Slashdot Mirror
Obama Lands In Cuba As First US President To Visit In Nearly A Century (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Barack Obama descended on Cuba with a pomp unmatched by the Pope on Sunday, becoming the first American president to visit Cuba in nearly a century, and the first since a revolution led by Fidel Castro toppled a U.S.-backed strongman in 1959. As he arrived, Obama used a Cuban phrase meaning "what's up?" when he tweeted: "Que bola Cuba? Just touched down here, looking forward to meeting and hearing directly from the Cuban people." "This is a historic visit," Obama said as he greeted U.S. Embassy staff and their families at a Havana hotel. "It's an historic opportunity to engage with the Cuban people."
One of the many results of the new diplomatic relations between the two countries is the ability for Cuban residents to become more connected to the internet. Reuters is reporting that Alphabet Inc's Google is poised to expand internet access in Cuba. "One of the things that we'll be announcing here is that Google has a deal to start setting up more Wi-Fi and broadband access on the island," Obama said in an ABC News interview that aired on Monday. The U.S. Treasury Department has even authorized San Francisco's Airbnb service to expand its home rental listings in Cuba to non-U.S. travelers.
Please, keep him down there, with the rest of his leftist friends.
Greetings Mr. Soetoro, nice to have you.
Now we can finally impeach him for setting foot in a foreign country! That's clearly meeting the Constitutional definition of treason! Off with his head!
Or a strong contender, at the very least.
And needs to be punished for ignoring immigration laws, that is treasonous.
How does any sane person not see that?
Because when you need basic things like food and shelter, nothing satisfies like wifi.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Humorous take on Cuban healthcare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDcI5suUv_I
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
hand in glove. Not OJ's.
Yes they can!
Here is what Senator Ted Cruz wrote about this:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/obama-cuba-visit-ted-cruz-213749
If you are a fan of President Obama, could you please explain to me why you think Senator Cruz is wrong about this? Because at the moment I agree with Senator Cruz. President Obama's administration has dropped the embargo and helped out the government of Cuba, and I'm not aware of a single demand that Cuba has granted in return. Set free political prisoners? Allow Amnesty International to visit the prisons? Maybe beat the political prisoners a little bit less? No, no, and no.
Not only did President Obama not make any demands of Cuba, but now Cuba is making demands of President Obama. Pay reparations, return Guantanamo Bay.
I do hope that President Obama will at least use his "bully pulpit" to say something about human rights in Cuba. Words are what he is best at. I would have preferred a binding agreement, but he already didn't do that.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Well, the Cubans didn't have many choices after the Russia let them down after the fall of Berlin's wall and the years following the change in the regime and the Venezuela no longer being able to provide them with almost free oil due to a collapsing market. This time, they were really strangled, that's why Raul started to think about opening the Cuban economy.
So, whoever would have been POTUS at this time, the Cubans didn't have choice. That's why Obama could have been much more hard on business a insist to obtain effective changes in the human rights in Cuba, unfortunately, he didn't.
One socialist leader meets up with another. Happened a lot during the cold war. Hardly the newsworthy event the propagandists say it is.
... he should leave Cuba the way most do : on a boat made of inner tubes.
Dark Reflection
...it'd be curious if Mr Obama bothered to talk with Castro about the conditions in Cuban prisons for political prisoners, which has been arguably worse than the worst of Guantanamo for FIFTY years.
Of course, there's few "Shame on USA" points to be garnered for such a discussion, so I doubt it will happen.
-Styopa
play area T8y not this is consistent become obsessed rival distribution, UseNet is roughly Fact there won't And was taken over BE FORGOTTEN IN A failure, its corpse to any BSD project, to survive at all
...I a can only say there goes my favourite theme-park.
Now, let's see what google has on N. Korean beach resorts...
If both, how is more than 45% less than something considered "nearly"?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That I'm guessing that he didn't re-open relations with Cuba because it was the right thing to do and he actually did it as a favor to Google for lending him all the people that ran the IT portion of his campaign. (Since they apparently want to expand their business into Cuba.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I'm happy I'm not the only one who has no idea which one is correct.
It took way too long for this to happen. Back when we gave China MFN status, what, early 90s? I was already complaining about the hypocrisy. The rationale was that by engaging with China we would eventually transfer our ideas as well as our goods. The theory behind this was called "Constructive Engagement".
But if CE was really the proper way to deal with these regimes, what about Cuba? It never really worked anyway. CE was just justification--it was all about the money, and earlier it was about playing China against the USSR. It was hypocritical on its face, right from the start.
I've literally been complaining about this since before some of you were born. Sheesh! Look, I get it. Castro stole your stuff, and you're mad; but most of the people who directly lost are dead. Aside from that, conquest happens. It's how America was built. At some point you have to write that off.
Don't get me wrong. Communism sucks. It's an evil little anachronism that exists down there; but our way of dealing with it didn't work. Time to try something different... finally!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Maybe we will finally see an end to the shame that is Guantanamo bay, where people have been tortured and deprived of their freedom without recourse for justice or even a trial.
I am sure they have all been punished enough for any crime they should now just be released.
This will get voted down, but, maybe we can work out a deal where the Cuban people keep him in return for lifting the economic boycott, then hand him over to Gitmo after the election.
Sence when this turned into the Druge report?
I thought this was about teckie stuff and not poltical current events. With the downfall of Widows 10, the year of the Linix desktop is almost upon us but we are posting poltical things instad.
"looking forward to meeting and hearing directly from the Cuban people."
He can't be that stupid. Can he?
He's going to hear from a carefully selected Potemkin village of people who fear for their lives and freedom if they say anything less than glowing things about life in Cuba.
The POTUS is trying to make peace and normalize a relationship that has been adversarial for 80 years. I suppose the best business advice I could offer Obama is stop trying to make more customers for US businesses. The more customers our economy has the more taxes will go up and the more the world will hate us and nuclear war is assured. The devil will take over our souls and homosexuals will ruin our lives. Not to mention all the friendly commies will convert our children into the red menace that will result in mass abortions on gun owners. It's so scary about the only person who can stop the chain-reaction of zombie doom is Trump or Cruz or whoever the GOP decides should rule the earth. The return of FUD GOP-style has been magnificent to watch. Comedians will be the only true entertainment when Trump get elected.
Ohh wait, those folks are U.S. citizens. The POTUS doesn't give a fuck about U.S. citizens. He cares about Cubans, Mexicans, Syrians, endangered desert tortoises. Just about everyone and anything except the people he is supposed to be representing.
Everyone needs to watch this extended video of Donald Trump reacting to President Obama's visit to Cuba. Whether you love or hate Trump (and it seems that most voters fall into one of those two camps), you'll recognize that Trump is not delivering talking points prepared by aides. He's quite passionate about the points he's making:
- Obama did not prepare properly for the trip because R. Castro got away with not greeting him at the airport, with the world press watching
- That alone shows that Obama is utterly incompetent
- Obama should've immediately boarded the plane and gone home
On all the other issues, benefits and drawbacks regarding Obama's diplomatic Cuban initiative, which was supposedly several years in the making, Trump says nothing. Cruz, Rubio, and some other Cuban American politicians are very harshly opposed, however.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what you will get if Trump is elected President of the United States. Right here, this is why he thinks he's the man for the job.
As a latin-american, after watching in the news how many concessions Obama is making to the second worst government in the world in terms of human rights, without getting anything in return, all I can say is: Qué bolas!
We want our plane back - but you can keep the village idiot who was a passenger on board; we have several more auditioning to replace him in a few months anyway.
What did the US get from these "thawed relations"? Typical left wing agitator style international "deal" like Jimmy Carter's Panama Canal giveaway, Bill Clinton's deal to prevent North Korea going nuclear, and Obama's earlier Iran nuke deal. The US gets NOTHING from the deal, while our enemy gets richer and/or better armed and the victims of our enemy have even their basic existence denied. Today, when asked, Mr Castro announced that there ARE no political prisoners in Cuba. This used to be thought of as treason, before the hyper-left took over the Democrat party in 1969 and began banging the drum of "USA = bad".
How about some very basic ones?
1. Immigration laws: they require the arrest and deportation of persons who enter the country illegally - but now it is nearly a religious mantra among Democrats and even some Washington DC Republicans that these laws just cannot be enforced. They certainly can and they were for many decades.
2. Federal law requires the President to notify congress in advance before he releases anybody from Gitmo - he has never followed this law.
3. The supreme court has unanimously (Obamabots: this means it even includes the votes of people Obama put on the court) swatted-down Obama over 20 times for violating the Constitution. Admittedly, you might not know this if you get your news from Comedy Central or one of the Democrat-run news outlets like ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS the NYT or WaPo.
4. Rather than disclose the information congress (with Constitutional oversight responsibilities) demanded relative to his Fast&Furious gun running operation, Obama pulled a Nixon - He asserted "Executive privilege" which only applies to things a president is PERSONALLY involved in (Nixon asserted it on his audio tapes). The courts will probably not resolve this Obama assertion until years after he is out of office.
5. It's ILLEGAL for Americans to spend money in Cuba. Is Obama an American citizen???? How has he been allowing Americans to to travel to Cuba and spend money there???? (hint: congress did not repeal those laws, Obama just ordered his bureaucrats not to enforce them.
This is far too easy. The list of Obama lawlessness would take a megabyte of typed text at a minimum... pull yer head out. I'm not gonna type more because I've typed enough to make the point.
Obama said in his tweet that he looked forward to hearing directly from the Cuban people.
Unfortunately, most of the people who wanted to speak with him were arrested Sunday night.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Here's a bit of a gedankenexperiment. How about if we open the borders to emigration? But with a twist.
For every Cuban who applies to escape the island, Cuba has to find an American who wants to live in the workers paradise. Cuba would get dedicated socialists who would (at least for a while) not complain about the conditions. Free medical, etc. for the taking. And they probably would owe lots of student loans, forgiving those might be the price the US pays (re-instate the loan if the immigrant returns to US).
Cuba would have to forgive the Cuban outbound emigrants their debts to the Cuban society that raised them (a common argument socialist governments give when asked why their borders are closed to emigration).
Allow free tourism between the two countries, anyone who overstays their visa would trigger an opening for someone going the other way.
The US would want to screen potential Cuban immigrants, no repeat of the Mariel boat lift.
Run this as a friendly cooperative experiment - we both might learn something.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
his biggest west coast (if not overall) fundraisers and "hearts and minds" media investors want to be first on the ground to monetize Cuba's information.
So he's there to do what he can for them.
If Alphabet didn't care about Cuba, he'd be elsewhere.
Follow the money, and the in-kind campaign message contributions.
"Only Nixon can go to China" and "Only Obama can go to Cuba."
Captcha: "decline"
Sorry but you are wrong. Here's why:
1). Do you think the governments of all those Eastern Block countries willingly gave up power and their comfortable, Communist ways? They lost power when the population no longer believed in the system and lost their fear of the government;
2). Cuba is one of 4 nominally Communist countries left in the world (China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea). Communism isn't exactly on the march, in case you haven't been keeping track. Which means Cuba isn't much of a threat;
3). Engagement worked with China, big time. This is where the real action and hope lies. China is vastly more open and much more free even as they retain quite a few political trappings of the Communist system. If Cuba can be persuaded through soft power, everything else changes too;
4). Americans tend to forget that Cuban Communism had a very strong thread of reaction against American domination. Cuba became a bit of a party town for wealthy Americans and the Mob set up shop too. Cubans still know exactly which hotel in Havana was the Mob hotel. Cuban Communism was, to a great extent, a desire by Cubans to reclaim ownership of the Cuban future;
5). The embargo has been used by the Cuban dictatorship as a propaganda set-piece for years. All Cuban problems are caused by the embargo! It's nonsense of course, but if you remove the embargo and many Cuban problems remain... an inevitable message will take hold.
Cuba is not North Korea and it's a fatal mistake to think of it in those terms. Saying that "we didn't extract any concessions" hugely misses the point that we don't need to extract any concessions. Seriously, what does the US need, that the Cubans have? The power imbalance is so vast it borders on comedy.
Yet for all of that it can be stated that Cuban resistance to the embargo has meant near zero progress for Cuba in 50 years. The Cubans have excelled at resistance. Time to try something else. Stop giving the Cuban regime something to resist against. That's a truly new idea in Cuban relations.