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Odds and ends
- The New York Times: U.S.-Cuban relations – relations between the nations, as opposed to the governments – are being reshaped by family ties and support. The dynamic described in the article puts President Obama’s travel and remittances policies in an interesting light: As options increase in Cuba, those policies are having greater impact, depending on the use Cuban Americans decide to make of their freedom to visit and to send material and money support. Also, I didn’t know that you could go to Ño Que Barato and have your purchase shipped to Cuba. A generation ago, that service would have earned the store a boycott. The slow-motion normalization continues.
- Café Fuerte looks at initial prices advertised in Cuba’s housing market.
- Granma highlights comments President Kennedy made a month before his death, saying that in no country in the world had “economic colonization, humiliation, and exploitation” been worse than in Cuba, “in part due to the policy of my country during the Batista regime.”
1 comment:
Peter, you did not tell us you were quoted in the article. Two generations ago, No Que Barato would have been bombed or burnt to the ground and the owners exiled from South Florida.
Now, about JFK, much has been said about his secret attempts to thaw US- Cuba relations when he was assassinated. What is often overlooked is that on the day he was shot, Rolando Cubela, a high ranking official in Cuba at the time, was given a CIA produced fountain pen filled with poison and intended for Castro. There you have it for “Thawing.”
I see JFK as a victim of his times, and a policy he completely embraced. The US had embraced a policy of assassinating foreign leaders whose policies they opposed. Kennedy personally oversaw the demise of Vietnam’s Diem and the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo (As abhorrent as he was). Lumumba of the Congo was killed mere days before JFK was sworn in as president, I believe. I guess Fidel Castro will go down in history as the big one that got away.
It was sad that JFK was assassinated; but it was also an ironic twist of fate that someone who fully embraced a policy meets the same fate he sought for others.
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