[pepsi_junkie]

They stole billions of dollars of US-owned assets without paying back so much as a single red cent.

And these guys are still really mad about it:

[darrellmaurina]

Look, if your point was that many of the American-owned businesses in Cuba were mob-connected, nobody who knows Cuban history will dispute that. We went from General Leonard Wood using his medical background to clean up a horribly dysfunctional Spanish colony to having Italian-American mobsters take advantage of someplace close to America but outside the purview of American law.

Look at the American invasion of Sicily during World War II. Americans used mobsters to convince Italian leaders to switch sides. Was that wrong? It probably kept World War II from dragging on for an extra year by forcing Hitler to divert troops into Italy for a third front, troops which he badly needed for his wars in the Eastern Front against the Soviets and for the Western Front against the Americans, British, and later the Free French.

Bad things happen in war. Sometimes really bad people offer themselves as allies, and the consequences of saying “yes” are less bad than saying “no.”

But we're now a half-century beyond the Cuban revolution. The Mob long ago lost its properties and interests in Cuba, and in any event, it is much less important today than it was in the 1950s and 1960s. Cuba needs to be dealt with today as one of the world's last remaining Communist governments, and the fact that Cubans nationalized Mob-owned property of American citizens a half-century ago has very little relevance to today's reality.