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I don’t think Venezuela or Russia are relevant in this situation, since we are strictly taking about US-Cuba relations.



If you understand the patchwork quilt of Latin American relations, then it is immediately obvious how those other countries are related to Cuba. Imagine discussing Cuban "transgressions" (under the present regime, no less) without considering the Soviet role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example.


That’s understandable, but the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Why is the US still vehemently opposed to Cuba, or improving its relationship with Cuba?

Even North Korea has better standing with the US than Cuba, but it makes little sense.


Respectfully, this question sounds like it is coming from a context of the US being a nation that deals with other regimes fairly and in good faith. This is not at all the case, most especially in the Caribbean and Central America. The crimes of the US are unfathomably legion in these areas and well understood by pretty much everyone, except Americans. Millions of lives lost, dozens of democratically elected regimes deposed, the list goes on and on. Cuba holds this standing because the Castro regime has resisted the will of US foreign policy and survived. Everything that one could report that is wrong with Cuba: human rights issues, poverty... the US's policies are causal a great deal to all of these.


US investment is the single greatest causal factor for prosperity in Latin America. Look at Panama and Chile, for example. In fact, the midas touch of American investment is visible in several other places outside of the Americas, including Taiwan and South Korea.

In my view, it is hard to label the immense prosperity-inducing capacity of United States foreign investment as bad-faith or unfair dealing. Cuba's government has spent years working on projects to attract spend-happy American tourists. Elsewhere in the region, entire countries base their economies around remittances from the USA. The US government could crack down on remittances and illegal immigration far more than already happens, but it does not, and millions of people in the region benefit as a result.

Respectfully, it takes a great deal of time, study, and travel to learn the dynamics involved in a region before you can say with confidence that Influence A is good and Influence B is bad. People who lean left in the US should understand that 'socialist' isn't a catch-all phrase; it means something different when you're voting for Bernie Sanders in the Iowa Caucuses than it does when you're bartering with your uncle for soap in Camaguey. I have been all over Latin America and I personally still don't consider myself to know all there is to know about the region. What I do know is that the "USA bad" narrative tends rarely to be accompanied with a discussion of the counterfactual universe where American influence is hypothetically absent from the region.


If you look at the prior conversation, you'll see that it isn't centered on the question you are posing here.

There was a statement that Cuba's only "transgression" was a desire to not be a US puppet state. That is a false claim.

Ignoring the language of "vehement" this and "opposed" that, I believe that my prior comment addressed your question. The present regime in Cuba is a direct descendent of the 26th of July Movement that orchestrated the Cuban Revolution in the 1950s. Cuba continues to be governed by the same faction and ideology that governed the island for four decades of the USSR's existence.


Because Miami.




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