Given the refueling situation with ships, I honestly don’t know how it would have any serious important, it’s only 90 miles from American shores.
It’ll be a PR coup for whichever Cuban leader oversees the U.S. leaving Guantanamo, this suggests that on the many issues where we’re still negotiating things with the Cubans, they’d almost certainly be willing to make concessions if evacuating Gitmo was on the table. I’m not looking for money here, just arguing that you’re advocating some vacuous and uncertain benefits for basically throwing away an ace in the hole we could get something valuable for.
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Not a separate issue to me.
You’re saying that there are no free Cubans who possess property rights and you want to reward the communist government by releasing GITMO. How about reversing the situation? The U.S. will leave GITMO after the communist government holds truly free elections. And releases it’s political prisoners.
Something for something. Quid pro quo. Tit for tat. They scratch our back, we’ll scratch theirs.
Yeah, exactly, squid pro roe and all that.
Wait – do you know where Guantanamo is? Because it is roughly 8 times closer to Port au Prince than it is any point of Florida, if you’re traveling by ship. Colombia is closer to Guantanamo than Miami is.
Let’s try “Zero-based budgeting”: What if we were not currently “renting” Guantanamo. Would it be a good idea to invade and occupy it with a promise to pay $4,085 year until such time as we get whatever conditions you are imagining bargaining for? Of course not. It matters how we arrive at our bargaining positions, and squatting on some land long after the people who agreed to the deal in 1903 are gone, and none of their inheritors want to continue it is similar to invading it de novo.
What if? What do you mean, “What if we were not currently renting Guantanamo”?
If things were different, things would be different.
If you desperately want to give something away, and you are not going to expect anything in return, give me $100. And I’ll even promise to like you better than I do now. Deal?
Does this logic work for other things? Like, how the Louisiana Purchase was sort of a sketchy deal, so now we should give it all back to France?
Are we leasing LP, also?
This logic only applies to leases?
The OP is talking about leases. Not purchases.
Oooh, I’m sorry, that’s an incorrect answer. The right answer was, “The OP was talking about Guantanamo. Not the Louisiana Purchase.”
Are there specific usage stipulations in the lease? Now that Americans are free to visit Cuba, maybe we should consider colonizing Guantanamo Bay. Wikipedia says it’s about 45 square miles, and I’d guess, what, may 22 square miles are land, maybe more if reclamation becomes valuable enough. Singapore-style free trade port, some nice hotels, residential neighborhoods, kind of like a Haiti-Dominican Republic dynamic on a slightly lopsided scale.
Somehow I doubt this is even true. With the embargo, was it possible for Fidel to cash a check drawn on a USA bank?
Yes, it has been the Cuban government’s policy not to even try to cash the checks.
Since when has the USA wanted free and fair elections in Cuba? Even if we colonized it with anglos and made it a US state, we wouldn’t have free and fair elections there.
The Louisiana Purchase was a blatantly illegal deal, under a treaty with Spain, actually. I don’t know what the remedy was supposed to be for France’s violation, but apparently Spain wasn’t in any position to enforce it.
Considering the present state of USA politics, I think maybe we should just accept that being part of New Spain is better, and return the USA to its previous boundaries.
The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992, for one thing, calls for the “peaceful transition to democracy and a resumption of economic growth in Cuba” and “free and fair elections to determine Cuba’s political future.”
So this has been the policy of the United States for only about 25 years. I can understand that some observers might have missed it.