Like Iran, secret diplomacy leads to US-Cuba thaw

Associated Press ^ | Dec 17, 2014 5:40 PM EST | Bradley Klapper and Matthew Lee

[Olog-hai]

Fresh off his 2012 re-election victory, President Barack Obama summoned senior advisers to a series of meetings, asking them to “think big” about a second-term agenda, including the possibilities of new starts with long-standing U.S. foes such as Iran and Cuba. Two years later, after painstaking secret diplomacy on separate but surprisingly similar tracks, efforts with Tehran and Havana are in full swing.

The nuclear negotiations with Iran continue and are far from a guaranteed success. But Wednesday’s announcement that the U.S. and Cuba will normalize relations after more than 50 years of hostility suggests one of the last chapters of the Cold War may be closing.

The U.S. outreach to Cuba started cautiously in 2013 in the early months of Obama’s second term, predicated on the idea that no improvement was possible unless the communist government released American contractor Alan Gross, arrested and imprisoned in Cuba on espionage charges. …

[Olog-hai]

Music without instruments, as Frederick the Great once put it. But vacationing in Havana is paramount, right?

[ConorMacNessa]

He is indeed more "flexible" now, isn't he?

"Dia shábháil ar fad anseo!"

This is the Arabic character "nun" – the first letter of the word "Nazarene." I post it as my avatar in solidarity with people of all faiths suffering persecution at the hands of Islam. Many of them are members of the oldest of our Christian Communities, dating from the days of the Apostles. They endure cruel, merciless and unrelenting persecution. They are Orthodox and Catholic, Protestant and Evangelical, Coptic, Pentecostal, and Baptist. To the persecutors they, and we, are all "Nazarenes."

[ClearCase_guy]

So ... does Cuba have centrifuges set up yet?

[Olog-hai]

If they have the weapons, they don’t need the centrifuges.

[Cicero]

Next stop, North Korea?

[BenLurkin]

[americanparatrooper]

This certainly is no longer the government of the people, by the people and for the people is it!