What is our beef with Cuba?

[guizot]

@acsenray

The Cuban-American community in Florida is a huge, wealthy, organised, politically active community that plays a key role in electoral politics. At the heart of the movement was a large number of affluent, conservative Cubans who were mightily pissed off at losing their property in Cuba and they took care to sustain their political influence. Their resentment has waned little over the last 40 years and they strike back hard whenever anyone suggests normalising relations with Cuba.

None of these things are true about the Vietnamese-American community. In fact, so far as I know, most Vietnamese-Americans are in favour of normalisation of relations with Vietnam.

Yes, that’s true. But those exiles are getting pretty old, and I also heard that many of the children of the Cuban-Americans don’t feel so quite strongly about Castro. It could be that soon that sentiment will decline.

[davenportavenger]

@guizot

I’m afraid this is correct. But we could afford to cut off trade with Vietnam (not China, of course).

Aren’t Vietnam and China pretty friendly with each other? A snub to Vietnam might be seen as an insult to China. Cuba is pretty insular as far as other Communist nations are concerned; they are halfway around the world from the main bloc of Communist countries and AFAIK Castro is not on great terms with any other leaders, even the Communists. Vietnam actually seems like it’s going in the same direction as China as far as allowing some private ownership (wrapping it up in Communist dressing, of course), whereas Cuba has not.

[guizot]

@davenportavenger

Aren’t Vietnam and China pretty friendly with each other? A snub to Vietnam might be seen as an insult to China. Cuba is pretty insular as far as other Communist nations are concerned; they are halfway around the world from the main bloc of Communist countries and AFAIK Castro is not on great terms with any other leaders, even the Communists. Vietnam actually seems like it’s going in the same direction as China as far as allowing some private ownership (wurapping it up in Communist dressing, of course), whereas Cuba has not.

I think the Vienamese are still pissed off at the Chinese. I just said we could afford to, not that we really want to. I meant to say we could probably get as much economically from dealing with Cuba as with Vietnam. It’s a political issue, because the Vietnamese have made friendly overatures, Castro has not.