Posted on 05/29/2015 1:28:34 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The United States took another step toward normalization of relations with Cuba on Friday, officially removing its onetime Communist foe from its official list of state sponsors of terror.
The White House initiated a 45-day congressional review of Cuba’s status on April 14, so Friday’s announcement is not a surprise. But it’s an important symbolic step as President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro try to thaw more than five decades of frozen diplomatic ties.
Republicans long ago conceded Cuba would be removed from the list and vowed not to fight it. “We can’t undo it,” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) told Foreign Policy in an interview in April.
Getting rid of the terror designation is an important part of the ongoing process but additional hurdles remain. The State Department has yet to announce a site for the new U.S. Embassy in Havana, where it has had an interest section for more than 30 years. Obama also has yet to nominate an ambassador to Cuba, an appointment that is expected to face a tough fight in the Senate. There, anti-Castro lawmakers and 2016 GOP presidential contenders Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have vowed to block any nomination to the post.
The Senate must confirm all ambassador appointments....
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
Perhaps if only given 55 more years, the Cuban Embargo would have worked.
If Saudi Arabia isn’t on the list, then nobody should be.
Cuba’s only mistake was not having a large supply of cheap labor.
Off topic, but, want to say —
Obama said, relating to Cuba that, if you are doing the same thing for 50 years and it’s not working, then you should try something different.
I would like to ask Obama — we are 50 years into the War on Poverty. After 50 years of that, we see that it isn’t working. So will Obama use the same criteria used to evaluate our situation with Cuba, the view that long term policies are not working, and apply the same criteria to the War on Poverty?? Clearly decades long policies have failed. We fought a war on poverty ,and poverty won.
“Cuba’s only mistake was not having a large supply of cheap labor.”
No, those Cuban baseball players don’t work for cheap.
What a crock.
When The FBI Tracked Terror-Suspects—Literally!
Humberto Fontova | May 10, 2013
The date was November 17, 1962 and the FBI wanted a clean sweep of the three top plotters, all Cuban agents. The night before—relying on their bedrock tool of human intelligence: moles, snitches—they’d pieced together the plot puzzle. The resulting picture must have staggered the FBI men. These men had served at their posts during WWII and the height of the Cold War and seen plenty. But this?!
The Castro brothers’ and Che Guevara’s agents had targeted Macy’s, Gimbels, Bloomingdales, and Manhattan’s Grand Central Station with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The Holocaust was set for detonation the following week, on the day after Thanksgiving.
Some perspective: for their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all 10 of them, that killed and maimed almost 2,000 people, al-Qaeda used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT.
Castro and Che’s agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year’s biggest shopping day. Macy’s gets 50,000 shoppers that one day. Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children—actually, given the date and targets, probably mostly women and children—were to be incinerated and entombed.
The rest of the history
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