It looks like the US is finally restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba...

If Bitcoin were ubiquitous it would be near impossible for the Castros to confiscate enough wealth to fund their police state, and they would be overthrown in short order.

Castros taking a big cut of the money we send there to maintain their military police state is hardly free trade.

 

defend american torture one week and cry about cuban torture this week.

get your panties so twisted you start saying dumb **** like this:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Rubio on CNN: &quot;You can't point a single example in human history ... where more economic trade has led to a democratic opening&quot;</p>&mdash; John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) <a href="https://twitter.com/existentialfish/status/545259375271874561">December 17, 2014</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

Miami Herald

Washington Post - Obama gives a bailout to Castros

 

yeah that U.S. leverage has been so valuable over the decades.

 

Commodore is a schizophrenic libertarian.

 

The point is without Castro the people would have had to endure a brutal rightest regime. The revolution was heroic. But the American government at the time opposed it to align with fascist, corporate and mob interests vilifying Castro and the populist movement. And, in this hemisphere, you have two choices, aligned to the US or opposing the US so Castro really didn't have much choice. And then the CIA tried everything they could to kill him and overthrow the movement forcing him into more and more oppression.

If the US had given even passive support to the overthrow of Batista we might have had a democratic socialist government we could have worked with. Remember Batista ruled as the result of not one but two coup d'état 's himself.

Through actions and propaganda, we made Castro turn to the Soviet Union, he made the deals he had to stay alive and support his people.

 

Interesting way to completely avoid the question. Yet another example of what happens when your libertarian utopia ideals meet the real world.

 

Well I think you're done here. Absolutely nothing heroic about what the Castros did. I've never heard of anyone calling genocide 'heroic'.

 

Lolwut? I've never heard of anyone calling what Castro has done 'genocide.' I know he's killed political opponents. You can call him a murderer. But, do you know what genocide is?

I did, because of this post, google around to find the genesis of this idea and I did find some wingnutter sources who also don't seem to know what a genocide is. Maybe there's something about Castro you need to educate me on -- some people group he has perhaps eliminated. But, I think we need to be very careful about how we throw that word around lest we indict ourselves.

 

Do you know ANYTHING about Batista?

 

Your hero has taken a position.

http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/rand-paul-breaks-rubio-bush-over-cuba-n270986

Rand Paul Breaks With Rubio and Bush Over Cuba

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is the latest potential presidential candidate to weigh in on policy changes to Cuba and the libertarian leaning Republican's position splits from other Republicans who are also considering a presidential run.

Paul told Tom Roten of News Talk 800 in West Virginia that the 50-year embargo "just hasn't worked" and normalizing relations with the island nation is "probably a good idea."

"If the goal is regime change, it sure doesn't seem to be working and probably it punishes the people more than the regime because the regime can blame the embargo for hardship," he said.

Potential challengers, Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, both of Florida, denounced President Barack Obama's decision to open diplomatic and economic ties with Cuba. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas also slammed the deal.

Bush called it a "misstep" that "undermines America's credibility and undermines the quest for a free and democratic Cuba."

And Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, vowed to use his role as incoming chairman of a Foreign Relations subcommittee to block progress on policy.

"The White House has conceded everything," Rubio said, calling the policy "disgraceful."

Paul, who has often bumps heads with members of his party over foreign policy, expressed a similar position to another potential presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.

"Despite good intentions, our decades-long policy of isolation has only strengthened the Castro regime's grip on power," Clinton said in a statement. "As I have said, the best way to bring change to Cuba is to expose its people to the values, information, and material comforts of the outside world."

 

I guess you could argue that the U.S. already does this by sending money to their ally - Venezuela. or maybe you could the U.S. supports Sharia law because of all the money (and military support) the U.S. send to Saudi Arabia. :grin::grin:

 

I've skimmed this thread and here are a few of my thoughts.

This was definitely the right move and a long overdue move. As others have noted the embargo did little to weaken the Castros. If anything it probably helped the Castros by playing up nationalism and global sympathy for standing up to the big Yankee power off the coast. What it did do is hurt most Cubans by crippling their economy. While there are certainly many problems with global capitalism one thing it does do is increase the amount of openness of a society and increases transparency (to a point). I'm a frequent critic of the PRC but there is no doubt that things in China have greatly improved due to being part of the global economy and in more ways than materially. The CCP is still in power and likely to be so for the foreseeable future but it's not as closed as it once was and the average Chinese knows more about the rest of the World than they ever did. Largely because most Chinese have more money, access to more information and travel means that the CCP has had to work harder to keep them happy. So even while the PRC is far from being a democracy it is probably impossible for their to be another Cultural Revolution or a Gang of Four where the whole country is subject to the whims of a handful of people.

Opening up to Cuba might not lead to democracy but it will likely make Cuba less ideological and more amenable to US interests when those are also tied to economic development.

For those who are thinking that this is a desperate move a powerless president consider that while these moves could be overturned by the next President there are many reasons that won't happen. For one many executive decisions made by previous presidents don't get overturned because the incoming president has other priorities that they consider more important, bureaucratic inertia makes it difficult to over turn, or that those moves actually turn out popular. Consider that Bill Clinton in his last days greatly increased the number of national monuments through executive action even though there was a lot from the Republican majority then. For the most part those are still there even with a Republican successor. At the same time while Obama has kept many of GW Bush's executive actions regarding national security even though he's had a lot of opposition from his own party.

In the case of opening up to Cuba it will be very difficult for even a Republican president to overturn what Obama has done for the above reasons but also that the Republican party isn't united on Cuba. While Rubio and Jeb Bush don't like it business interests do and it is likely that many Republicans will resists efforts by a future Republican president to close off Cuba again.

 

Probably has more to do with Russia right now than Cuba or liberal vs conservative ideology.

 

you do know that the largest Bitcoin wallet was held by the FBI after the Silk Road seizure right?

Assuming that the average Cuban were able to use cryptocurrency, then their government would have correspondingly better or equivalent technological sophistication (or cryptocurrency would have become much more easier to use, and deploy, a much more likely scenario), holding bitcoin in Cuba would be the same as holding bitcoin in America: i.e like holding gold bars with virtual identities and GPS trackers attached to them.

In any case, for that dream scenario to even happen, America will have to trade with Cuba and vice versa. I think you're really shooting yourself in the foot with this argument.

 

Astros need to jump on getting the first camp in Cuba.

 

Don't forget helping the US pro Cuba Lobby blow up a civilian airliner.

 

Isn't that redundant?

 

Listening to the radio, the Miami Cubans that they are talking to who are most upset are people who have pretty serious personal losses, and their arguments seem to be built around those losses.

it made me think that a lot of the Cuban opposition is about personal losses and pain and keeping grudges alive, as opposed to what is most likely to change Cuba for the better for the Cubans.

I get and understand that, but I would prefer intellectually formulated strategies to emotional ones.

I don't hear too many people against it talking about how continuing old policies will have better outcomes for Cubans in the future.

As US tourists flock to Cuba, think of all the CIA agents who will move is under cover of that exodus. Does anybody think that a popular uprising against the Castros was going to happen any day, if we just kept up the pressure? What's happened here is we've just gotten Snow White to eat the poison apple that will put her to sleep, and she's thanking us for feeding her. There was the Rose Revolution, Orange Revolution, Cedar Revolution and others, all helped along by the CIA. We need to start thinking about what we'll be calling it in Cuba.

 

Do you know ANYTHING about Castro?

Nothing Batista did justifies genocide. That's just dumb and it certainly doesn't make Castro heroic in any way.