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In Breakthrough, US and Cuba To Resume Diplomatic Relations
HughPickens.com writes: Peter Baker reports at the NYT that in a deal negotiated during 18 months of secret talks hosted largely by Canada and encouraged by Pope Francis, the United States will restore full diplomatic relations with Cuba and open an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century. In addition, the United States will ease restrictions on remittances, travel and banking relations, and Cuba will release 53 Cuban prisoners identified as political prisoners by the United States government. Although the decades-old American embargo on Cuba will remain in place for now, the administration signaled that it would welcome a move by Congress to ease or lift it should lawmakers choose to. "We cannot keep doing the same thing and expect a different result. It does not serve America's interests, or the Cuban people, to try to push Cuba toward collapse. We know from hard-learned experience that it is better to encourage and support reform than to impose policies that will render a country a failed state," said the White House in a written statement. "The United States is taking historic steps to chart a new course in our relations with Cuba and to further engage and empower the Cuban people."
For years, the only thing this served was to try to get votes in Florida. And even then, I do not know how much good that did.
Either Obama has written off the Cuban vote in Miami or he has decided to concede FLA to the GOP. Either way, Obama has finally done something right.
Opening up relations with Cuba makes too much financial sense for pride or antiquated ideas of anticommunism to get in the way.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
The Cuban people survived 55 years of near total trade embargo, with universal healthcare intact, and no one starving in the streets.
A definite failure if I ever heard of one.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
He is not losing that many votes. These Cuban Americans are captive to GOP. High time Democrats stop pursuing the vote they are never going to get. Might as well play to the base and show America what happens if both parties start appeasing their base.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When the whole rest of the world wants sanctions, as with South Africa, they may be useful. When the whole rest of the world trades with Cuba and we don't, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot. Also, the South African government was far more malleable because it was elected by white citizens who suffered from sanctions -- the Cuban government is not elected by anyone who can be hurt by sanctions.
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Might as well play to the base and show America what happens if both parties start appeasing their base.
The vast majority of Americans that aren't partisan asshats get whacked in the head every 2/4/6 years as pendulum swings back and forth?
Hooray for Gerrymandering and first past the post!
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
We found useful amounts of oil off the Cuban coast not terribly long ago. It just took this long for the oil companies in this country to put enough pressure on the US government to move towards "normal" relations.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Cuban cigars are desired because they're good.
I used to smoke cigars, and I live in a country where you can readily buy Cuban ones. They're not illegal for me, but they were damned fine cigars ... much much better than some of the other countries.
And, real Cuban rum ... also tasty stuff, and something they're quite good at making. In Cuba, it's affectionately called "Vitamin R".
Maybe to Americans they're better because they're illegal. But to the rest of the world they're better because they're better.
Cuba has pretty much an awesome climate for growing both tobacco and sugar cane.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Cuban exiles are a big voting block in a big battleground state, , but obviously somebody decided to risk kicking this hornets' nest ...
The Cuban Exiles have never voted Democrat / Liberal, and have always been rabid right-wingers politically. I lived in Miami for a few years and learned that although certainly not a majority on the area, they are very vocal locally.
These people would never vote Democrat anyway, so they are not Obama's audience.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I doubt the US administration "realized" anything.
Very likely a conglomerate of US companies sees business opportunities and is pulling strings behind the scene.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The curse is that a small few are about to make huge profits on land and state enterprises. I don't care how the laws will be worded, any time you have a major economic shift like this, opportunists will take incredible advantage of the situation.
The other curse is that Western 'culture' - McDonald's, Burger King, Coke and Pepsi will invade. They will do tremendous harm to the health of the average Cuban.
Lastly, the wonderful beaches and hotels will be overrun. Cuba is so close to the U.S. that development will explode and tourism will skyrocket. The 'pristine' aspect of Cuba will quickly disappear in a morass of tawdry tourist traps.
Adios Cuba viejo y bienvenido al futuro.
*** Don't be dull.***
Here are some other facts that actually count:
CIA World Factbook Infant mortality rates:
Cuba: 4.76 / 1000 live births
USA: 5.2 / 1000 live births
CIA being a well-known source of Michael Moore types.
How about life expectancy?
Life expectancy at birth (years), UN World Population Prospects 2010:
Cuba: 78.50 (rank 37)
USA: 77.97 (rank 40)
World Health Organization has USA ranked 34 and Cuba 36, FWIW. Close in any case.
Let's look at an "evil government" index to determine the "evilness" of Cuba among authoritarian regimes. A good one is the Democracy Index put out by the Conservative economics journal "The Economist".
Cuba ranks at 124, which puts it in the top 20% of authoritarian regimes, so 80% of them are "more evil". We certainly don't do any business with those 80% do we? Near the bottom of that list is our old friend Saudi Arabia, a regime we absolutely should not support right? Others in the "evil 80%" are Nigeria, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Tunisia, China, Qatar, Oman, Vietnam, and the UAE. No way we do we have diplomatic relations, do any business, or offer any support to any of those guys!
Of course six of these Evil Nations have oil, which makes everything good, correct? Well, it turns out that Cuba has useful offshore oil as well, so geology automatically promotes them to Tolerable Oil Nation, even if their much higher democracy ranking does not.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
> Cuban cigars are desired because they're good.
[citation needed]. Outside of the 'neat' factor of buying a cuban cigar, there are equally good makers in other countries.
How about the fact that the primary magazine dedicated to cigars has an entire wing of their site dedicated to Cuba?
http://www.cigaraficionado.com...
Go check out their reviews...Most of the top reviewed were either made in Cuba, or by Cubans in exile in the US. Clearly they're doing something right.
My god, are you that delusional?
You toppled a government, but you sure as hell didn't "conquer" them.
You barely got out of there with your asses intact, and every single justification for going in there in the first place was provably false before anybody got sent in. Oh, and your inept fumbling about led to the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians -- far far more than were killed in 9/11.
The entire reason for being in Iraq the second time was a colossal lie perpetuated by a chimpanzee of a president trying to finish what daddy started.
You were in the wrong fucking country, because Iraq had nothing at all to do with 9/11. And now you've left a giant power vacuum which has destabilized the entire region.
Being in Iraq was such an epic failure that only people who can call it a success were the private companies who made huge profits, and the lying bastards who got you in there in the first place.
If you think that's a template for how to fix the worlds problems ... the world doesn't want any more of your "help".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Apparently the 70-90% top marginal tax rate in the 1960s didn't prevent job creation.
While starting completely new ones. Hooray!
Indeed, Hooray! (I'm glad you get it - so few kneejerk anti-American morons do.) The US is at its best when it is saving innocent people, like Libyans and Yhazdis, from genocide. It returns us to what is best about this country.
*cough* bullshit *cough*
Yes indeed! Your quote IS bullshit! I'm glad you noticed! You can't claim a policy failed by arbitrarily changing the yardstick. We've never measured by U6. No time to start now.
Hooray though, we added 300,000 jobs in the last quarter. The economy did that in most years of the 1960s, when the population of the United States was significantly less than today. Success!
Yet again, you are completely correct! This is an amazing Success! The economy in the 1960s was aided by the fact that most of the rest of the world was still recovering from WW2, and half of it was under the ideological sway of Communist regimes fundamentally opposed to economic reality. Further, the U.S. had many more controls in place in those days to reduce economic inequality, since people still had a long memory of what Republicans did to cause the Great Depression. Tax rates on corporations in the 1960s reached as high as 90%, with fewer loopholes. This allowed many states to give a free college education to anyone who had the grades to get accepted, no matter what their economic background. All which provided massive demand for U.S. employment.
Alas, we ended all that. Self-defeating "trickle-down" is now more or less a religion (except Jesus and his miracles can't be actually disproven, like all these bullshit Republican economic theories have), so now we're stuck with people voting in Republicans on grandiose promises that this-time-it'll-work-for-sure, the inevitable economic crash, Democrats voted in to fix it, and then Republicans again to punish the Democrats for fixing the Republican mess, because this-time-it'll-work-for-sure.
If gas was this low under a Republican president I could guarantee you that the party faithful would be giving the president full credit.
The general rules of thumb are:
good things happen while our guy is on watch: it's due to his hard work and leadership
bad things happen while our guy is on watch: caused by previous administration's policies
good things happen while the other guy is on watch: caused by an earlier administration's policies
bad things happen while the other guy is on watch: worst president of all time!