Stealth bill would drop restrictions on travel to Cuba.
this can’t get passed soon enough. what a relic.
now about that embargo…
No need to rejoice yet, random bills are introduced all the time.
The wife of one of my closest friends is Cuban. It’s been a long struggle, both getting her initial paperwork/greencard, and staying in touch with her family.
While there’s no reason to get excited just yet, I certainly hope for some progress in this area. The travel restrictions are a real hardship on thousands of families.
this is true enough. but i think with cuba, any news that gets people discussing these policies is exciting.
Pretty frequent topic in Florida, especially around election time. I don’t follow the issue at all but it sounds like the anti-Cuba coalition is pretty strong. The feds would piss them off severely with a bill like this, and there’s no reasoning with them. But that’s life.
This stupid embargo has always been about politics and votes. We trade with just about everyone, yet not with a country 90 miles away. But the perception is that any politician who normalized trade with Cuba would lose the votes of a large bloc of anti-Castro immigrants in important states like Florida and, to a lesser extent, Texas.
I recall that Clinton made some moves to try to restore trade with Cuba (jokes were made about him hoping to get the flow of Cuban cigars going) but then he ran into internal party opposition.
It’s really stupid not to trade with Cuba and have free travel: I can easily travel to mainland China or Iran, but not Cuba? Politics, bleh.
Since we’ll soon be as poor as Cubans with nationalized health care and banking we may as well embrace them as a sister state.
Maybe they would like to be the next Puerto Rico?
I fail to see why people who have little to do with the issue get so excited about lifting an embargo against an oppressive dictatorship. Are the beaches and cigars that great?
I can understand why some Cuban-American do and do not want the restrictions lifted but why others seem to care so much about this, I don’t understand. Why care whether we trade with Castro’s regime?
is it 1965 already?
Because it would potentially drop the price of cane sugar drastically and then maybe we could get some soda that doesn’t taste like high fructose ass syrup.
Yeah, no…
Maybe you’ll sign them into NAFTA and then ignore the treaty because domestic corn producers are being slaughtered like with softwood lumber, so you’ll punish them with illegal tariffs.
You trade with them so that they get a taste of capitalism, and freedom, and it softens their masses, and makes them more like us, the way it does to everyone. Give em a pot to piss in, and suddenly, you find you have a lot in common. For instance, you each own a pot full of human urine.
That is another strong political force that few people are aware of. Go do some reading on the sugar barons in FL and other places and the political clout they wield - I was really surprised.
You assume trade will result in capitalism, which seems unlikely. Cuba has had trade with most of the world, including Europe for years, and they’ve only dabbled in capitalism. Most of the country is a socialist backwater. I don’t see why trade with the US will suddenly result in the blooming of capitalism and democracy.
In Cuba it still is :)
Who cares? It’s ignorant as hell to refuse to trade with Cuba when the rest of the world is perfectly willing! Don’t you protectionists hate that other countries are grabbing such a delicious market under your very nose?
That’s my point, why do people with nothing at stake seem to care so much?
It’s ignorant as hell to refuse to trade with Cuba when the rest of the world is perfectly willing!
Ignorance has little to do with it.
Don’t you protectionists hate that other countries are grabbing such a delicious market under your very nose?
You must be talking about someone else.
Look, if you want to normalize relations with Cuba or whatever, fine, do it. I want to go there myself but I won’t spend any money that props up that horrible regime. Yes there are worse regimes we do business with but why should that be a reason to endorse Cuba?
If that’s the debate you want to have, fine. Sneaking it in to the Porkulus bill is serious dirty pool and should be stopped. It makes the Republicans objecting to the bill look correct in their position. Between this and the National Healthcare Records Czar position created under the table, what other nuggets are the Democrats trying to sneak by the American people?
Cuba, especially Havana, is extremely beautiful. I lived in Havana for a year so I know a little bit about what I’m talking about here. For a socialist backwater, the countryside is full of very tolerant, imaginative, and surprisingly well educated people trying to make a living while their government fucks them over.
It’s not that trading with the US would make the populace fall in love with Colgate and Starbucks and smug pricks on gaming forums. If you go to Havana you will see buildings with thirty-foot letters proclaiming BUSH: CRETIN or PATRIA O MUERTE. You will see giant murals painted by government workers depicting Che defending the proud people of Cuba against the racist and ignorant American government and their evil Bloqueo. The United States is the great boogeyman in the Cuban psyche, even though they generally love individual Americans who come there. If the Americans lift the embargo that argument dissapears. (Well, it dissapears after a few months, because news takes a while to seep into the more remote areas.)
Anyway. Cuba is an amazing place. It is incredibly multicultural, especially in Havana, where you will see more skin tones on a bus or a bar than you will in an entire day in Toronto. The place drips with history, largely because there are very few multinational chains and almost no billboards. There are old movie theatres that will show Dark Knight in double feature with the Adam West Batman movie, with cigar smoke hanging thick in the air and beautiful young girls selling lemon squash and rum punch in the lobby. There is a massive art scene, a graphic design scene with a very unique and fascianting voice, a health system the first world would do well to take a page from, and probably the best medical school in Latin America.
What I’m saying is this: Cuba is not China. They’re not blithely destroying the environment and bullying surrounding countries and engaging in purges. It is an urban, cosmopolitan, and well-educated nation that could easily become a great friend and ally of the United States, if every POTUS didn’t just gamely play along with the Castro Brothers and their national persecution complex.
Is it? Read Malcolm’s post above ^
If the US allows open travel and ends the embargo, the US and the Cuban people only win and the Castros only loose.