{"id":31893,"date":"2019-06-09T06:00:18","date_gmt":"2019-06-09T10:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/?p=31893"},"modified":"2019-06-04T10:58:01","modified_gmt":"2019-06-04T14:58:01","slug":"trumps-new-move-on-cuba-is-idiotic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/?p=31893","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s new move on Cuba is idiotic"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Mike McGann<\/strong>, Editor, The Times<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Havana, Cuba, 2018 near El Malecon<\/p><\/div>\n

John Bolton is full of crap. And his boss, Donald J. Trump, is in the words of a friend of a friend on Facebook, is a \u201cDoucheCanoe.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This week, the Trump Administration announced that the U.S. government would again tighten and restrict commercial and travel to Cuba. Bolton, a hard-line lunatic who helped get us into pointless war (Iraq), but was willing to say anything to return to power in the Trump Administration, falsely claimed that tourism hasn\u2019t helped the Cuban people or furthered the journey toward freedom.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a word, that\u2019s bullshit. <\/span><\/p>\n

Sorry for the profanity, but sometimes only certain words capture the truth accurately.<\/span><\/p>\n

My own visit there last year showed me exactly the opposite of Bolton\u2019s claims.<\/span><\/p>\n

After nearly 60 years of failed U.S. policy \u2014 the embargo and failure to engage \u2014 hurt the Cuban people, not the Castro government. The isolation allowed strict control over information, messaging and public thought.<\/span><\/p>\n

The loosening of travel restrictions has led to increased distribution of outside media \u2014 many tourists bring stick drives with the latest news from U.S. sources, entertainment programming and other information that then is circulated through back channels to the average Cuban. It is this information that has led to the Cuban government to finally allow a full cable to be run to island for Internet and a loosening of censorship \u2014 because the government can no longer control the flow information to the people.<\/span><\/p>\n

Additionally, Cubans have been able to talk to Americans, share what their lives are like, and in turn, learn about us, the outside world and more. That information spreads, person to person, around the island.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bolton\u2019s move would change that.<\/span><\/p>\n

As a nation, we screwed up badly on Cuba. If, say, we had treated it like Vietnam \u2014 where thousands of Americans died, for God\u2019s sake \u2014 we\u2019d see a vastly different country with McDonald\u2019s and Hard Rock Cafe\u2019s dotting Havana and the Castros would have been long gone.<\/span><\/p>\n

But instead, pandering to Florida politicians, we embraced this failed, pointless embargo \u2014 all the more stupid, when we could have offered to lift it in the early 90s after the failure of the Soviet Union in exchange for progress on human rights and compensation for U.S. property seized during the 1959 revolution.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now we\u2019re slamming the door again, just as slow, steady progress is being made to open Cuba to the outside world.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe in the litany of idiotic, pointless, thoughtless decisions by Trump and his gang of thugs, this one doesn\u2019t rank up there, I guess. When you put kids in cages, discriminate on the basis of faith, ignore the deaths of thousand of Americans in Puerto Rico because of Hurricane Maria and make moves to nuke the economy, Cuba probably doesn’t rank up there.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, I\u2019ve long been fascinated by Cuba, since working in a Cuban-exile enclave in North Jersey. Finally being able to walk the streets of Havana myself was an amazing experience and I learned much in a short time.<\/span><\/p>\n

We should be embarrassed by this short-sighted, pandering decision. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Mike McGann, Editor, The Times John Bolton is full of crap. And his boss, Donald J. Trump, is in the words of a friend of a friend on Facebook, is a \u201cDoucheCanoe.\u201d This week, the Trump Administration announced that the U.S. government would again tighten and restrict commercial and travel to Cuba. Bolton, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31895,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[11267,10427,11268,11269,6518,5936,11270,7919],"class_list":["post-31893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion","tag-bolton","tag-cuba","tag-douchecanoe","tag-embargo","tag-featured","tag-idiot","tag-president-of-the-united-states","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31893"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31894,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31893\/revisions\/31894"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kennetttimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}