Wouldn't dropping the trade embargo on Cuba be in the U.S' best interest?

[brentspeak]

Especially now that we're bleeding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month? I doubt that the American people give a rip about what the anti-Castro community wants.

[EFerrari]

1. The Democrats don't want to lose campaign contributions and other support

from voters who irrationally want to continue the embargo.

[RaleighNCDUer]

6. Except, those who most irrationally want to preserve the embargo

vote solid Republican anyway, so what's to lose?

[EFerrari]

7. The first big Latino group that Obama spoke to was CANF in FL.

These people are more interested in continuing their mafia than in any party. That was probably Obama's calculation, too.

[EFerrari]

11. Fyi, here's a Time article that describes how Bill Clinton courted the hardliners to good effect:

CLINTON'S CUBAN ROAD TO FLORIDA
By DOUGLAS WALLER/WASHINGTON Monday, Oct. 28, 1996

Not too long ago, all a Republican presidential candidate had to do was point out that his opponent was soft on Fidel Castro to maintain the G.O.P.'s lock on Florida's powerful Cuban-American community. But Bob Dole has nothing on Bill Clinton. The President has been courting that community, and to them he is now a hard-liner after their own hearts. A Miami poll has found that 41% of Florida's Cuban Americans plan to vote for Clinton, almost double what he won in 1992, finally giving him a chance to take the state he lost by a squeaker in 1992. It is one of the biggest triumphs of his campaign.

But the Clinton turnaround has come with costs. The tale of how he brought it off involves excessive influence over foreign policy by a special-interest group, gloves-off bureaucratic infighting and a willingness to bash U.S. allies for electoral gain. It also involves peril. Wooing Dade County's 678,000 Cuban Americans has resulted in the most volatile period of confrontation with Havana since the 1962 missile crisis. The Pentagon fears it is only a matter of time before another event like February's shoot-down of two U.S. civilian planes by Cuban MiGs sparks a military confrontation between the two countries.

Four years ago, senior State Department diplomats hoped Clinton would breathe fresh air into U.S.-Cuban relations. Miami's fiercely anti-Castro Cuban-American community had long blocked any thaw, though the Pentagon had concluded that Havana posed no threat to the region, and Washington had made peace with almost all its cold war enemies. But half a dozen Cuban-American Democrats who raised huge sums for Clinton in 1992 convinced the new President he could win Florida in '96 if he became even more anti-Castro than Ronald Reagan or George Bush had been.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,985376,00.html

(I'm just scanning it now so no promises about bias or fairness! :) )

[NJmaverick]

2. Yes it would be beneficial, especially to the auto industry

[panader0]

3. Trade embargoes only hurt the poor

They don't hurt the leaders, or rich, who can get what they want anyway. Open Cuba totally. Great tourism possiblities.

[AtomicKitten]

4. Obama is getting ready to lift travel restrictions to Cuba.

http://havanajournal.com/politics/entry/obama-expected-to-lift-cuba-travel-restrictions-in-may-in-key-west/

I have a feeling normalizing relations with Cuba will be done incrementally so as not to cause the hardliners to seize up.

[EFerrari]

8. Last weekend Biden said it was not in the plans. (edit)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090329/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_chile_biden_7

Oops -- you were talking travel and I misread "trade". :blush:

[AtomicKitten]

9. hey

:hi:

[EFerrari]

10. Hi there! I have a bad feeling about the embargo so my brain isn't working well. Look at this:

"Even Hillary Clinton's sister-in-law, Maria Victoria Arias, is a pro-embargo Cuban-American Miami lawyer responsible for the Clintons' campaign contributions and consequently hard-line views on Cuba. Florida Governor Jeb Bush, President George W. Bush's brother, ran the campaign for Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the first Cuban-American member of Congress."

http://www.alternet.org/audits/79264/

Just scanning this now -- it's not a bashing article so far but does explain the industry that has grown up around these issues. :hi:

[babylonsister]

5. They're working on it...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/politics/story/65199.html


WASHINGTON — Buoyed by a new administration, advocates for trade with Cuba unveiled a bill Tuesday that would lift travel restrictions to the island, allowing Americans to visit there freely.

The bipartisan group of senators, who've long pushed for increased trade with Cuba, say they think that momentum is now on their side, noting that President Barack Obama campaigned on a promise to change U.S.-Cuba policy.

snip//

Proponents of the legislation argue that U.S. policy is a Cold War relic that should be scrapped. Dorgan was joined by Jose Miguel Vivanco, the director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch, who argued that current U.S. policy "has neither weakened the Cuban government" nor improved conditions for Cuba's political prisoners. Business groups pledged to push for the legislation with Bob Stallman, the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, saying that it would help farmers sell more products to Cuba, which he called an important market for soybeans, rice and poultry.

"I think we've finally reached a new watermark on this issue," Dorgan said, adding that he thinks that he has sufficient votes in the House of Representatives and the Senate to get the bill passed. "At some point this is a policy that is no longer justifiable. When something doesn't work for 50 years, clear-headed thinking has to say, 'You know what? It's time to change it.' "

[pampango]

12. They're a Third World country with a lot of poor workers.

Just kidding. I hear that about trade with Third World countries all the time. Chinese workers were poor when we started trading with them and I don't hear much good about them now around here.

Maybe Cuba will stay communist in reality, not just in "name" like China, so we won't have to worry about them much. Right now they have nothing much to export to us, but then neither did China 30 years ago.

We definitely SHOULD stop the embargo and trade with Cuba. It will be better for both of us.