The news today is of course Obama deciding to renew ties with Cuba after about 50 years of embargo and what not. I will not even bother to put up a link, just open your Google News section.
I am not going to argue the pros and cons. One thing is clear and it is that the embargo has not worked, has furnished the odious Castro criminals with an excuse that they have milked beyond the udder. Yet the failure of the embargo was not the idea per se, but the way successive weaklings applied it, speaking tough when the Miami Cuban vote was needed, forgetting about it as soon as they were sworn into some elected office. Clearly something had to be done and I am too busy, too overwhelmed by my own life and home problems to give you the opinion of my crystal ball about the well founded of that initiative of Obama, or any other possible one.
However I am going to concede one thing: whether Obama is misguided about this outing, it is certain that he is the only one that could take such a gamble. His presidency is over, he lost baldy recent elections. The guy has nothing to lose and it is quite possible that his decision is more than just a bow to the left of his party that he does not need anymore, anyway. Sometimes state decisions must be done and someone has to wear the hat and assume responsibility for all past mistakes and/or successes that led nowhere (both, it is an abstract thought, bear with me). I would not be surprised that we learn someday that some high flying Republicans may have secretly encouraged the embers of this White House to take a step that serves, well, so many people right and left. After all, let's not forget that Nixon went to China and even got an opera named for his trip. What rules over the world, in the end, is not what people think it is.
But this is a Venezuelan blog and as such I am going to write next about what this all means for us.
For one thing, all the recent anti US actions from Venezuela and chavismo against the US of A are now under a different look. The utter misguided foreign policies of Maduro and his combo reveal one thing: they had no clue about what Raul Castro was doing. They were in the dark. They were never allies of the Castros as Chavez tried to make us believe for too many years: we were just a Castro colony, a pawn with an accidental wallet to pluck. Now the proof is in front of the dumb chavismo. Now what for them? Are they going to keep screaming about possible sanctions from the US towards the most corrupt of chavismo? (it took the official media of the regime hours to announce the news officially).
Another thing is that the way Raul Castro has dumped Venezuela for the US tourism dollar. Now that Venezuela is bankrupt, the only quick fix available for Cuba is to open its tourism to US visitors, and to Miami Cubans eager to come back and buy back, say, their ancestral home. Raul Castro, for all practical purposes, told us today that Venezuela is done, that he cannot leech much more from it, and that he dumps us without ceremony. We are broke and not even the most idiot of chavistadom can pretend to ignore that for much longer.
But what worries me the most about the whole Raul-Obama deal is that a wind of impunity is blowing through the Caribbean. Thousands of Cuban criminals that supported the Castro horrendous dictatorship are now going to go Scott free. Sure, a couple of them will be somehow sent to trial, scapegoats for decades of tyranny and errors. But it looks like the Castros are now going to die peacefully in their bed while the cult to Che will grow even stronger as throngs of lobotomized US tourists will be driven to the high places of Che crimes.
Is this last part going to affect us. Maybe. Maybe not. Who is to say that in exchange for forgiveness for his own henchmen Raul is not willing to deliver the Venezuelan narco traffickers to US authorities? Is Venezuela part of the deal, as a token present to Europe and the US? As this blog sort of agreed commenting a few months ago the predictions of Rafael Poleo.
More interestingly, if Raul is really going to dump Venezuela, could that mean that this is the end of chavismo economic policies, when there is not much worth left to save? If Maduro was all along the mere representative of Cuba in Caracas, a pro consul if you wish, what is his future now?
And more questions. Many more. But you get the point: today's Obama/Raul show is just the beginning a new bewildering chapter in Latin America history of dictatorship survival. This is barely a start line. The end line maybe further than 40K. It may actually be just the start of a poliathlon....
Let's just hope that this way will indeed be less costly than a civil war in Venezuela.
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