The person who wrote this never asked a Cuban immigrant how they felt about the government in Cuba. Many will tell you a story about how their family desperately escaped on a row boat, are lucky to be alive and blame Castro.
The bottom line is that many Cuban immigrants in the United States feel that the current government destroyed the country and should be removed and Marco Rubio’s quest to fix Cuba is a reflection of Cuban immigrants values.
There is a strong argument that the Cuban government has treated many Cuban citizens very badly. But the assertion that this mistreatment is why the US is behaving aggressively towards Cuba is pretty naive. The people in power in the US at the moment do not care about the civil and political rights of Cubans. They care about acquiring Cuba and its natural reaources for themselves and their clients.
>The people in power in the US at the moment do not care about the civil and political rights of Cubans. They care about acquiring Cuba and its natural reaources for themselves and their clients.
I thought the motivation was ideological, chiefly from the cuban exiles voter base, of which Rubio is a part of? Aside from maybe tobacco, cuba doesn't have much natural resources. That's why it's so poor.
The main reason Cuba was valuable to U.S. interests before the Revolution was as a playground for American vacationers. Las Vegas was basically spun up as a replacement Havana after the Revolution took it away from U.S. interests and jet air travel made Nevada a reasonable destination for well-heeled East Coasters.
I think something similar could be true today, and it doesn't require any natural resources beyond cheap labor, Caribbean weather, and an obedient government.
Hot Springs, Arkansas was an alternative during that era.
The nations first national park anchored the attraction, complete with eponymous hot natural water baths. All the big celebrities of the day vacationed there ( alongside all the biggest gangsters, Al Capone included ) and professional baseball teams held spring training there.
Today, Hot Springs is still a pleasant place to visit, but it’s no longer a national draw.
I can't comment much on Cuban-American immigrant feelings about Castro or the current Cuban government, but Marco Rubio's parents fled the US-backed regime of Fulgencio Batista, who Castro overthrew.
Maybe that's an example we should pay attention to though. How many of Cuba's problems are caused by the US doubling-down on trying to interfere? Obviously their current power outages are.
Having angry expats exercise control over foreign policy is stupid.
The rest of us don't need to do anything that doesn't serve us just because they have an axe to grind.
There's a good Scott Horton and Dave Smith conversation about this, but it's so obvious really, when you look at rich Cubans and rich Persians. Those revolutions happened because of their parents and grandparents, and now they want to pretend like they somehow represent the country they left? lol
There is a strong argument that the Cuban government has treated many Cuban citizens badly. But the assertion that this mistreatment is why the US is behaving aggressively towards Cuba is pretty naive. The people in power in the US at the moment do not care about the civil and political rights of Cubans. They care about acquiring Cuba and its natural reaources for themselves and their clients.
Marco Rubio cares about his own quest to be the man who finally frees Cuba from communism. He doesn’t care about natural resources. It’s a pride thing. And I’m fine with that.
"infant mortality has doubled to 9.9 per 1,000 births; childhood cancer survival rates have fallen from 85 to 65 per cent; and essential medicines are available at only around 30 per cent of normal supply levels." [1]
> Many will tell you a story about how their family desperately escaped on a row boat, are lucky to be alive and blame Castro.
Many will also not want to tell you any stories about what their family did in cuba.
Like I'm not trying to downplay the real violence and excesses. But read about how americans talked about cuba pre-castro, what they expected from the place during batista's dictatorship.
The deeply entrenched feudal-type rural poverty provided the raw human material for the mafia to create a vile playground for their own fantasies and sell it to other wealthy americans. Epstein economy shit. Castro didn't come out of nowhere, he harnessed the deep disgust and pain of a people being treated as things for money and pleasure. So yeah the sugar plantation landlords, the batista enforcers, the mafia sex slave sourcers were running for their lives. A lot other people got caught up too, absolutely. But ask your hypothetical cuban immigrant some followup questions. It's not always exactly personal why they hate castro.
No offense, in my opinion you are being very arrogant. Foreign intervention doesn’t relate to fixing a country.
Think about how harmful Trump is to his country and how harmful he can be to a country that he doesn’t have any responsibility to. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand.
People who live outside if their country and say things like this are being shallow. They are understandably frustrated but this is not a healthy way as can be seen in numerous examples in history
right yer...Trump admin is gonna pause and hear out their grievances...in a pipe's dream. Blatant corruption with no shame waging unrestricted economic warfare. Greed is the policy.
Every single Cuban in the US despises the communist government in Cuba.
Most Americans don’t even realize that there are millions of folks in Miami whose parents fled Cuba when the communists took over. My father’s family owned a factory in Cuba and were ordered to leave at gunpoint in 1960. They boarded a flight that day with few belongings.
To this day, people still risk their lives to flee Cuba on makeshift rafts. The conditions there absolutely suck.
> Most Americans don’t even realize that there are millions of folks in Miami whose parents fled Cuba when the communists took over.
No, we know, we just don't think it should affect our foreign policy.
My own family also fled a similar situation btw, communists ousting them and taking their business, ultimately leading them to emigrate here.
But you have no idea how unsympathetic "pre-revolution Cuban factory owner" sounds lol, IDK how naive you think the rest of us are.
My grandfather's family, which owned the aforementioned business that got taken by communists, didn't do anything of use for other people or even for themselves really (e.g. didn't send kids abroad to get educated, as they should have). So karma got 'em (though ultimately the reason for the revolution could be ascribed more to the moral failings of colonial government than people like them).
Now, here, we see how the rich Cubans here are. How they vote. How they think they are better than other Hispanics, etc. Not interested in doing anything those people want.
Odd to see no mention of the US government's rationale for intervening over their continuing to leave a vaguely weak enemy alone as past administrations have: the US believes that inhibiting Chinese covert activity (real or imagined) has risen in necessity to now outbid the cost of invasion.
This could have only come to pass because the administration has faith in the pessimistic forecasts for peace between Beijing and Washington. If so few private sector forecasters thought Tariffs and Hormuz were important black swans to consider, how can we give the forecasts of no US-China conflict as much credence as we do?
Idk if Hn is the place for my making such remarks, however, as the commentariat has gotten much less confident in the value of sober political analysis than before.
Trump's problem is that he sees the US and the world only through the lens of maximizing profits for his cronies. In the face of global warming and climate change, this is extremely harmful to the country and the world. His attitude is always win-lose, never win-win.
On a recent podcast episode Ezra Klein mentioned something like "when making agreements one should be able to accept the deal of either side" which is something that's stuck with me and is basically an elegant way of describing a win-win situation.
Trump has taken corruption to a new level. Biden was bad, this is worse. It’s like stealing power lines for their copper, the damage to the general wealth is immense. I think a big part of the shift to democrats in advance of the midterms is the hope that democratic oversight will put an end to it.
Either way, this is what the looting stage of collapse looks like to me.
I have no love for communist regimes but this corrupt capitalism alternative understandably isn’t appetizing. Consider the damage the Harvard Institute for International Development did to post USSR and how a country that was eager to adopt western ways was introduced to new levels of looting they didn’t even know was possible. Perhaps if we had a better track record in governance people wouldn’t be so reluctant to adopt it.
It is entirely possible for the US government to have been implementing an awful policy for decades, and for Trump to be cranking it up to 13 and making things massively worse.
Exactly. It's a strange form of whataboutism, mixed with learned helplessness, to imply that having sucked for decades, we can't avoid sucking even more now.
America: Get rid of communism and become a democratic government so that your people are free and your government is not a threat to us. Are you upset that a liberal government is preventing the maturation of an authoritarian communist government so that a result similar to North Korea does not happen? Sanctions and blockades are what achieve this, and these things do not happen with diplomatic handshakes.
Should the Jews that will be killed if we defeat Nazi Germany be thankful as well?
See how stupid that sounds? Fear of collateral damage is something terrorists use to keep the west helpless while they move their goalposts. We shouldn't fall for this silly trap.
The person who wrote this never asked a Cuban immigrant how they felt about the government in Cuba. Many will tell you a story about how their family desperately escaped on a row boat, are lucky to be alive and blame Castro.
The bottom line is that many Cuban immigrants in the United States feel that the current government destroyed the country and should be removed and Marco Rubio’s quest to fix Cuba is a reflection of Cuban immigrants values.
There is a strong argument that the Cuban government has treated many Cuban citizens very badly. But the assertion that this mistreatment is why the US is behaving aggressively towards Cuba is pretty naive. The people in power in the US at the moment do not care about the civil and political rights of Cubans. They care about acquiring Cuba and its natural reaources for themselves and their clients.
>The people in power in the US at the moment do not care about the civil and political rights of Cubans. They care about acquiring Cuba and its natural reaources for themselves and their clients.
I thought the motivation was ideological, chiefly from the cuban exiles voter base, of which Rubio is a part of? Aside from maybe tobacco, cuba doesn't have much natural resources. That's why it's so poor.
The main reason Cuba was valuable to U.S. interests before the Revolution was as a playground for American vacationers. Las Vegas was basically spun up as a replacement Havana after the Revolution took it away from U.S. interests and jet air travel made Nevada a reasonable destination for well-heeled East Coasters.
I think something similar could be true today, and it doesn't require any natural resources beyond cheap labor, Caribbean weather, and an obedient government.
Hot Springs, Arkansas was an alternative during that era.
The nations first national park anchored the attraction, complete with eponymous hot natural water baths. All the big celebrities of the day vacationed there ( alongside all the biggest gangsters, Al Capone included ) and professional baseball teams held spring training there.
Today, Hot Springs is still a pleasant place to visit, but it’s no longer a national draw.
Behind every ideological move is a rich man trying to get richer.
That is to say, ideology may do some heavy lifting, but the buy-in to actually translate that to action requires a profit motive.
Reading current events is a whole lot easier once you disabuse yourself of the idea that everything happens for a reason.
I can't comment much on Cuban-American immigrant feelings about Castro or the current Cuban government, but Marco Rubio's parents fled the US-backed regime of Fulgencio Batista, who Castro overthrew.
Maybe that's an example we should pay attention to though. How many of Cuba's problems are caused by the US doubling-down on trying to interfere? Obviously their current power outages are.
Having angry expats exercise control over foreign policy is stupid.
The rest of us don't need to do anything that doesn't serve us just because they have an axe to grind.
There's a good Scott Horton and Dave Smith conversation about this, but it's so obvious really, when you look at rich Cubans and rich Persians. Those revolutions happened because of their parents and grandparents, and now they want to pretend like they somehow represent the country they left? lol
There is a strong argument that the Cuban government has treated many Cuban citizens badly. But the assertion that this mistreatment is why the US is behaving aggressively towards Cuba is pretty naive. The people in power in the US at the moment do not care about the civil and political rights of Cubans. They care about acquiring Cuba and its natural reaources for themselves and their clients.
Marco Rubio cares about his own quest to be the man who finally frees Cuba from communism. He doesn’t care about natural resources. It’s a pride thing. And I’m fine with that.
> And I’m fine with that.
People, specifically children, are dying:
"infant mortality has doubled to 9.9 per 1,000 births; childhood cancer survival rates have fallen from 85 to 65 per cent; and essential medicines are available at only around 30 per cent of normal supply levels." [1]
Are you fine with that?
[1] Children are dying as US sanctions push Cuba to the brink, warns UN human rights chief https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/06/1167671
Rubio's family left Cuba before the revolution that put Castro in power.
Rubio has been pushing a false narrative of his family's history for a long time.
Not even the slightest justification for inflicting so much suffering on the current population of Cuba.
I visited Cuba and found that Castro's popularity is fairly universal there. I have never been to Miami and don't know any Cuban immigrants, though.
[flagged]
> Many will tell you a story about how their family desperately escaped on a row boat, are lucky to be alive and blame Castro.
Many will also not want to tell you any stories about what their family did in cuba.
Like I'm not trying to downplay the real violence and excesses. But read about how americans talked about cuba pre-castro, what they expected from the place during batista's dictatorship.
The deeply entrenched feudal-type rural poverty provided the raw human material for the mafia to create a vile playground for their own fantasies and sell it to other wealthy americans. Epstein economy shit. Castro didn't come out of nowhere, he harnessed the deep disgust and pain of a people being treated as things for money and pleasure. So yeah the sugar plantation landlords, the batista enforcers, the mafia sex slave sourcers were running for their lives. A lot other people got caught up too, absolutely. But ask your hypothetical cuban immigrant some followup questions. It's not always exactly personal why they hate castro.
[dead]
No offense, in my opinion you are being very arrogant. Foreign intervention doesn’t relate to fixing a country.
Think about how harmful Trump is to his country and how harmful he can be to a country that he doesn’t have any responsibility to. It shouldn’t be difficult to understand.
People who live outside if their country and say things like this are being shallow. They are understandably frustrated but this is not a healthy way as can be seen in numerous examples in history
right yer...Trump admin is gonna pause and hear out their grievances...in a pipe's dream. Blatant corruption with no shame waging unrestricted economic warfare. Greed is the policy.
Every single Cuban in the US despises the communist government in Cuba.
Most Americans don’t even realize that there are millions of folks in Miami whose parents fled Cuba when the communists took over. My father’s family owned a factory in Cuba and were ordered to leave at gunpoint in 1960. They boarded a flight that day with few belongings.
To this day, people still risk their lives to flee Cuba on makeshift rafts. The conditions there absolutely suck.
> Most Americans don’t even realize that there are millions of folks in Miami whose parents fled Cuba when the communists took over.
No, we know, we just don't think it should affect our foreign policy.
My own family also fled a similar situation btw, communists ousting them and taking their business, ultimately leading them to emigrate here.
But you have no idea how unsympathetic "pre-revolution Cuban factory owner" sounds lol, IDK how naive you think the rest of us are.
My grandfather's family, which owned the aforementioned business that got taken by communists, didn't do anything of use for other people or even for themselves really (e.g. didn't send kids abroad to get educated, as they should have). So karma got 'em (though ultimately the reason for the revolution could be ascribed more to the moral failings of colonial government than people like them).
Now, here, we see how the rich Cubans here are. How they vote. How they think they are better than other Hispanics, etc. Not interested in doing anything those people want.
Odd to see no mention of the US government's rationale for intervening over their continuing to leave a vaguely weak enemy alone as past administrations have: the US believes that inhibiting Chinese covert activity (real or imagined) has risen in necessity to now outbid the cost of invasion.
This could have only come to pass because the administration has faith in the pessimistic forecasts for peace between Beijing and Washington. If so few private sector forecasters thought Tariffs and Hormuz were important black swans to consider, how can we give the forecasts of no US-China conflict as much credence as we do?
Idk if Hn is the place for my making such remarks, however, as the commentariat has gotten much less confident in the value of sober political analysis than before.
It's already in the hands of rich men:
"A decade ago, Forbes estimated Fidel Castro’s personal net worth at $900 million."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/keithflamer/2016/11/26/10-surpr...
I'm sure most of that went to his sons (the ones that weren't Prime Minister of Canada).
You could make this a headline about anything and it would be true
The U.S. Is (insert anything) to Make Rich Men Richer
Trump's problem is that he sees the US and the world only through the lens of maximizing profits for his cronies. In the face of global warming and climate change, this is extremely harmful to the country and the world. His attitude is always win-lose, never win-win.
On a recent podcast episode Ezra Klein mentioned something like "when making agreements one should be able to accept the deal of either side" which is something that's stuck with me and is basically an elegant way of describing a win-win situation.
[dead]
I hope they continue terrorizing the communist regime that tortures dissidents.
Fascists torturing communists... seems familiar.
[flagged]
He IS doing it. He could choose to do better.
He doesn’t get a pass.
Trump has taken corruption to a new level. Biden was bad, this is worse. It’s like stealing power lines for their copper, the damage to the general wealth is immense. I think a big part of the shift to democrats in advance of the midterms is the hope that democratic oversight will put an end to it.
Either way, this is what the looting stage of collapse looks like to me.
I have no love for communist regimes but this corrupt capitalism alternative understandably isn’t appetizing. Consider the damage the Harvard Institute for International Development did to post USSR and how a country that was eager to adopt western ways was introduced to new levels of looting they didn’t even know was possible. Perhaps if we had a better track record in governance people wouldn’t be so reluctant to adopt it.
It is entirely possible for the US government to have been implementing an awful policy for decades, and for Trump to be cranking it up to 13 and making things massively worse.
Most things aren't binary.
The extremity of the current administration's actions do not absolve the sins of others.
The extremity of the current administration's actions should not be ignored just because others did some things in a similar direction.
"Yawn, same shit different day" is how we sleepwalk ourselves into fascism.
Comments like that aren’t “sleepwalking”. They are complicit.
Exactly. It's a strange form of whataboutism, mixed with learned helplessness, to imply that having sucked for decades, we can't avoid sucking even more now.
Free markets harm children and people of Cuba, but communism doesn't, I'm sick of these leftists.
What part of the free market demands the blockade currently imposed on Cuba?
America: Get rid of communism and become a democratic government so that your people are free and your government is not a threat to us. Are you upset that a liberal government is preventing the maturation of an authoritarian communist government so that a result similar to North Korea does not happen? Sanctions and blockades are what achieve this, and these things do not happen with diplomatic handshakes.
[dead]
Maybe. But also, if the regime falls, you know who will become richer and more healthy? ALL CUBANS!
If bad people do the right thing for the wrong reasons, we should be thankful, not angry.
Should the Cubans that will inevitably be killed along the way be thankful as well? Or the Cubans currently suffering due to the blockade?
Even for clearly despotic regimes, overthrowing them is not the obviously right thing.
Should the Jews that will be killed if we defeat Nazi Germany be thankful as well?
See how stupid that sounds? Fear of collateral damage is something terrorists use to keep the west helpless while they move their goalposts. We shouldn't fall for this silly trap.