Thursday, May 07, 2009

Cuba rewind

Here are some quotes about U.S. policy toward Cuba, coming both from Democrats and Republicans.*

--"The U.S. policy of isolating Cuba has been a failure"

--"Our Cuban policy is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world"

--"our embargo policy is not working in our best interests"

--"it doesn't make much sense to forego a market a few miles off our shore"

Actually, these are all from 1974. The more things change, the more they stay the same. But momentum (even grudgingly accepted by Henry Kissinger) foundered as both sides accused the other of making excessive demands, and then Cuba vocally supported Puerto Rican independence and became involved in Angola, which the Ford administration decided was too much.

*Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009): 266-267.

2 comments:

Anonymous,  9:33 AM  

I look forward to reading the book when I get home (I head back a week from today). I did get to browse the copy Lars sent to a Cuban colleague who was also very excited to read it.

redwood 7:09 PM  

your phrasing, Greg, "...and became involved in Angola" sounds like a euphemism for some kind of sexual partnership.

another way to put it would be to say that the good Cubans kicked CIA/South African butt out of Angola.

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