Biden wants to re-thaw relations with Cuba. He'll have to navigate Florida politics.
By
Anthony Faiola and
Karen DeYoung
November 25, 2020 at 3:17 p.m. CST
MIAMI — Stirred by breathless warnings of a socialist menace, Cuban Americans turned out for President Trump in massive numbers. Now those voters are presenting a new challenge for President-elect Joe Biden: How to reembrace the historic Obama-era opening with communist Cuba without ceding Florida to the Republicans in 2024.
On few countries is U.S. foreign policy driven more by domestic politics than Cuba and, to a lesser degree, Venezuela. Exiles and Americans of Cuban and Venezuelan descent who harbor deep antipathy for the governments in those leftist police states helped Trump win this key swing state this month. Trump’s net gains in South Florida’s Cuban community alone, experts say, accounted for as much as a third of the 372,000 votes that cost Biden the state.
But Biden is gambling that a focus on the restoration of flights and remittance privileges removed under Trump — which Miami Cubans have griped about over steaming cups of cafecito — will allow his administration to re-engage Havana without enraging a pivotal electorate. Ultimately, the failure of Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaigns against leftist authoritarians in Havana and Caracas to provoke significant change could help Biden swing the pendulum back toward detente.
On Venezuela, Biden has signaled no change in the sanctions on indictments of top officials, but he has said he plans to focus more on the humanitarian plight of a people suffering under a harsh autocracy. At least in the short term, President Nicolás Maduro is unlikely to enjoy a major break in his international isolation.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/biden-cuba-venezuela-maduro/2020/11/25/5762e044-2abe-11eb-9b14-ad872157ebc9_story.html
(People who've watched the Post over time are aware the Post is virulently hostile toward ALL leftist-led Latin American countries. Don't know what the story is on that. Very peculiar.)
Also posted in Editorials and other articles:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016277903
= new reply since forum marked as read
Since Florida was so supportive of Biden, guess he should listen to them. 
which prowled through the streets, the "Masferrer's Tigers" picking up leftists, torturing them, murdering them, hanging their parts from trees in places like Santiago de Cuba, they were the same ones who hated Black people, the descendants of so many slaves brought to Cuba to work on sugar, tobacco, fruit, or work in mines, etc., most of whom had only seasonal work only and lived in desperately poor conditions, without water, without electricity, without access to medical treatment, of course without education, without even minimally decent shelter, and without adequate food.
Hence, two REVOLUTIONS, of course.
The people of Cuba didn't revolt because they wanted even more, they rebelled because they couldn't keep living like that.
Most people who bother to start researching will get the picture in no time at all.
The first wave of "exiles" (a hilarious term) was composed of very wealthy, very political, fascist racists. Miami became their kingdom, they continued to despise any among them who dared to hold different opinions, they terrorized people for a very long time, bringing Miami to the point the FBI termed the town the "Terror Capital of the U.S." back during the days of the little power-mad demon, JJorge Mas Canosa, who believed he would become the next president of Cuba.
The vicious, greedy dirtbag, with Ronald
Reagan.
The vicious, greedy dirtbag, as he
buttonholes George H.W. Bush
Dirty greedy dirtbag holds Clinton
prisoner.
Greedy dirtbag with George H W Bush, Rafael
Diaz-Balart (former attorney for United Fruit
in Cuba, then Speaker of the House, then
Minister in Cabinet of dictator of Fulgencio
Batista, and father of two US Congressmen,
Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart) and Ileana
Ros-Lehtinen, US Congresswoman from
Florida. (Rafael's sister, Mirta, was the first
wife of Fidel Castro.)
Mirta Diaz-Balart, and Fidel Castro, just for curiosity's sake. Interesting.
~ ~ ~
Anyone who hasn't taken the time to research, dive in, and learn about the unbelievable corruption, the well-known bribery, deals with both Batista, and the legislators, the Mafia, and its influence, for Chrissakes, (Batista's brother-in-law made nightly runs to bag the day's payoff to Batista at all thes casinos, oh, and don't forget the fact that Cuba was also a designated Rest and Relaxation spot for the US Navy during those days, just like other notorious spots, like Manila was, and Hong Kong, etc. for US Navy men.
Interesting article:
A Brief History of Guantanamo Bay, America’s “Idyllic Prison Camp”
A Hundred Years at the Edge of Empire
VIA THE NEW ENGLAND REVIEW
By Stephen Benz
January 30, 2019
https://lithub.com/a-brief-history-of-guantanamo-bay-americas-idyllic-prison-camp/
~ ~ ~
Two sailors in Cuba in 1939
US sailors stationed at Guantánamo in the 1950s on a night out in Cuba
US sailors in Cuba
A link I've had a long, long time. Once it was a resource for people interested in finding great nightspots in Havana. At that time, there were even flights from Miami to Cuba, which wouldn't really take all that long, of course, with champagne, even a floor show, of sorts, for tourists who wanted to go horse around in the U.S. party town:
http://cuban-exile.com/menu1/%21entertain.html
This was saved and made available online for people curious about what was going on. If you take your time there should be quite a few photos, still.
grabbed the island back from the people, also went to the Bay of Pigs invasion, only he STAYED IN THE BOAT, and once he saw they were getting their butts kicked he had them turn the boat around and take him right back to Miami.
Here is an excellent article on the man who controlled Miami's Cuban exile community until his death, and created the iron fist grip on US politics which has resulted in every damned national US politician's long trudge to Miami to have Cuban coffee at the Versailles restaurant, get photos taken with local Cuban politicians, make speeches, etc. EVERY time they hope to seek national office. Shameful.
No Mas Canosa - the death of Cuban political figure Jorge Mas Canosa - Obituary
Saul Landau
For forty years, U.S. national security apparatchiks have tried to exact imperial revenge against Fidel Castro, the man who should hold the Guinness record for disobedience. From almost the day Fidel Castro led his triumphant rebeldes into Havana in January 1959, the U.S. government has employed routine terrorism against the Cuban revolution; in addition, the United States has tried to embargo Cuba to death and strangle it by any means, short of full-scale U.S. military invasion. One Cuban exile took advantage of this climate, and the space the government created for anti-Castro mischief, to mount a prolonged campaign of naked terror, and astute political manipulation of the highest levels of the U.S. government. His aim was to replace Castro as president of Cuba and substitute capitalism for socialism on the island.
I read the news, on November 23, 1997, that Jorge Mas Canosa had died. Mas emerged as a modern Horatio Alger, who learned how to acquire power and wealth in a uniquely American way. He was one of the few men clever enough to combine the tactics of a Ku Klux Klan good old boy with the pragmatic lobbying techniques of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC), thereby grabbing national prominence and dictating U.S. policy toward Cuba.
Mas's formula amounted to a one-two combination in the U.S. political ring. By getting himself or his cronies appointed or elected to local water, sewer, utility, road and electoral commissions - much as the Klan did in the South until the late 1960s - Mas and his Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), and its various political and business spinoffs, built an empire. Mas could award contracts and jobs, do favors and act like an old-style political ward boss. This Godfather-like role made him into a local, and then national, persona - a business-political superstar. Thousands of Cuban exiles owed him for bringing in their relatives, resettling them, getting them jobs, apartments, or loam. Thousands more had at least a vicarious investment in this hombre fuerte who knew how to work the American system.
By the 1980s, Mas had achieved national recognition. He had learned how to intimidate and buy strategically placed members of Congress, and even presidents, on Cuba policy. He put large donations into their campaign coffers and then used them for policy decisions, photo ops, and promotional quotes. For twenty years, Mas exercised a singular influence over U.S.-Cuba policy, and he let everyone know about it (and then some). Indeed, he learned how to step forth and boldly take credit even when none was due him.
Mas was the son of a Batista army veterinarian, and his life became a modern American "success" story. In 1956, he became president of the Free Mason Youth (Asosiacion Jovenes Esperanaza de la Fraternidad), which he quit just months after the revolution triumphed. In January 1959, he joined a right wing Catholic group.(1) The revolutionary tribunals that investigated offenses by the Batista regime acquitted Mas's father, an officer, of any wrongdoing. Mas, however, got caught for counterrevolutionary plotting with his Catholic group. He escaped from Cuba in July 1960 by using a false identity.
More:
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/exile/canosa.htm
