Posted on 12/18/2014 9:14:32 AM PST by LibertarianTreehugger
On the rare occasion I find myself in agreement with President Obama, I get nervous.
It just feels like a setup. Like someone's going to pull the rug out from under me at any moment.
But right now, I have to admit, I was very pleased to hear the news that the U.S. and Cuba are moving to normalize relations.
(Excerpt) Read more at libertybriefing.com ...
Thank you for selling your soul with America with it.
Perhaps lying, cheating, stealing, killing, death and apostasy are now the best path to take?
You should stick to libertarian...(cough), values.
Eric Bolling said something similar. Still can’t see the benefit.
Don’t care that agriculture is good, purchases from cuba will only profit the government/oligarchs.
The cigars.....sorry, but the good stuff coming out of Honduras, and points south are as good or better than anything coming out of cuba today (before kastro.....? maybe)
Open emigration of good folks from cuba to the US? Not on the table...
Just not a benefit....except for the progressives who can point to this over the next dozen or so election cycles and say VOTANOS!
Been fun,
KYPD
A major portion of America’s agricultural exports float down the Mississippi to the port of New Orleans where they are loaded on ships and exported to Europe or Asia.
Cuba has two natural chokepoints which could stifle American trade coming into or out of New Orleans: 1) the Florida Straits, and 2) the western passage in the Gulf of Mexico between Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula.
Putin is wounded and looking for some form of retribution. He can make trouble via Cuba if he wants to.
This has been co-opted by yesterday’s announcement.
Timber exports from Alabama and chicken exports from Arkansas will most likely be the primary American beneficiaries.
I’m no fan of the Castro brothers or Obama, but from a geopolitical point it made sense. To a lesser degree, American trade will benefit.
“”The more people get exposed to core, conservative American values, the more they want to be like us.””
That’s pretty naïve. obozo said it’s “for the people”.....Is he serious? Nothing will change for the Cuban people in spite of the feel good talk. The U. S. may be paying a huge price for this but what does it matter if obozo leaves office getting credit for “normalizing” relations with a communist country? He can’t really believe it’s going to change anything but he has a huge ego to feed so what’s the harm? Does he care if our country ends up paying the price? NOPE! He’ll be long gone from office when the SHTF!
Cubans have been trending Democratic over the years. Maybe this will push them back into the GOP column again. FL might then become a lock for Republicans. This sounds like yet another unforced error on Obama’s part.
Indeed. I'm betting anyone on this thread wringing their hands about Cuba has an entire houseful of crap made by the Chinese. Hypocrites.
Delightful.
Forgot about the Bay of Pigs or the Cuban missile crisis? Only communist countries get in bed with Cuba, so I guess that’s why Obama now did what he did.
OBAMA EXTENDED A FRIENDLY HAND TO CASTRO TO AVOID THE IMMINENT COLLAPSE OF THE CRUMBLING COMMUNIST REGIME
As stated by Senator Jesse Helms, “Flooding Cuba with new U.S. investment and American tourists will do nothing to bring democracy to Cuba. To the contrary, it will give new life to Castro’s crumbling regime.
Here’s why:
As almost any Cuban will confirm, the real cause of the misery of the Cuban people is not the U.S. embargo—it is Castro’s Marxist-Leninist economic system. Castro’s Cuba is a brutal police state; Castro maintains power by fear, intimidation and deprivation.
His regime controls every aspect of Cuban life—access to food, access to education, access to health care, and access to work. And if you say the wrong thing in Castro’s tropical gulag, you lose your job. If you refuse to spy on your neighbor for the government, you don’t get to go to college. If you dare to organize an opposition group, you go to jail.
U.S. investment won’t change this. It won’t empower individual Cubans nor will it give them independence from the regime. Why? Because foreign investors cannot do business with private Cuban citizens—they can go into business only with Castro. Consider: it is illegal in Cuba for anyone except the regime to employ a Cuban citizen. Everyone works for Castro.
Foreign investors cannot hire nor pay Cuban workers directly. They must pay Castro in hard currency for the workers. Castro then pays the workers in worthless Cuban pesos, while keeping the rest. Under these circumstances, U.S. investment cannot help average Cubans—it would only help the Castro regime.
Consider a real-life example: Sheritt International is Canada’s single largest investor in Cuba today. It is operating a stolen American-owned nickel mine at Moa Bay, where roughly 1,000 Cubans work as virtual slave laborers. Sheritt pays Castro approximately $10,000 for each of those Cuban workers. Castro gives the workers the equivalent of about $10 a month in Cuban pesos—and then pockets the difference.
The result? Sheritt provides Castro with a $10 million direct cash subsidy each year. And what does Castro do with that hard currency infusion? He uses it to pay for the ruthless and cruel apparatus that keeps him in power— and the Cuban people in chains.
Foreign investment can thus do nothing to promote democracy, nothing to promote entrepreneurship or independence from the state. What it does is directly subsidize the oppression of the Cuban people.
Tourism is another source of hard currency for the Castro regime that Castro is desperately seeking to expand. Every one of the tourist dollars spent in Cuba ends up in government hands—the Cuban government owns all the hotels, and it owns all the stores on the island.
And another side effect: Cuba has become the world’s capital of SEX tourism. Thousands of destitute Cuban women, who cannot survive in Castro’s Marxist-Leninist economy, have no choice but to prostitute themselves with foreign tourists from Canada, Italy, Germany and other nations to get hard currency.
Many of these prostitutes—or jineteras—are schoolgirls as young and 12 and 13. Others are educated women— doctors and lawyers—who cannot earn enough practicing their professions under Castro to feed their families. Americans simply must not become a part of this degradation of Cuban women.
The United States must continue the embargo to keep up the pressure for change on the island, because if we don’t give up our leverage by unilaterally lifting the embargo, Castro’s successors will he forced to exchange normalized relations with the United States for a complete democratic transition in Cuba.
Fidel Castro isn’t going to live forever. He is going to leave power in Cuba— either vertically or horizontally. And we need to start planning for the day when he is no longer there as the unifying force for tyranny on the island.
That is why maintaining the embargo, by itself, is not enough. We need to start helping the Cuban people prepare for that day, by helping them to create an independent civil society, helping them to build free institutions, and getting resources to the human rights advocates, independent journalists and democracy activists so they can expand their space in society—just as Ronald Reagan helped the opposition leaders in Eastern Europe (who are now the presidents and prime ministers of free, democratic nations).
Last year, along with two dozen co-sponsors, I proposed bipartisan legislation— the Cuban Solidarity Act—to provide $100 million over four years in humanitarian relief directly to the Cuban people through private charities on the island. We will pass it, and send a message to Fidel Castro—and to the Cuban people that Congress and the Administration arc united in our support for freedom in Cuba.
I look forward to the day when Americans can once again go to their corner stores and purchase Cuban cigars. But those will be cigars will have been produced by free labor in a free and democratic Cuba. To get to that day, we must keep the pressure on Castro, while simultaneously working to help the Cuban people build a free and independent civil society within the crumbling shell of Castro’s teetering communist regime. “
JESSE HELMS ON CIGAR AFICIONADO June 1999
The truth of the matter is that all the help received by Castro’s regime after the collapse of the Soviet Union through western tourists and western investments and trade, have been proven to be a total failure in bringing any freedom to the Cuban people, the oppression, the misery have continued and the Cubans still live under conditions even worse that those under which the slaves lived during the Spanish rule.
A real world embargo worked to put an end to the South African apartheid government. Why then ask United States to follow a policy already used by European, Canadians, Japanese and more than 120 countries around the world?
Their trade and investments proved to be a complete failure in bringing democracy or better living conditions in Cuba. Castro is still in power because only United States has remained in solidarity with the Cuban plight for freedom while the rest of the World has been accomplices of the Cuban genocide.
Libertarians have no values nor ethics beyond money and “do as thou wilt” which comes from the Satanic “bible.”
Money is material; not a value. Libertarians are not conservatives and that is why you find yourself kissing the bamster’s rear parts. He has no Western ethics.
Could there be a chance Castro is just misunderstood, a guy with noble intentions that didn’t turn out right?
He's just a poor boy whose intentions are good.
No.
my husband is predicting that Obama will now give Guantanamo back to Cuba, as soon as he empties it out.
Every other country in the world has diplomatic relations with Cuba. Are they all communist?
They stole billions of dollars of US-owned assets without paying back so much as a single red cent.
...
Fidel stole it allowing him to live the life of a king, greatly admired by New York liberals, while forcing leftist poverty on almost every other Cuban.
He’s an American Ruling Class hero.
OMGoodness! Don’t let 0baba find out that American trade will benefit. He’ll sic the EPA on them immediately.
Thousands of new regulations... never voted in by congress. Just sayin’.
You are mistaken. People flock to this country. They want a chance at liberty and freedom.
Why did we have Radio Free Europe?
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