A few people have wondered this and I dont mind sharing it. As a kid I remember the nuclear drills in school, I grew up in a rural area as most of my readers know. I hunted, I fished at a VERY early age. It was not lost on me why, when our drills happened and we had to sit against concrete walls with our heads between our legs and our arms over our heads. I may not have understood the breadth and depth of a nuclear attack but I was familiar enough with death to know what I was doing and why.
As I got older we learned about Cuba and the revolution and how “The Other Guy Blinked” referring of course to Nikita Khrushchev in the stand off with President Kennedy over ballistic missiles in Cuba. By then I understood what a nuclear bomb was and how close we actually came to experiencing one first hand.
At the time it was hailed as a great victory for President Kennedy but as learned more over the years I saw it for what it was…..a great failure. It should never ever have gotten that far and had just a smidgen of diplomacy been exercised by the US Government, it wouldn’t have.
Am I oversimplifying it some, ya probably but in a nutshell hindsight backs me up.
Was Fidel Castro a brutal Dictator with human rights violations under his belt, probably but no more so than many others we have propped up over the years and the brutal dictator part can certainly be argued.
It does seem to be that there is a very large age gap that defines the feelings of this though, the older you are, the less likely you will support ending the embargo, that goes particularly true for families of Cuban exiles that had land confiscated and such.
The younger you are the more likely you are to support normalized relations, many say that is because you didn’t live through it.
One thing always stuck in my craw though. On the one hand you tell me I am a free man, and I have a right to come and go as I please. On the other you tell me except to Cuba. Well which is it? Because it sure as fuck isn’t both.
In the final analysis the economic embargo did little more than to strengthen Castro and weaken the very people we claimed we wanted to help, it failed, its time to move on….now if only we could admit that about the war on drugs.
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Why The Cuba Thing Interests Me http://t.co/581gan72Vt
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The war on drugs will never be cleared up. Mainly because the biggest drug dealer is our own government. Only they justify it by using the word “prescription”. I have had the luxury of traveling the world because of a previous job, and only here do we have television and radio advertising for medication that also has street value
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I know where pot is legal !
C’mon, South – you always WANTED to fish in Cuban waters…
What’s that noise? Oh, it’s JFK flipping in his grave.
thats a very good point Rich and it is spot on man.
Not so at all DB google Ciguatera. where I fish it isnt a big issue in Cuban waters it is. it does effect pelagics like Barracuda in the gulf and atlantic waters and its why you dont eat them unless they are very small
Mike: As a Hemingway fan, this interests me tremendously. If you want to get romantic about Cuba, read Islands in the Stream, or see the movie with George C. Scott. On a more serious note, one has to wonder what is the point of the embargo at fifty years. Embargo or no embargo, Castro and his brother will remain in power until both die. They are both very old men. Meanwhile, even the Cuban community in Miami is split about 52% in favor of the embargo to 48% against the embargo. You can’t help but feel that this is generational and serves little purpose at this point in time. Meanwhile, normalizing relations may put us in a favorable position when the Castros are gone.
All I know is that doing what we’ve done for 50 years has done little more than appease a very vocal minority. What’s the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over – perhaps for 50 years – expecting a different result.
On another note – I saw the Lisa Ann is retiring from performing at the end of 2014. I must say, she has given me many hours of pleasure over the years. Its good to see a porn performer go out on top, and on her own terms. I hope Julia Ann, Nina and Raylene are as fortunate.
On a cruise we took a catamaran excursion and thankfully weren’t too shitfaced on the Caribbean rum punch…we heeded our deep sea diver buddy’s cautionary warning to take pictures but don’t eat the beachside dinner the sailor prepared for us.
Oh ive read islands in the Stream and seen the movie, also read The Old Man and the sea and unrelated to Cuba A Farewell to Arms and I am pretty sure everything else he wrote about Cuba or not Im a huge fan of Hemingway. I wont publicly say if I have been to Cuba or not but I do believe that in the not too far future I will be there. I love the people and their passion and graciousness.
As for Lisa Ann…I agree there as well, its good to leave on top and its good to know when its time…may she not be in a position where she feels like she has to return.
Back to Hemingway, I have always read that he always wrote nude and standing up, on a typewriter…not standing on the typewriter…but you know 😉
I also know that even though the US Ambassador had urged him to move away from his home in Cuba Hemingway told him to go fuck himself, that he would do nothing of the sort. His subsequent suicide made it a moot point.
I’m not sure about writing in the nude or standing up. I’ve read all the Hemingway biographies and his letters. What I do know is that he was very disciplined about writing. He got up early every day, hung over or not, to begin writing – like 6 AM. He had a word limit – I can’t remember if it was 600 or 800 words, but he wrote to that word count and then stopped – generally late morning or lunch time. His dog and cats were generally with him. And, in Cuba, he wrote in a tower that was part of his house. I love them all, however, my favorites are The Son Also Rises for the ending. Lady Brett tells Jake how good they could of been together, and Jake says: Isn’t it pretty to think so. I used to think what an odd phrase and yet I knew exactly what he meant. And then A Clean, Well Lighted Place is about the most perfect, self-contained piece of writing I can imagine. An entire world expressed in about 1,000 words with one old waiter walking home from work to an apartment with a single light bulb. Next to “Jesus wept,” the shortest verse in the Bible, its hard to think of something as short yet powerful in context.
You and I should be so lucky, my friend, to ever write that well. Like Wayne’s World, I am not worthy.
Agreed on Lisa Ann and hoping no lure to return. I’m hoping she’s invested her money so she doesn’t need to come back to make $800 for a blow job.
How brutal can he be? When the country has a 99.8 literacy rate. which is higher than the good old US. Also cant bitch about cuba being bad to their people as you buy crap made in china.
I don’t really know what to think on this one. Fidel Castro was brutal to those that protested against his policies. However, Fidel is no longer in power and I am not going to kid myself and think Raul Castro (Fidel’s brother and current el Presidente of Cuba) would have made the same decisions. I thought even ten years ago (about the time Fidel stepped down) that the embargo was pointless to continue and hurt the Cuban people more than Fidel and Co. What I don’t know what to think is how do we clean up the damage done by the embargo (since Cubans don’t have the hard currency to do so), pictures and accounts from Canadians that have visited Cuba (legally, there is no embargo on Canadian citizens or trade with Cuba — surprisingly) tell me that everything has pretty much stood in time as if it were 1959. The housing stock is in such poor condition (from next to no maintenance since the revolution) that just about every house and building there other than maybe government buildings will need to be torn down and rebuilt in the next 2-3 years. One Canadian I corresponded with said that there is so little in electronics and other gadgets that literally some of the teen girls will fuck and suck you for a cheap $25 MP3 player with some teen-type music on it (or probably now a cheap Atari or Sega game box that costs about $40). This same Canadian said he went to Cuba routinely and took bags of clothing to give out to the Cuban people because they have so little. No one mentioned their medical system in conversation recently, I think I heard once about 25 years ago that it was actually not that bad considering the US didn’t assist with creating it and it was free to all Cuban citizens.
As for whether I would travel to Cuba, I really don’t think I would chance it until it is proven that someone with a big, opinionated mouth (such as myself) doesn’t risk being taken to the Cuban gulag and tortured for the next five years just for telling the truth as to how Fidel treated his adversaries, especially during the early years of the revolution. Frankly whether Fidel was instrumental in creating a literate, educated society there his brutal treatment of allies of Batista and forcing the Cuban people to live in squlaor just because he didn’t like the US and was unwilling to do what he needed to do to appease us and allow his country to enter the 20th century for his people make Fidel one cocksucking bastard that deserved the tortures he inflicted on Batista’s allies himself. I feel differently about Cuba than I do about the CIA “enhanced interrogation” techniques because in Cuba he did it to his own people. We just did it to despots that assisted in attempting to take down the US and killed 3K of our people on 9/11. Cuban torture was also much worse than what the CIA did to Al-Quida. To me there is a big difference because of those points.
OMG! LOL!!
Well looked into the $100 cigar thing and have to say Hubby won’t be finding any under the tree or for his Birthday and he’s just begging my brain to forget shit….the first box he ever got was mailed via Panama and as a relatively new gar smoker he had no clue that the box was a secondary product or keepsake and tossed it…the date stamp was 04 JULY.
Instead of using one of the fly by night counterfeit sites that are popping up already we’ll stick to international mailings for his occasional premium Cubans. Though he finds Dominicans to be more consistent smokes he likes the Cuban tobacco better.
Talked to friends in South Florida and they think it will be easier and cheaper to remit US funds directly to Cuba vs having to use Canadian or local island intermediaries.
“On the one hand you tell me I am a free man, and I have a right to come and go as I please.”
Actually, in America you have the right to be a consumer. That’s about it. The other stuff the government and media tell you about your rights is to make you feel good. Yeah, I am a big time cynic.