By “farmers,” of course, you mean “agribiz.” Maybe it will lose some votes – not that many. On the plus side, maybe once Cuban sugar starts flowing northward, the soft drink companies will reintroduce sodas made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup. sigh
The Freeptards seem to think so. But, even among them, I note a few dissenting voices.
So Cuba can return to how it was in the 1950’s when it was a promising industrial economy?
Yay, let’s erase 60 years of shittery and praise Obama for it.
I’m willing to bet if there were a president Romney in charge right now, or heaven forbid, the second term of McCain, there is no way on Earth we’d be easing down hostility with Cuba.
So I’d say Obama deserves a little credit here.
And so do the voters.
I think it would still be happening, but I’m willing to concede that they would most likely have taken a much harder line and might stretch out how long it takes to get to real normalized relations. But we normalized relations with Vietnam AND China, so I don’t see it as a huge stretch that we’d get there eventually…once Fidel shuffles off anyway.
I want to see where this goes before I hand Obama credit. However, I’d be more than happy to give him all the props he could want if this goes somewhere and we make real progress towards normalization. Of course, that means he needs to do this with more than a few Republicans obstructing…and probably more than one or two Democrats.
I’ve thought for a long while that the Cuban embargo had become pointless and wasteful, especially after the Soviet Union stopped supporting them. If we can normalize relations with Vietnam and China, there’s no good reason we can’t do it with Cuba. And yes, Fidel getting out of the way probably helped things along quite a bit. The embargo and lack of relations were policies that outlived their reasons for existing, so I think Obama deserves credit for making things happen.
Speaking of China (at least, someone was)…
China continues to push its influence in the Caribbean, while the US has ceded much of its post-Monroe Doctrine imperialism in the region. Normalizing relations with Cuba could serve to mitigate Chinese power in the region; the Cuban people are arguably more positively disposed to their closest neighbor than China. If a post-Castro Cuba could pull in economic tandem with the US, that would go a long way toward stymieing Chinese power in our backyard.
Might be too little, too late, really. But I have to think that’s entering into the equation on some level.
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You forget that McCain would have been guided by the consummate wisdom of Sarah Palin. One presumes that her policies would largely be premised on whether one can see Cuba from Florida, and would probably involve nukes.
The Cubans call it a blockade.
That goes beyond “misspoke” into full on dishonest.
I dinna thin’ that word means what they thin’ it means.
They’ve been calling it “el bloqueo” for half a century – I would put it down to nothing more than hot-blooded Latin temperament – and the use of the term “economic blockade” in this context is not unusual.
The reality is that it’s more than just trade sanctions in the ordinary meaning of the term. One thing that the EU and many other nations and international bodies found particularly arrogant about some of the specific laws – Helms-Burton in particular – was the extraterritorial prerogative to penalize foreign companies that did business with Cuba, by theoretically being able to ban them from doing any business in the US. Since the Helms-Burton law was justified by Cuba having nationalized US businesses there after the revolution, some intrepid Canadian politicians proposed the Godfrey-Milliken Bill, which provided for descendants of United Empire Loyalists who fled the American Revolution to be able to reclaim land and property that was confiscated by the American government, which property was rightfully owned by said Loyalists under the laws of the British Empire and His Majesty the King. 
The thing was ridiculous of course, and a deliberate parody, because the whole Cuban embargo was and is ridiculous.
Do not create or use words employing the insulting suffix -tard in this forum.
[ /Moderating ]
And why should we care what they think?
Rauuuul! You got some ‘splainin’ to do!
And we called the blockade “a quarantine”.
Please tell me you’re joking. Because that is, frankly, racist. More parsimonious is that languages vary and words morph all the time. The term “Latin” is a perfect example since they don’t actually speak Latin.
That statement originally had a smiley-face but I took it out because there’s another one at the end and I dislike posts that are peppered with emoticons. The imagery of “hot-blooded Latin temperament” came from the humorist Dave Barry, who frequently uses it in reference to his wife Michelle, who is of Cuban descent. I don’t think Dave Barry is racist. 
I am curious about what kind of trade the USA would have with Cuba. Cuba exports sugar-we protect our sugar industry via high tariffs-and (ironically) the US (Florida) sugar production is owned by Cuban-Americans (Fanjool brothers). Cuba also exports rum, and produce-all of which compete with Florida-grown produce. that leaves nickel (there would be a market here, if we had any steelmaking left). So I don’t see a big boom in Cuban-American trade.