It's good to be back.
During the weekend, it was announced -- not to much anyone's surprise -- that Fidel Castro would run again for his Parliamentary seat. Technically, he needs to do that in order to qualify to serve another term as El Presidente. So Castro isn't going away any time soon.
It never ceases to amaze me that the Cuban American lobby -- and I stress lobby, because it definitely doesn't represent all Cuban Americans, some of whom want to open up a dialogue with Castro -- but this lobby have been saying all along that they want Cuba to be a democracy. Nonsense. They just want to replace a Soviet style lackey with an American one and make Cuba an American client state again with a US backed dictator, à la Fulgencio Batista.
And whether America wants to admit it or not, that is the official policy of the State Department. To them democracy isn't about a free and fair vote as we understand the expression. It's freedom only as long as other countries vote the way Americans want them too. Especially if the people in that country -- the majority or a significant minority -- isn't white. And it explains why Cuba has been suspended from the Organization of American States. Given a re-vote today, a fair one, one might see Cuba voted back in the club -- but then you could be sure the US would request the OAS to leave Washington and relocate outside the United States.
You're probably never going to see America invade the UK for example, since the three major parties support NATO, and 10 Downing Street has access to Da Bomb. But we saw what America did to Chile, Bolivia, Argentina and El Salvador and how that has strained relations between Latin America and the US Mainland ever since.
None of the major Presidential candidates for 2008 are talking about normalizing relations. In fact, Clinton and some of the Republicans want to tighten the screws even more. But Castro isn't going away any time soon. You play with the cards you're dealt with, and in this post 9/11 world America needs as many friends or at least partners as it can get. If terrorists are using Cuba as a base camp to launch future operations, that might be something they might cooperation on to stop.
As it is right now, they don't even recognize Cuba's right to exist, at least officially. And that's just plain stupidity. Yes, Cuba must be made free and America should insist on it -- real freedom, not Batista freedom. But the first step should be recognition that what is, is.
Vote for this post at Progressive Bloggers.
1 comment:
we seem to believe that in order for a system to work, it has to be our type of democracy, we try(sorry) they(few right wing politicos) try to impose this system on others, but it has to be free and fair, like in palestine, where hamas won fairly, but our side did not aggree with the resusts, therefore punish them for voting freely, as for Cuba, I agree, that it has nothing to do with democracy but more about influence. and just plain national pride, (how dare he outlast so many president), what I never hear is that cuba, with all its fault, has the best education and health system amongst others, than all of central and south america, even better than americans, so they could do worse, like ....american style democracy, like.....Iraq and Afghanistan...
Post a Comment