To make it less abstract, Cuban-Americans are heavily concentrated in Florida and so are an important constituency there. Easing sanctions on Cuba is not something they want, in the aggregate. Politicians that want Florida therefore don't want to do it. Party leadership (for both parties, but most importantly the Republicans) therefore doesn't push for it because it's such a losing issue. Essentially there is imagined to be no upside politically to easing on Cuba, while the downside is very clear (you lose Florida).

I'm not sure how we could move Cuban-Americans somewhere else unless you are suggesting forced relocations to other parts of the U.S.

I don't disagree about your analysis of the politics but I still think the math just doesn't pencil out. On the other side of the issue from all those Cubans who don't want normalized relations is business interests that do.

Levis wants to sell them jeans. Apple wants to sell them phones. GM wants to sell them truck. Raytheon wants to sell them radar systems. There's just so much money to be made when a formerly isolated market become unlocked that I think you could win back Florida and more with all the donations from the big corporations that would stand to benefit from normalized relations with Cuba.

I think the only reason nothing happens is because there's no one sector that really stands to benefit and can make a concentrated lobbying effort whereas the people that don't want it are a unified ethnic group which for the purposes of high level political analysis can roughly be seen as a voting block.

Ditto all this for Iran, but move all the decimals to the right once or twice.

Cuba is a poor, small country. They can't buy very significant quantities of jeans or phones.

(11.3M people, per capita GDP $9,500 or so.)

I also wouldn't discount the power of inertia in public policy. Why spend capital on this relatively minor issue when we can just keep the status quo going indefinitely with no debate?

I think biorach is quite correct, and that is not even as strange as our commitment to Ethanol, which is largely due to the Iowa caucuses. It's very popular in that state-- they grow a lot of corn. It also used to be the first state of the presidential primaries (I believe this is changing). So if you wanted to run for president at some time (and a lot of powerful politicians do) you had to be in favor of Ethanol subsidies.

The assessment is largely correct.

US Presidential politics has been on a knife edge for the past 2+ decades, with multiple popular-vote-minority presidents elected (or appointed, according to some, notably Bush-Gore 2000).

There are a handful of swing states, with Ohio and Florida topping the list via Google Ngram Viewer. The term "swing state of " starts appearing notably around 1995, and has been persistent since the 2000 election.

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=swing+state+of...>

(Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, New , Illinois, and Virginia make the top six over that period. "New" seems likely to be "New York", though it could be the combined effect of "New York" and "New Jersey".)

And again, Cuban politics and policy is absolutely pivotal in Florida.