Politics. Florida used to be swing state in Presidential Elections. The Cuban community in Florida loses their shit if President talks about lifting the sanctions and will vote other way. If all Cubans had settled in California or Wyoming, we likely would have lifted sanctions a long time ago since they wouldn't have as much political power. It's why we lifted sanctions on Vietnam so long ago. Vietnamese who fled mostly immigrated to California and can't impact California voting Democrat.

It almost seems the Cuban exiles want the people they left behind in Cuba to suffer as much as possible. What else have the sanctions achieved?

There seems to be a belief that if sanctions remain THIS YEAR, regime change will come to Cuba. It didn't work. Well, NEXT YEAR they will, they have to! Repeat for 50 years.

Most people fleeing Cuba blame current regime for their suffering with good reason. So they have a desire to see it overthrown.

Why don't they blame on the oppressive country making the whole south american continent poor?

Nobody made south America poor; like every continent poverty was the natural state. South America just did a worse job at developing the infrastructure, rule of law, institutions and culture necessary to lift itself out of poverty as fast as north America.

With the exception of Argentina, which after WW2 was one of the richest countries in the world, but through bad political choices ended up impoverishing itself.

That quite a wild thing to say about an entire continent whose politics were almost completely manipulated by some 2 powerful countries after WW2.

> which after WW2 was one of the richest countries in the world

Oh yeah, I wonder what changed then.

Idle thought - I wonder how much the German contingent had to do with these choices.

If you have any desire to not be remarkably ignorant of 20th century history, I’d suggest spending a few minutes reading about who in North America did a bunch of coups and otherwise created the conditions for a lack of rule of law in South America.

It's entirely their fault if the CIA keeps giving money to terrorists. No other country is involved with that.

What does South America have to do with Cuba? And why do you assume that South America is poor? Much of South America enjoys a high standard of living, and is nowhere near as poor as most of Central America, for example, and definitely much richer than Africa.

I'm surprised at this take. It seems readily apparent that Cuban exiles want their countrymen and women to be free from state communist control and have the ability to speak their mind, practice economic freedom and their religion, which is I understand is very Catholic from Spanish influences. I don't know how you can say Cuban exiles want the people they left behind to suffer.

I am saying that because the sanctions haven't achieved anything positive for the last decades. At some point people just have to admit that they don't work but cause a lot of suffering. I bet if the US traded with Cuba, the communist regime would quickly fall apart like the Eastern block did.

That's right. US trade with China has exploded in the last couple of decades and China's communist regime is falling apart quickly.

I wouldn’t call China a communist regime. They are highly capitalist. What’s communist about China other than the name of the party?

The lifetime dictatorship like any other communist nations in the world.

People who left want to put pressure on the government that they hate and they don’t mind sanctioning the people to do it.

A bunch of Floridians who are, or are descended from, folks who had their land and businesses seized during the revolution are holding grudges and won’t let go of them until they’re given their stuff back or a ton of money, which, this far on, isn’t happening.

Florida is important in Presidential elections.

US elections are structured such that dumb stuff like a relatively small—but loud—and also hopeless interest in a single US state can influence policy and make a whole bunch more lives worse for no good reason.

AFAIK that’s basically the story.

I would still hold a grudge. I hold historical grudges going back centuries.

Right. I still want back Constantinople.

Native Americans called, they want their land back.

see, that's Castro mistake. he didn't buy scalps from land owner exploiters. imagine if all natives were in Florida today instead of dead.

Russians were more aligned with usa tho...

Still mad about Amalek.

Sometimes I want to but it's hard when every European country has tried to kill you. (Maybe there's one that was good to Jews, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't, for the simple reason that all the Jews would go there then, and the countries all the Jews went to, Spain and then Poland, then tried to kill us.) I don't want to have a grudge against a continent.

Albania? Bulgaria?

1. Albania was part of the Ottoman Empire, which, while better than most of Europe for Jews, was not great; being "better than most of Europe" typically meant "you don't get killed every year" and still allows for significant antisemitism. I am willing to grant that they may not have wanted to be part of the Ottoman Empire, though, and there's little on antisemitic massacres. So I concede that I do not need to hold a grudge against Albania. Thank you, Albania.

2. As for Bulgaria...not deporting Jews to their death for one small period of time != lack of antisemitism in the past few hundred years.

According to the USHMM,[1] Bulgaria's actions in World War Two included:

Instituting laws that, among other things, forbid Jews from marrying non-Jews and restricted where Jews could live and what jobs they could have.

Deporting Jews who were not in Bulgaria pre-war (its borders expanded) to their deaths.

Sending Jews to slave labor camps. [1]https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/bulgaria

So, no, Bulgaria was antisemitic in the past few hundred years.

I don't think it's fair to apply that to Poland. Jews were well integrated into Polish society for most of its history during the Commonwealth era. Poland-Lithuania was a very pluralistic state with explicit protection in law for religious liberty, something that didn't exit in pretty much any other European state during the early modern era. The inquisition didn't operate there after the mid 16th century at all, just around the time when Spain was ramping it up.

Most of the examples of antisemitic repression in Poland took place during the post-partition era in the 19th century, when Poland was ruled by Russia, and Poles themselves faced similar repression by the Russian authorities.

I think that's really underselling the political persecution that many have suffered in Cuba. It's far and away from just wanting reparations for land grabs.

We have sanctions on Cuba for the same reason we have sanctions on Russia and Venezuela now- we don't want to fund what their government is doing, and allying with them gives us little to nothing in return.

That said, it's pretty obvious that economic sanctions aren't bringing about regime change. I don't think anyone has the stomach for putting boots on the ground, though.

It may not in the short or medium term cause regime change, but sufficiently large sanctions on a country do stop it from growing in influence, wealth and power. Eventually, after some number of generations, Cuba could be so poor in comparison to the rising tide of the rest of the world, that it's not even able to defend itself or maintain government control. At some point, the disparity in power becomes overwhelming and you have super high tech society surrounding stone age cave men.

Can that really happen? Won’t one of the visiting tourists bring news of the wheel or what have you eventually?

Seems more likely sanctions would cause a steady state where the sanctioned country is some n months/years behind where it would otherwise be, speaking as a complete geopolitical layman anyway.

Not OP but the problem is not awareness of modern solutions that prevents sanctioned societies from modernizing, the isolation from trade prevents local industry from growing which keeps society living at subsistence levels and when everyone is poor you don’t have a class of people with spare time or the resources necessary to build up local industry that brings about capital that brings about infrastructure modernization etc.

The problem is that not enough nations are participating in the sanctions. Multiple generations should have been plenty of time, especially given the harms done to the population in the interim.

> That said, it's pretty obvious that economic sanctions aren't bringing about regime change.

On the flip side, you have China, where US pretty much helped build up their economy and hoped for a peaceful and democratic outcome. How well did that go?

The USSR and China and prime examples of sanctioning vs opening up. One is still around and persucting its people and the other is on the dust bin of history. The problem with the Cuba sanctions is that a large chunk of countries aren't sanctioning Cuba. If everybody got behind the sanctions regime change would happen. Half assing it won't cut it.

> the other is on the dust bin of history.

and yet US is spending taxpayer money to defend Ukraine.

Why wouldn’t we spend a small fraction of our military budget on bleeding an adversary dry?

same reason you don't corner a rabid animal

The MLRS weapon systems shouldn’t be creating corners if deployed effectively.

They aren't corned though. All they have to do is leave. Then they stop losing so many troops and they have their sanctions lifted.

What you wrote here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41025321

"So?

I'd rather live in the modern day, "unequally" with the rich, than starve or die of disease equally with the rich of the middle ages.

Just because the rich have 100Xed in quality of life over the last century, doesn't negate the fact that the poor have 10Xed in quality of life.

Making everyone equal is easy. Just make them all equally dead, starving, or miserable, just like they were in past centuries."

Shows a lack of historical knowledge. If all were so miserable, how did they built the greatest civilization, Christendom? Did Newton or Leibniz starve to death? The picture you are drawing here of past centuries is ahistorical and completely disregards the unbelievable quality of art and architecture that was possible during times where people were, according to you, "dead, starving, or miserable". (As if they aren't today.)

I don't want to live at all. I would kill myself immediately did I not fear God, Christ, and eternal damnation.

Shows a lack of historical knowledge. All that wealth of Imperial Europe was built off the backs of serfs and slaves.

The Jackson-Vanik amendment was only repealed in 2012, at the same point when the Magnitsky act was signed. I don't think Putin & co see a lifting of sanctions as a possibility, given past experience.

Ok, that doesn't change the fact that all that is happening is that they are losing more and more lives, military power, and are suffering significant economic damage.

Thats the point. They are taking nothing but losses. All for some land that is now worthless after the war.

They obviously see things differently. You cannot claim that the particular sanctions regime in place pushes Putin & co towards your desired course of action without understanding their motivations.

> without understanding their motivations

Oh they are absolutely have motivations against their own people dieing in the hundreds of thousands and they have motivations against them losing significant military assets and having massive amounts of economic damages.

Those are normal motivations they every county has.

That's why the best way to get them to change behavior is to "motivate" them with those consequences.

Current analysis is that Russia has maybe another year and a half left in their war before it ends due to these "motivational factors".

Still a ways to go, but manageable.

Define “small fraction” please.

We've spent a bit over $100B in 2.5 years. Our annual military budget is about $900B, so about 5% annual to strategically neuter the Russian military.

A few hundred Bradleys and Abrams, weapons systems that were designed to murder soviets, which we built by the thousands, in the hope that we could defend Europe from an invasion it turns out wasn't ever likely to happen.

Those machines are not fit for a war with China, which is our current fear, and have to be replaced anyway. It literally costs obscene amounts of money to scrap and disarm them, but it turns out it's very cheap to let them save a few Ukrainian lives.

Nearly every dollar "spent" for Ukraine was either spent in the 80s military build up or is loaned to Ukraine so they can purchase our stuff.

The US (and Russia...) made a commitment to protect Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine giving up its newly-owned nuclear weapons after the USSR broke up.

Are you suggesting that USSR is invading Ukraine? Maybe we are living in different realities since we the USSR no longer exist.

Are you suggesting that Russia is not USSR's legal successor. Maybe we are living in different realities since Russia still exists.

Russia was a state of the USSR, not the USSR itself. That is like saying the Roman Empire exists today because Italy is the successor.

Don't make such far-flung analogies.

The Russia/USSR transition is more like that of the Roman Republic to the Principate/Dominate. Or the different stages of other closely related empires throughout history after dealing with internal regime, partial reversals and so forth.

Even Putin sees Russia/USSR as parts of a organic historic continuum, and this is a key component of his rhetoric. That the USSR's territorial losses are Russia's losses and must be reversed if Russia it to "save face" and so on.

In some aspects we could say that, given the high number of USSR tanks, ships and weapons that are being destroyed by the Ukrainian army just right now.

USSR was a necessary collaborator in this invasion.

The USSR is gone. It can't collaborate with anything. Did your great-great-great-great-great grandparents who died before the internet collbarate with you to write this post?

> allying with them gives us little to nothing in return.

Recent events have shown that to be very much not the case. Over the past few weeks we've had news of the Russian Navy paying port calls and the Chinese building major signals intelligence capabilities. Wouldn't it be better to have them as an ally?

It's always interesting to contrast our relationships with Cuba vs Vietnam. We fought a long hot war with Vietnam yet today we have good relations with them. Obviously we can't say we would have a good relationship with Cuba if we had been nicer to them but it certainly makes me think.

> Wouldn't it be better to have them as an ally?

I strongly suspect the possibility of normalizing relations while the Castros held power would have been impossible.

I had actually expected some progress on this front after they got new blood in a few years ago, but he's much the same, and given their relations with other sanctioned countries like North Korea, and calling Israel a terrorist state, I don't really see much desire for change from either side.

> We have sanctions on Cuba for the same reason we have sanctions on Russia and Venezuela

Many senior government officials over the years, including then Vice President Cheney, have plainly said that our interest in Venezuela is their oil. The sanctions, as in any country, are about wanting control over their resources.

I find it odd when the left criticizes the US for supporting dictatorships in places like Iraq, South America, etc.

Then when it comes to Cuba, another dictatorship, the left complains the US is applying sanctions.

It seems inconsistent.

There is a huge gap between overthrowing regimes to put your own dictator in place, and not putting sanctions toward a neighboring country.

Most people are pushing for the latter, to get a more neutral approach to foreign relations.

I find it odd when people cast "the left" as some kind of homogeneous singular mass.

It seems divorced from reality.

My statement doesn't assume a homogenous singular mass.

There are opinions that come from different groups on the political spectrum, that pop up again and again and can be regarded as "common beliefs".

My comment is based on that.

- Supporting regimes

- Working against them with sanctions

Don’t you see any other options here?

> we don't want to fund what their government is doing

What is their government doing that is so terrible?

Anyway let's suppose Cuba is a brutal dictatorship, even though it really isn't by any metric. Why are there no sanctions on Saudi Arabia? Why no sanctions on Taiwan during the white terror? Why no sanctions on Chile when they threw alive protesters from flying helicopters? I could go on for a while.

>What is their government doing that is so terrible?

Surviving while Communist.

My whole family was murdered by the government of Cuba because they verbally disagreed with Fidel and communism. No crimes other than speaking out were committed. That's what they're doing that is so terrible.

That's how revolutions work, if you disagree you usually get killed.

The thing is that people would get killed for disagreeing even under Batista. If your family was happy with Batista then I don't think they were in a clean line of business.

The US did put an arms embargo on Batista's government, though far too late given the violent suppression of the protests towards the end.

I agree, especially considering that Batista had been sold arms until 1958, when the fights with the rebels had been ongoing for a while already (1956 I believe). The result is that Batista fought the rebels using USA weapons, embargo or not.

Batista was a dictator too. No one, except criminals, liked him.

Do you own anything of value? What about your family?

Now let's try practicing some empathy: How would you feel if I just took that from you?

In this scenario, should everyone born in the same city as you be punished for your crimes?

This is foundational to American legal system in many cases. If your local cops for instance unjustly beat say Cubans and get sued for it the inhabitants will pay and possibly even their children through debt.

Well, that's how it should work. Qualified immunity massively complicates this in favor of the cop and therefore the city employing said cop and the residents of the city. It is technically not impossible to win such a case if you get a court to take it, but you might be facing some insurmountable odds getting a court to take the case.

Oh, I get it. It’s just not gonna get them anything. That ship sailed decades ago. On a policy level, all this is doing is causing harm.

Ah. So uk should sanction the whole USA, on account of that revolution that costed some people something?

They did and it took a war and a long time for relations to be reestablished

Not true. After the Treaty of Paris (1783) was signed, trade between the US and UK resumed almost immediately; and diplomatic relations were reestablished in 1785. Shortly after the war (1793), when France and Britain went to war, rather than back up the French, the US signed the Jay Treaty to maintain trade and positive relations with the UK... angering France who helped us gain independence.

Other than the revolutionary war from 1776 to 1785, the other break we had was from 1812-1815 during the War of 1812.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom%E2%80%93United_...

Ah ok so other than the war and the tarrifs and the blockade it isnt true

the point is it took less than a decade and half...

Sorry, but I don’t think families who escaped in those times were exactly just innocent property owners.

Sorry, but that does not matter. If they did anything illegal, they should be prosecuted by and in the country it happened, but you are presuming collective guilt here. That is always, universally, the wrong thing to do.

We are talking about the descendants of the wealthy or dissident people who were escaping the Cuban revolution, where Cuba at the time was largely owned by foreign sugar plantations which was perpetuated by the the brutal military dictatorship of Batista, which was supported by the US government as well as organized crime (and where one ends and the other begins is sometimes unclear…)

It’s a tale as old as time!

The legacy of colonialism still casts a dark shadow. You can replace who rules much easier than changing how they rule. Batista a dictator replaced by Castro another dictator.

Yes and collective guilt is still wrong. Being a descendant is not a punishable deed, nor should it be. Also many professionals had to leave too.

It was a better lie when "the people we robbed and killed totally deserved it" was about Kulaks. Seriously it is the same victim blaming bullshit to absolve a government of thieves.

Many were. My grandfather was just a doctor that owned a townhouse. My mom had her toy bear's head ripped off by customs as she was leaving to check she wasn't smuggling gold out of the country. My grandfather was completely uninvolved in the war, like the vast majority of Cubans. Castro promised everyone that Cuba would become a democracy. Stopped buying the leftist propaganda you've been fed. You have 10% of a country fleeing in 3 years and you people still can't admit you were wrong, it's worse than a cult.

The bright side is, despite the suffering involved, moving to America is the greatest thing that could have happened to my family.

"My grandfather was merely part of the middle class that supported and legitimized the brutal regime in question," isn't the absolution you seem to think it is. To the sizeable population of the have-nots, "I'm just providing the best for my family," amidst such persecution sounds a lot like, "F*ck you, got mine." My (futile) hope is that people who are aware of this dynamic would put less energy into seeking vengeance and more into looking at analogous circumstances in the US and joining with their fellow educated professionals to not repeat the mistakes of such gross inequality and bougie apathy.

And while, "They were mean to my mom's stuffed animal," is comically evil, in a way, the maids throwing out my teddy bear in the name of our hotel's efficient running when I left it in the room upon checking out doesn't damn Capitalism wholesale. Sometimes people do stupid, mean, but ultimately innocuous things in the interests of keeping it moving, no matter the overarching system. It sucks, I want my teddy back, but my take-away is not advocating to punish the state of North Carolina socioeconomically until Republicans are purged from the government. That would be unhinged.

I guess that the million people who have escaped in the last couple of years are also guilty of something.

Yeah, we killed the mosquitoes that don't let us sleep and gave us Dengue every month because the gov can't provide electricity and if you protest you dissapear to jail

Depends; were I or my family aligned or complicit with a military dictatorship?

thanks for letting us know you never read a book and take lessons from the tv.

Florida was relevant in US elections. When was the last time it was up for grabs?

It is actually interesting, a state converting to single-party rule significantly reduces the electoral leverage it has.

> When was the last time it was up for grabs?

Obama won it in 2012.

That isn't that long ago in electoral cycles.

Obama did start warming relations, probably due to that shift. Trump reversed it. I expect it’ll continue to, at best, see-saw until Republicans are comfortable enough with their advantage in Florida to ignore the Cuban vote.

It was reversed since it was a campaign promise. The idea was that all that money from tourism was only helping the Castro regime. A sentiment I'm sure most Cubans are not happy about.

DeSantis won by 0.5% in 2018…

> A bunch of Floridians who are, or are descended from, folks who had their land and businesses seized during the revolution are holding grudges

They should've learned from the French making sure there's nobody left to hold a grudge.

Killing people who did nothing wrong always puts you on the right side.

...are you seriously arguing for genocide?

Whenever you have to ask that question, it is often a better idea to sit down with a nice cup of tea, and take some time to reconsider what the person you are replying to was intending to do with their comment.

The comment pokes fun at people holding grudges for that long, on behalf of their ancestors, and at the whole situation in general. Ultimately is is meant to make people think whether demanding reparations from a less well-off people is really a better idea than just moving on. If everyone held grudges like that, no two people on earth would have good relations and we'd all sit in our little caves brooding over some slight our neighbor's ancestors inflicted on our family ten generations ago.

No, I'm not arguing for genocide. But thanks for the laugh.

Fun fact, I'm a grandchildren of poles who lived in what was polish land but given to Ukraine after WW2 when Stalin moved Ukraine westwards (and compensated Poland with former German land).

I received a compensation 60 years after WW2, but it was few thousand euros (many generations have passed). And by the way it was the polish, not Ukrainian government that compensated us.

> US elections are structured such that dumb stuff like a relatively small—but loud—and also hopeless interest

I can tell you, not just the US.

See: farmers having an absolute chokehold on the EU despite virtually everyone hating them, and them only being a tiny percentage of population, votes or GDP.

Off topic but, I am curious, why would people hate the people that produce their food? Seems like a footgun position to take.

Usually problems vis-a-vis farmers come from farmers being exalted just like you're doing, so politically they've been given a lot of leeway for government subsidies and entitlements. There are many farmers who struggle making a living on limited land, even with subsidies. But in other professions, there wouldn't be those subsidies and that specific job wouldn't be economically viable. But there are also many other farmers with $10m+ properties and paying meager farmhand wages to those doing the actual work, while the farmer landowner gets the million dollar subsidies paying them to dump milk or grow wasteful corn fuel.

Essentially, it's because producing food doesn't give you the right to be pampered by everyone else and make economically bad decisions.

In Europe specifically, it would be in part because of the "tractor protests" where tractors were mass driven into city centers in protest, especially the Netherlands because they didn't like being restricted on nitrogen pollution. It would be especially irksome when you can get most peoples' votes for bad policy just by saying "support farmers, they grow your food." Except that all that nitrogen in the Netherlands goes to actually growing exported food ($$)...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/16/nitrogen...

Where does this plantation-owner story come from? How many plantation owners do you think existed?

And that still doesn't explain the continual drain happening, to this day, as is evidenced by this very article we're commenting on. What, are these 10% also filthy capitalists somehow?

As a Serb whose parents fled an eerily similar situation to Cuba's way back when for greener pastures to the literal other side of the planet, this thing where people blame the citizens rather than the worthless piece of shit government for fleeing these socialist hellholes is always an amusing one for me.

you should really read on Cuba before comparing it to Serbia. completely different situation and the people fleeting it in the last decade is exclusively about the the embargo.

> that still doesn't explain the continual drain happening, to this day,

Are we sure and can be trust that this numbers are really correct?

Alternative hypothese: Maybe a part of this people "left the country" in 2022 by covid 19 and statistics were masked to avoid public embarrassment. I would not bet against it.

62 years ago.

Obama began easing them and opened up travel and then Trump put them all back to win Florida.

Democrats took an L for freedom, prosperity and common sense and Republicans capitalized to win back the presidency.

The message is: if you refuse to be our puppet state and play by our rules, we will destroy you for as long as it takes.

Anyone who believes the US acts to punish evil authoritarians in defense of freedom and democracy is delusional. Look at our allies in the middle east.

more than 60 years ago actually.

A hostile regime 90 miles from US mainland will be treated differently. Cuba is not some vanilla leftist regime that has no love for America. Cuban intelligence and elite for the past 50 years have been active subverting US interests. A unilateral withdrawal of sanctions would mean rewarding bad behavior. Do not let the small size of Cuba underestimate them, they are behind all major anti-American activity in Latin America. They were are major force supporting Maduro in Venezuela.

Why does not the Communist regime in Cuba "open up"? Because they know the day Cuba becomes a multiparty state with elections -- they have to run out of the country. Both Cuban and Venezuelan elite along with many Caribbean states are active in Drug Dealings and Money Laundering.

Yes, the hawks in US have a role but they are not only active players, there are hawks in Cuba too.

> A unilateral withdrawal of sanctions would mean rewarding bad behavior.

Do something horrible to your neighbour - be surprised that he doesn't keep good behaviour torwards you.

Why did the US drop 2 nuclear bombs on Japan? Why the US is keeping Israel as their toy? Why the US entered the Vietnam war (hint: no, not to avoid the spread of communism). US is the bad boy of this planet, just because they can.

But they did it to protect the planet. We need to enforce "democracy" and spread capitalism.

and agent orange, and destroy literally everything before we tail it back to our own country, not before we tell our vets to “suck it up” and bootstrap their PTSD due to exposure of aforementioned war crimes.

HN is fast becoming reddit with comments like these, sadly.

Just to be clear, are you insinuating that my comment is somehow misleading or untrue?

Not strictly untrue, but it's a trite dismissal of US foreign policy in general.

"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills."

bottom of the hn guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hope you do get paid faster in rubles for agitating then the hyperinflation.

All that I have to say about this is that it’s a shame that the people of the US and western “imperialist” world do not reap more benefits from this

> Why did the US drop 2 nuclear bombs on Japan?

Japan declared war on the US. Didn't surrender when it became obvious they were going to lose and instead decided to inflict as many casualties on the as they could on the way down. So they got nuked.

> Why the US is keeping Israel as their toy?

The US inherited a lot of messes after WWII. Not really the US fault the Palestinians always make bad choices.

> Why the US entered the Vietnam war (hint: no, not to avoid the spread of communism)

Hint you are 100% self servingly wrong about that.

> US is the bad boy of this planet, just because they can

I've come to the opinion people that say this are upset that the US stands in the way of some nastiness they want to inflict on someone.

It’s an authoritarian government without free elections right on the US doorstep. Cubans are oppressed.