cuba when it barely reports the human rights abuses committed in the island by the tyranny
Silly Alberto,
Don’t you know that the way to defeat totalitarian dictatorships is to shower legitimacy and currency on their leaders?
Henry, by currency do you mean change? So that is what they mean! The regime can be brought down by pelting them with nickles, dimes, quarters, and if that isn’t enough, we can pummel them with Susan B. Anthony dollar coins.
Now that makes sense. How could I have been so dim?