Let's just stop for a minute and tell the truth about U.S. Cuba policy. It's dictated by a few hardcore Cuban-Americans, who live principally in Florida, and who pay vast sums of money into the political coffers of such luminaries as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Ray Martinez, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, and others.
In return, these congress persons vote for—and, worse, cajole their fellow feckless congresspersons to vote with them—legislation that grants millions of taxpayer dollars to the people in Florida who run the "anti-Castro campaign". This campaign consists principally of these folks putting the money in their pockets and lifting their standard of living. Rarely if ever do they do anything to advance democracy in Cuba. What's wrong with this picture?
Well, for starters, not a lot that anyone would object to these days because this is the way most politics is conducted in America today. Whether it's Iraq, ENRON, U.S. actions to help Katrina victims, or thousands of dollars stored in a congressperson's freezer unit, Washington politicians are not noted for their brainpower, their honesty, or their decency. When you find one who breaks this mold—like Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska—he or she can tolerate only one or two terms in Washington and then they must return to heartland America and take a month or two of resuscitation so as to revive their fundamental feelings about what America ought to be about.
But policy toward Cuba is different.
Cuba is only 90 miles off our coast. It's 11 million people are very talented, possessed like the city-state of Singapore of a lot more brainpower and energy than their island's size would indicate, and incredibly altruistic—the most recent manifestation of which is that they send more than 30,000 of their medical personnel overseas to help impoverished people who otherwise could not afford any medical care.
These really decent people also live on an island where oil exists. Oil on land and oil offshore.
But because of the stupid policy that those old SOBs in Florida have us locked into, American companies cannot offer to recover the oil that Cuba possesses. Instead, China may be doing the drilling. Or Venezuela whose leader, Hugo Chavez, loves the U.S. so much that he bashes us every chance he gets.
What's wrong with THIS picture?
The bottom line here is so simple it makes your head hurt (like President Bush and our Iraq policy).
We need immediately to lift at least that part of the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba that deals with our oil companies so that they can bid on drilling in Cuban territory. Leave the rest of our idiotic policy in place if you want to (America seems incapable of changing it). But since access to oil relates directly to our national security, let's do this little bit immediately.
Since I know that every American with a brain (which is most of them) understands the truth of what I'm saying, why can't we do this?
Because the Cheney-Bush lock on stupidity is impenetrable as long as the separate but equal branch of government known as the Congress refuses to find its courage and reverse this stupidity.
-- Lawrence Wilkerson