American Corporations Want U.S. Relations With Cuba, So What's Holding it Up?

[Mika]

American Corporations Want U.S. Relations With Cuba, So What's Holding it Up?
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorblog/064

It's such a standard part of the American political landscape that even the two Democratic candidates for President don't support full diplomatic relationships with Cuba forthwith.

Never mind that America has relationships with almost all of the nations that associate themselves with the near-dead political theory of Communism, full diplomatic relationships with Cuba are still pretty much off the table in the United States.

Neve mind that Cuba stopped being any sort of military threat to the United States after the Soviet Union broke up and Russia pretty much abandoned the island just 90 miles from Key West.

Never mind that European and other companies are getting contracts and making money right and left by investing in a dollar and Euro hungry Cuba that is now a mixed-economy, having long ago started to open up its doors to capitalist investment.

And that is why American companies are champing at the bit to end the counter-productive Cuban boycott and establish relations so that they can make money by investing and marketing products in Cuba.

It may strike some Americans whose political distate for the ailing Casto is caught in a rut, but the real losers from the official U.S. embargo laws against Cuba -- along with the lack of full diplomatic relations -- are profits and jobs in America.

Some agrictultural products are allowed -- under current legislation -- and sail in large part out of Mobile, Alabama. American farmers are salivating to sell more to the Caribbean island, as are pharmaceutical and medical providers (who also can currently deliver some products on a "humanitarian basis" to Cuba). But they are just at the beginning of the line.

The bottom line is that the calcified American Executive Branch position on Cuba is killing lucrative business opportunities for American corporations. The Europeans and other nations are beating us to the punch, and have been for years.

It remains one of the oddest political quirks of all time that a dying group of Cuban exiles with dreams of the Batista era of gambling, prostitution, and U.S. mob influence in their nation continues to drive a foreign policy that boomerangs to the detriment of the United States. It's for fear of losing Florida because of the older Cuban vote that presidential candidates are sacrificing American business opportunities for platitudes that won't go over the line in offending the septuagenarian Bay of Pigs survivors.

It's time to treat Cuba like any other nation that may have a government that we don't fully agree with, grant them full diplomatic relations and then work from within to influence change.

Anyone we have talked to in recent years who has been to Cuba notes the pride and beauty of the Cuban people and island, but also of their readiness to become part of the contemporary Western world.

Given our ailing economy at home, it is a destructive anachronism to punish the Cuban people, when we are really shortchanging ourselves. American corporations know this. Why doesn't our government?

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[zonmoy]

1. the thieves want all their booty returned to them.

that is the whole of the problem.

[Recursion]

2. The mob and the Miami expat community (nt)

[annabanana]

3. The need for the Republicans to control Florida.

That's the bottom line. They keep that state with the mob and the offspring of the Cuban exiles.

[Mika]

5. I don't see many Dems working to change this.

As a matter of fact, Florida Dems only pander to the same intransigent elements.

You might he seen these recent stories about spineless Fl Dems..

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=3227914&mesg_id=3227914

[Judi Lynn]

4. By keeping Americans out of Cuba, opportunistic fear-mongering politicians can tell us anything

about Cuba and many Americans will believe it. Why? Because they don't know any different. That's the idea.

The politicans can keep this situation going indefinitely as long as the American public can't get to Cuba to check all of it out for themselves. There's always a "bogeyman" on deck who can be used to rally public anti-communist sentiment, to convince the idiots among us that we need greater national security, maybe even stir people all up again for a future invasion, and this sentiment is kept simmering, and never allowed to die down, as you probably have noticed.

In the meantime, DU'ers from Canada, and Europe have come and gone to Cuba for YEARS, over and over, and have a totally different view of them, and cannot understand how we EVER got this way over that island and those wonderful, strong, warm people.

As a former U.S. diplomat, the former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, Wayne S. Smith said, "Cuba seems to have the same effect on American administrations that the full moon used to have on werewolves."