Cuba: Here we go again?

our next presidential aspirant, English collapsing:

"My understanding is that the influence that His Holiness had was on the release of Mr. [Alan] Gross, which I've not criticized. As I said, I'm happy that he's with the Cuban people [sic]. I would also ask His Holiness to take up the cause of freedom and democracy, which is critical for a free people — for a people to truly be free," Rubio, a Catholic whose parents immigrated from Cuba to flee the Castro regime, told reporters.

"I think the people of Cuba deserve the same chances to have democracy as the people of Argentina have had, where he comes from; as the people of Italy have, where he now lives. Obviously the Vatican's its own state, but very nearby," the senator and rumored 2016 presidential hopeful continued.

We've been doing business with the Chinese Communist party for decades now, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. One must ask oneself, wtf is so special about Cuba that we can't do a dime's worth of business there?

The Cuban exile community's once wizardly sway over Congress and the White House? It's not hard.

last sentence of Rubio's is really a beauty

plus, our history with Cuba is more tangled than any country not named England. Jefferson wanted it. Southern Congressman forty years later sought to make a slave state out of it. We got sugar, rum, the best beaches in the Caribbean, baseball players, cigars, Watergate burglars, and George W. Bush out of it.

Shit, we've even normalized relations with the butchers in Myanmar, fer chrissakes.

"...as the people of Italy have, where he now lives. Obviously the Vatican's its own state, but very nearby," the senator and rumored 2016 presidential hopeful continued.

lmao really putting the knife in. who's the writer here? I can't get that quote to come up on google

man, wait til the Pope announces he's moving the Vatican to Pinar del Rio

I hear the beaches are especially beautiful.

I believe it's where I saw a rooster mascot do what looked like a Santeria dance around home plate.

http://www.que.es/archivos/201111/4219565w-640x640x80.jpg

the young ones and those who've benefited from the loosening of remittance limits and travel restrictions in the last five years

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, December 17, 2014

younger cubans really support liberalizing US-Cuban relations? not doubting it so much as observing how behind-the-times i must be.

oh yeah -- the older ones too. The women who clean my grandmother's and take care of her are my mom's age. Most people who came after Helms-Burton support normalizing relations.

plus, our history with Cuba is more tangled than any country not named England. Jefferson wanted it. Southern Congressman forty years later sought to make a slave state out of it. We got sugar, rum, the best beaches in the Caribbean, baseball players, cigars, Watergate burglars, and George W. Bush out of it.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, December 17, 2014 1:41 PM (43 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That's real nice for Canada.

why didn't we recruit a burglar from Canada?

I'm glad I've been to Cuba multiple times before the Starbucks and whatnot. I wish there was a middle ground between people having basic freedoms and not being rampaged by lots of Wal Marts.

Can anyone link to anything genuinely interesting/informative about what Gross was actually doing there and whether there was actually any basis for his arrest?

seeing all this preemptive righteous anticommercialism is nauseating

Shepard Smith, who worked in Miami and Naples for years, is practically trembling with excitement. He also repeated the cliche regarding the definition of insanity -- that's how FOX can claim it's Fair and Balanced.

how soon till i can get some havana club on the reg?

haha. why's shep "trembling with excitement," e.g., the opportunity to pander to a well-known fox-leaning demographic?

http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/12/authorities_hope_thaw_in_cuban_relations_will_aid_capture_of_nj_cop_killer_joanne_chesimard.html

My thoughts on the matter.

Very happy, and poised for a comeback.

http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20100426143902/godfather/images/7/74/Vlcsnap-2010-02-25-19h21m17s23.png

My thoughts on the matter.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, December 17, 2014 9:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that is a moving and smart piece of writing, Alfred.

"...as the people of Italy have, where he now lives. Obviously the Vatican's its own state, but very nearby," the senator and rumored 2016 presidential hopeful continued.

i imagine rubio continuing to ramble in this circumlocutions manner for minutes as the media and then his staffers leave one by one and finally a janitor comes by and turns the lights off. "…i mean, you know, the vatican isn't really a democracy either, but uh, pope francis should know, uh, I mean, that democracies are all around, and…"

that is a moving and smart piece of writing, Alfred.

― Vic Perry,

thanks, Vic!

My thoughts on the matter.

― guess that bundt gettin eaten (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, December 17, 2014 9:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that is a moving and smart piece of writing, Alfred.

― Vic Perry, Wednesday, December 17, 2014 11:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agreed Alfred, enjoyed that post a lot

since the tourism ban can only be lifted by Congress, we can expect to see that go in...?

sadly we'll always have Congress, Morbs.

I would suggest you all become humanitarians or educators if you want to go, meantime.

Essay on TPM:

It happens pretty much every time I meet someone new and they find out I’m Cuban. Have you been? is usually their first question—generally just a way to attempt a polite transition to their own inevitable Cuba visit story. I brace myself for these stories, plaster a polite smile on my face, and try to change the subject as quickly as possible. Many of them come with a sentiment similar to Jeremy Scahill’s tweet yesterday—a kind of perverse, nostalgic desire to witness things “before they change.” I can’t keep track of the number of times someone has recounted this sentiment to me. Last year, it happened at a week-long training I was participating in, and it was the first time there was another Cuban-American present, with whom I could exchange a weary, knowing glance.

I’m sure there are hundreds (thousands?) of people right now trying to figure out if they can visit Cuba before the inevitable surge of change. Miss seeing the crumbling buildings? The fifties-era cars? The Castro government propaganda? I’ve never understood these sentiments. I find them to be so tone-deaf, like this place that has shaped my entire existence is just a type of disaster tourism, a fun stop on a political nostalgia to-do list. They’re sentiments that gloss over and negate all the suffering and loss that has shaped what Cuba is today.

It gets to the mixed reaction of someone my age hearing about deprivations secondhand yet recoiling from the unintentional crudeness from those who haven't witnessed either.

when I was in Russia right after the wall fell the biggest tourist draws were Soviet memorabilia/buildings etc

Maybe it was partly due to the structure of the group visit I went on, but I'd say you have to be pretty willful, sheltered and/or insensible to overlook the deprivation in Cuba.

I imagine something similar is going to happen here - aw communist dictatorship detritus, ain't it cuet

xp

This triggered her article:

jeremy scahill ✔ @jeremyscahill
Follow

I'm very glad I was able to visit Cuba several times before US tourists try to turn it into Cancun

tbf Cancun is p fucked up

I un-followed Scahill a few years ago after a photo he posted of himself and Fidel inspired commments like "WOW, YOU GO!" and "SO JEALOUS" and "YEAH EL JEFE!"

(I still read his books)

of course for Americans there's no middle ground really between Communist-regime-induced squalor and capitalist-induced-squalor + RESORT LIVING

Communist-regime- and moronic-American-blockade-induced squalor

hey plenty of credit to go around

I did not eat in any of the paladares citizens operated in Havana 10 years ago, but I talked to people (who knew English) in the parks and the streets and usually gave them money when I was panhandled. I think most of the people in our group did the same. I'm sure we all were partly guilty of gringo complicity, but I don't think "disaster tourism" is the sum total of such travel.

Link: http://forums.talkingpointsmemo.com/t/discussion-why-i-don-t-want-to-hear-about-your-nostalgia-tour-through-cuba/14589/30

is there possibly some residual "oh what might have been" leftist nostalgia for the Castro regime at play here? (which was obviously from p early on an unqualified disaster, from a marxist/leftist perspective) Like oh they almost had a socialist paradise, look at how many doctors they turned out etc.

that forum link is ... interesting. I'm not really sympathetic to arguments that American corporate hegemony does a great job of increasing the standard of living wherever it goes tho.

I'm glad she made the point though: you can't find any goddamn clean needles in this socialist paradise.

Other than the tourist sector, which is reasonably mature already, and sugar is there anything particularly notable for US corporate hegemony to influence? It's not as though Cuba is likely to get a massive increase in revenue in the medium term or that the U.S. is the world's sole purveyor of commercial tat.

The questions about how / when the economic system is going to be reformed and who is going to influence that are much more interesting in the post-Eastern Bloc context, but there doesn't seem like a vast amount to build oligarchies out of.

Not that this question is necessarily answerable, plus to make it worse it seems to presume some kind of definite answer where none is possible. Okay, here goes: how is Alejo Carpentier regarded by Cuban-Americans?

Thanks to a tip from Harold Bloom, I discovered his novels about 20 years ago. "Explosion in a Cathedral" is, I'm sure, permanently tied for best novel I will ever read, I am quite sure. Just an unbelievably good book and I don't know one person who has read it, despite or because of my years of nagging (I'm exaggerating....kind of).

I know Carpentier had been imprisoned in the pre-Castro years, and was happy to act as diplomat for Cuba to Paris in the post-Castro years. I could see people doing this kind of "collaborator" thing with him, and with Julio Cortazar (who I also love). Any info on reactions, etc. would be welcome.

unfamiliar w Carpentier myself (my fave Cuban novelist is easily Cabrera-Infante). altho I was unaware there was any connection between Cortazar (who I also love) and Castro...?

Cortazar made a point of defending left-wing regimes in Central & South America (Cuba & the Sandinistas come to mind), although it clearly made him uneasy too.

is the best Cabrera-Infante book Three Trapped Tigers? I was reading a paperback of that about ten years ago and I LOST it.

yeah that's the one imo

"Let’s keep the dictatorship for another 60 years because we couldn’t possibly risk the greatest threat of all … US influence."

Nobody is saying this. If the US care about Cubans they should lift the sanctions they've kept for decades and leave Cubans and their administration to it.

Wouldn't a better analogy, one that's in this hemisphere and not eligible for social security be Colombia and Cuba, today?

― Joe Bombin (milo z), Saturday, July 24, 2021 6:11 PM (forty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Colombia has a better health care system than both Cuba and the US per the WHO. Colombia’s social expenditure is also pretty good, higher than South Korea and about the same as Ireland. I don’t know what you are talking about.

...

I have no idea what milo z and xyyz want

I don't think it's necessary to want anything, aside from an end to the embargo (and American imperialism). Interventionists like VHS's fantasy of Cuban autonomy after their desired regime change is risible because of the dishonesty.

So now ‘untainted from any foreign influence’ is interventionism?

y'all enjoy going in circles?

cos it makes for really shitting reading

*shitty

So now ‘untainted from any foreign influence’ is interventionism?

No, it's just a fantasy. (Or, more accurately, dishonesty.)

I have no idea what milo z and xyyz want

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 24 July 2021 bookmarkflaglink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD8Cz2HOlEc

Today, we are imposing further sanctions against the Cuban police following their attacks on protestors, including young people, religious leaders, and civil society organizations. We will continue to promote accountability for the Cuban regime’s human rights abuses.

— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) July 30, 2021

https://t.co/3e23O3AiCo pic.twitter.com/HglTVz123p

— by mennen (@ClassHuggle) August 1, 2021

Lmao we're so fucked https://t.co/VqL8BvRvNR

— Lisa and the banned one (@LisaA311) July 31, 2021

if it wasn’t for Fidel these whiteboys would be owning mansions in Havana rn, shouts out Fidel https://t.co/YvHU0KFBSZ pic.twitter.com/lBHyAnkbIF

— SLANK (@DabSquad_Slank) September 12, 2021