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Originally Posted by OldOneEye

I can visit Viet Nam, I can visit China, I can visit a ton of other places. I didn't say I didn't understand why it's illegal (because the State Department says so) but why do we treat China, Viet Nam, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and a ton of other really nasty dictatorships that treat people much worse than Cuba ever did and yet we treat them differently than Cuba (Parade magazine did a top 10 worse dictators and Cuba wasn't in there, but a ton of our "allies" were).

So if your trying to imply I just don't understand the situation, my undergraduate degree is in Latin American Studies (two of my college professors wrote extensively about Che Guevarra, revolution in Latin America, and military dictatorships in Latin America (Brian Loveman and Tom Davies Jr.), so I have an understanding of the players, what happened, what brought it about.... (uh, a corrupt US backed dictatorship who oppressed its people....), and why it doesn't really accomplish anything outside of getting Florida's electoral college in the bag on election day. Did the regime in Havana do bad stuff? Sure. Did it do stuff worse than Pinochet, the Juntas in Argentina, El Salvador, Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, Panama under Noriega, Iraq under Saddam (oh, I went there), China, Pakistan, etc. (all allies that we dealt with and/or continue to deal with), I would say no.

The US government tried assassinating him how many times? So you are surprised they reacted the way they did? I mean, we pushed them into the hands of the USSR. The sad thing in that whole mess with Cuba and the civil wars in Central America is the fact that we couldn't afford another Cuba, but economically, neither could the USSR (Cuba was a subsidized money hole, getting subsidized oil and supplies and selling sugar at above the market rate). We spent something like $10 billion in Central America and didn't really produce any wins (they didn't defeat the Nicaraguans, or the guerrillas in Guatemala, Honduras or El Salvador.... that should have been an omen considering how small Central America is for Iraq... or ask the Colombians who have spent 60 years fighting the FARC.

So frankly, I could go to visit Cuba tomorrow and come back and sleep like a baby at night if the State Department dropped the rules today.

And don't worry, at some point there will be a demographic shift in Miami anyway... and the number of "back in when I was in Cuba" people will be replaced by "my parents talked about the old country" people and that next generation isn't going to be as pissed. Those people might start realizing that spending more time making sure Miami, Dade County and Florida are being better run, versus worrying about how things work out with Cuba which has less impact to them.

Juan

I didn't state what I was feeling correctly, I meant to say you can understand why someone would not be seen as doing the right thing by wanting to go there NOW. Time heals all wounds but we haven't even started this clock yet.