Limbaugh and Krauthammer are totally into killing or subjugating everyone who thinks differently that these nazi fascist neocons will never change. They would never want to make peace with anyone. It's just a terrible shame they control our government and have most Americans in their stranglehold. They don't seem to ever understand that their are real actual living breathing human beings in Cuba and everywhere else in the world.

Hitler is still alive and well among the nazi like tactics of the neocons.

Money and votes talk. Cuban Americans are tired of sanctions that yield nothing. They will concoct a deal with the first Cuban leader whose last name is not Castro, or certainly before US grain or other exporters obtain the benefits of trade normalization. Their worst nightmare would be to see non-Cubans invest unfettered in yanqui retirement communities on "their" ancestral soil. Florida may again chose the US presidency in 2008, so (listen, pols) here's the deal: let an expat commitee guide the post-Castro transition, picking the winners and losers. As in the case of Russia, there will indeed be winners, just as there will be losers.

Restoration of trade ties to the US will not suddenly enrich Cuba any more than they did before 1959. The US makes little that cannot be bought in Europe or Asia, and no country ever got rich selling sugar. Goods will remain scarce on Cuban shelves until 1) prices and exchange rates are freed and 2) productivity rises. Right now, plenty of the labor produces little, both because Castroite factor prices are meaningless and there is no incentive to do anything more than necessary to get one's rations. Market reforms will raise living standards for a few, but leave much of the workforce redundant. Miami will receive a million visa applications from Elián's it is no longer eager to embrace. Healthcare workers, no matter what their ideology, will find high wages in the US to be an irresistable draw.

Result: trickle-up prosperity. Aging gringos will obtain the benefits of cheap retirement sites and healthcare workers, mostly paid under the table. The public treasury will pick up the cost of importing more poverty. Cuba will itself morph into an Atlantic City mix of luxury and squalor. Shelves will be well stocked. The poverty of the Afro Cubans or the whole 30% bottom of the income scale may never descend to Haitian or Dominican levels, but neither will they match the present humble but guaranteed standard. With the freedom to succeed will also come the freedom to fail.

This should not trouble any free marketer. Just as fear of punishment must deter the felon, so must the fear of hardship drive the loafer. Some must become rich--even very rich--so that others try also. Falling wages and unemployment are a quick cure for a lack of enterprise. The poor should either "vote with their feet" or be taken by the Devil. Blessed are the rich and mighty. And liberals--let us be candid--have lost any courage to say otherwise.

You're right. I was a complete fucking asshole. Guess I should have gone for the decaf this morning. I'll try to do better.

Middle Aged Veteran. I'm a veteran too. You are correct. The old "90 miles" cliche is just awful. I borrowed it from the old cold war alarmists. I'll try to do better on that next time.

Sans invectives: Idealism and false pride has kept the U.S. on the sidelines for far too long when it comes to Cuba. I'm going to have a party on the day Fidel dies. Then I'm going to sign up for the first flight into free Havana to party with the Cubans. Raul Castro isn't going to last even as long as a snowball in hell, mark my words.

Now that there's confirmed oil on the north coast, Cuba is a player in the Caribbean basin. Get ready as the U.S. State Department suddenly remembers the Monroe Doctrine and starts bitching about Chinese drill rigs.

Everybody happy now?

I keep hearing variations on the cliche that Cuba is 90 miles from the United States, such as the last posting about Cuba being "a fortress' and situated 90 miles from our shores. Or another post saying Cuba is 90 miles from Miami.

PUH-LEEEZE. Cuba is 90 miles from the island of Key West. Key West is an additional 160 miles by US 1 to Miami, perhaps 140 miles by air. So Miami is more like a couple of hundred miles from Havana.

But, hey that doesn't sound quite as sexy as repeating that "Cuba is 90 miles from our shores!" This is something that has been repeated for decades by TV personalities and pundits who apparently never opened an atlas and picked up a ruler to do some fact-checking.

Just because you are right doesn’t grant you license to be a complete fucking asshole.

Your insults subtract from the valid points you were trying to make. They turn people off and make you look like Dick Cheney.

Ebloviate? Hmmm, I smell a Billo fan.

That's right, SR, you've never been to the Caribbean. That much is obvious. And, I think you're flat out lying when you say "I'ved in a few other poor third world countries." I wish I had a Euro for every wing nut I've heard say that. It's right up there with "some of my best friends are negros."

You want to know what my posts say about me? Then read some of them. If you did, you'd know that I'm no Lefty.

"It's just an island with a few million people."

Really? The largest island in the Antilles, with 11.4 million people, situated like a fortress only 90 miles from our shores and strategically positioned as the gatekeeper to the Gulf of Mexico and the western Caribbean basin? Just an insignificant blip.

But since you've never been to the Caribbean and the only thing that stimulates your idiotic brain is baseball, let me enlighten you a bit.

The U.S. Geological Survey reports that within the northwest territorial waters of Cuba there are more than

4.6 billion to 9.3 billion barrels of crude and 9.8 trillion to 21.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

I know, I know, SR, numbers confuse you unless they are useless baseball stats. But let's put it in perspective:

That's roughly the same size field as the ANWR, and you don't need even a quarter of the extraction and development overhead to get at it.

Cuba recently opened bidding for drilling leases on 59 blocks covering 74 thousand square miles of subsea territory.

Not that I would expect a baseball moron to understand the implications of this discovery, but let me try to help you: None of the leases went to American oil exploration/development companies. Who got the leases?

Spain and India went together in a joint venture and Norway has some promising blocks, as does Canada. You know who else has rigs out there?

Fucking Communist China, that's who! Oh, but you probably don't care about China, they don't even have a minor league farm club.

But while it might not bother an ignoramous like you, it sure as hell bothers U.S. Republicans. Suddenly, the smell of crude oil and natural gas has made them forget all about their moralistic and self-defeating embargo. They want it lifted! Can you believe that? After all these years of posturing and finger wagging, their principles take a back seat to their greed and now they want Congress to lift one little part of the embargo -- the one that has to do with oil. Leave the rest of the embargo in place, but exempt petroleum so we can get in on the action.

Like I said, the U.S. is always a decade or two late to the party. But it's never too late to try to barge in.

Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, have introduced two bills that would exempt oil from the embargo.

Craig told a reporter that "prohibition on trade with Cuba has accomplished just about zero." Ominously, he added: "China, as we speak, has a drilling rig off the coast of Cuba."

What's going to happen when those fields start coming on line? Communist China and Socialist Cuba (post-Fidel) are going to get rich selling petro to the U.S. and using the money to find new ways to screw with us all over Latin America. Hell, Halliburton and Bechtel will probably get the contract to build a subsea pipeline to Florida. Never let a little thing like National Security get in the way of making money!

Oh and SR, please spare me your righteous compassion for the downtrodden of Cuba. You pretty much blew that when you showed your racism and dissed the whole place as being insignificant except for baseball draft picks. Besides if I'm a Birkenstock Lefty, what's that make you? Please! You wing nuts don't give a damn about the dissapeared teachers, writers and certainly not gays, of Cuba or probably anywhere else.

How 'bout them Yankees, moron.