Some thoughts from someone who I hope will be Florida’s next Senator (though I no longer live there), and not just because he’ll knock out the oleaginous Charlie Crist.
[Update a while later]
Come for the disaster preparedness, stay for the totalitarianism:
I’m probably hitting my head against the wall here but, again, why is it acceptable for a neverending stream of Democratic politicians to make the trek to Cuba and kiss Fidel’s ring? Does having free health care* excuse a lengthy history of dragooning dissidents and gay people into prisons? Just last month Juan Carlos Gonzalez Marcos got a two-year prison sentence for getting drunk and ranting to a film crew about how widespread hunger is on the island. Somehow I doubt a visit to his prison cell is on Nagin’s itinerary.
I suspect that if Mao were still alive, they’d be doing the same thing with him. But Castro’s the best they have these days, short of Kim Jung Il. And what would they have said if the mayor of (say) Detroit, had gone to Chile to get advice from Pinochet on recovering an economy? He did, after all, have a lot better record of that than Castro does with disasters. And of course, that was Pinochet’s real crime — disappearing his enemies was just standard procedure for dictators, and they never seemed to have a problem with it coming from people like Fidel. It’s only when the enemies being disappeared are leftists, opposing free markets in their own nation, or being disappeared by a regime that supports free markets, that it’s a problem.
Cuba’s “exceptional disaster management” is also known as “not having anything worth destroying.” And — as for “[t]hree powerful hurricanes hit Cuba last year, damaging half a million homes” — how could they tell?
Fidel, Mao, and Stalin made plenty of leftists disappear, more so than Pinochet or Franco. After a while you don’t even need a reason to execute…
They were better constructed after the storm than before.
I work w/ an American citizen who is also a Cuban immigrant (via Spain). He jokes about the poverty, the role of the State in treating most people as chattel, and so on. He does so with grace and no bitterness. He is clearly grateful not to be under the thumb of Raul and the actor playing Fidel [characterization of the Cuban “revolutionaries” solely my own].