Wednesday, December 17, 2014

United States Comes to Its Senses


In a deal negotiated during 18 months of secret talks hosted largely by Canada and encouraged by Pope Francis, who hosted a final meeting at the Vatican, President Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba agreed in a telephone call to put aside decades of hostility to find a new relationship between the United States and the island nation just 90 minutes off the American coast.
It took long enough. Cuba has never been a threat to the US in any way. (That was the Soviet Union with the missiles.) 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quibbling over who controlled the missiles is not a very helpful argument. The missiles were in Cuba, Cuba was a physical threat.

But that's actually beside the point. The Soviet Union had missiles on its own territory which were a threat to us, and even more of a threat to our NATO allies with whom we had a binding mutual-defense treaty.

Yet that didn't prevent us from keeping diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

The breaking of diplomatic relations with Cuba was a giant snit fit which escalated because of a desire to woo politically the Cuban refugees in Florida. It was kept up for decades, long after it served any purpose, long after we'd normalized relations with Vietnam, even, just out of inertia and to politically pacify the descendants of the refugees (most of the original refugees are long gone).

It was a silly thing, and about time it was ended.

Lisa Hirsch said...

Did Castro have the power to launch the missiles? He did not. And that's why Cuba, the nation, was not the threat.

I agree with you completely on everything else.