Obviously because he’s evil, at worst, or a hypocrite at best. Seriously, though, I think we all know it was political expediency; something that is not at all unusual. Did your favorite two-term president never introduce some new policy in his second term?
I mean, what else would it be? He waited so long because he knew it was a bad policy but wanted to implement it anyway?
Sometimes your gotcha partisan comparison game playing is very boring and very stupid.
Even from afar it is very clear political calculations on timing play, the expediency. REally it is extremely obvious…
The only question I see with the madness of the American policy is why the policy successful with very other communist country - the engagement and the winning them from the inside out with the Trade and the relations, and removing any plausible basis for their sick paranoia - one proven very successful everywhere else since the 1989, why is the Cuba some how not fitting?
To be fair, that is not the only question with regard to Cuba. There is the question of appropriated American private property. We might not think that that tips the balance in favor of disengagement, but it is still something that sets Cuba apart.
I think Bricker made clear the difference: Cuba stole America’s sugar plantations. That can never be forgiven.
Jeez, Bricker, that’s an incredibly lame deflection. If he’d done it in his first term, would you be asking why he didn’t do it in his first hundred days?
If the American mob could move on from this, you’d think the Republicans would reach a statute of limitations by now and let it fucking go too.
Costing tourism jobs both here and there, especially there. B&B hosts, taxi-drivers, restaurateurs (what a damn screwy word to try to spell!) tour-guides, etc. They’re all already feeling the pinch, and the rollback hasn’t even fully been implemented yet. People are cancelling vacations just on the basis of the announcement and the news coverage.
Trump is a stumble-bum, without the capability of meaningful reasoning.
One needn’t “let it go”. The government can have a restrictive policy in terms of cooperation with and help given to the government of Cuba without forbidding US citizens from traveling there or businesses to sell things there. And we still haven’t seen what the actual effects of Trump’s policies are going to be. The link upthread posits that the changes Trump made were mostly cosmetic and not substantive, which would not be too surprising given his penchant for appearances over substance.
No, but four years is certainly long enough.
Why? Why should we let it go? Cuba stole property, some of which still exists. Why should the country “let it go?”
What’s your source for that “pinch” claim?
I agree that it’s time to quit dodging this question and answer it. What Obama did or did not do, and when he did it, is not what this thread is about.
Back off the personal comments.
(Yeah, I know that “stupid” was, technically, attacking the post and not the poster, but it is not really helping move the discussion forward.)
[ /Moderating ]
If “letting it go” (if that’s what Obama’s rapprochement was) helps the Cuban people, the American people (by increasing business and cultural interaction opportunities), and increases the chance of political and democratic progress in Cuba, as I think it does, then those are pretty good reasons to “let it go”.
How does not “letting it go” help anyone but the Castros and Cuban hardliners?
To answer why it took Obama so long, we would need to know whether or not he was working behind the scenes to gather support for his actions rather than simply making a Trump-like"Let’s do this dumb thaing about which I know nothing."
As to why Obama was the first to do it, consider the hoopla surrounding the return of Elian Gonzalez to his father in 2000. Passions run high on Cuba; Florida has been a major electoral player for many years with the exile community playing a strong role in the vote. Analogously, working against Anthropogenic Global Warming is self-evidently the right thing to do, but there is a lot of political back-and-forth that has prevented its implementation.
One reason is that we live in a Democracy, and most Americans want to “let it go*”. But, as I noted earlier, we can separate out policies such that we sanction the rulers but don’t punish Americans (or ordinary Cubans) in the process. We can’t prevent 100% of the money tourists spend from ending up in government coffers, but we can still put pressure on the government in other ways. We negotiated a nuclear deal with Iran and we never prevented Americans from traveling there.
And seriously, how many years of a policy not working does it take to realize that a policy doesn’t work?
*I mean that in the sense of not continuing the policies of the past. Not that we just give up and forget.
The whites stole almost all of the United States from the Native Americans. Is it time to let it go? Or is it time to return the land to the Native Americans?
Because sometimes, what seem like good investments, turn out to be bad investments. So you have to let them go. Now, perhaps when relations improve and the Cuban economy is doing much better, there may be an opportunity to negotiate reparations. But continuing to punish Cuba like the US has for 50 years is certainly not going to make that any more likely.
Why shouldn’t we? What does refusing to forgive accomplish? Are we providing consequences to the ones who did it? Are we worried they’ll do it again if we let things go?
It’s on you to explain why the status quo of forgiving nations for things over a generation old is a bad thing. They stole some property. Big fucking whoop. We’ve destroyed governments. We’ve bombed civilians intentionally. We’ve enslaved entire populations.
The same reason we have to forgive people applies here. Everyone does bad things. And this is the national equivalent to stealing a candy bar from a grocery store. It’s just not a big deal.
And, as a Republican, why are you against letting the free market make things better for them and for us?
In a democracy like ours, the will of the people is expressed by electing representative leaders, not referendums on every issue.
We elected representatives. They reversed the Obama policy.