I am generally dubious of the notion that countries which have governments that their citizens by and large want, will have to rely on secret police, keep large numbers of political prisoners in jail, outlaw opposition parties, and have people fleeing the country in makeshift rafts.

You may believe that Cuba is a paradise if you wish. In my opinion, all it takes to refute that notion is to notice that people break the law to enter democracies, and break the law in order to leave dictatorships.

Cuba has a government that it seems obvious that Cubans by and large want.

You are an idiot, a dupe, or both. I thought this kind of stupidity was largely a thing of the past, but sadly it appears not.

I am generally dubious of the notion that countries which have governments that their citizens by and large want, will have to rely on secret police, keep large numbers of political prisoners in jail, outlaw opposition parties, and have people fleeing the country in makeshift rafts.

 I get the first part, and I agree, but I didn't know that any of our citizens were fleeing the Cheney administration on RAFTS!

OK, my point is that our government has taken a distinct turn off the road of righteousness, and we just don't hold the moral high ground any more (if we ever did).  We used to lead by example.  Now we lead by force, and using techniques that we formerly decried.  We simply have no business forcing our fake morals on other countries. 

We really need to fix our own sad state of affairs first, if it's not too late

Jan Knaus

I get where Matt is coming from, and largely agree here -- but I also have been forever scarred by watching Tiannemann Square live on CNN, and would prefer to be paying .05% more or whatever on various low-end manufactured goods from Thailand or Guatemala than from a China that is overrated as an "enemy/threat" by most but underrated by Matt. (b/c he relies on "per capita" econ analysis, which is REALLY bad when comparing rich & poor countries -- purchasing parity is far superior)

Additionally, I strongly support Taiwanese independence -- Formosans deserve tjeir democracy, rather than China's horrifying blend of Dickensian capitalism & old school autocracy.

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Jan Knaus

Anybody seen what the Chinese are doing to pet dogs lately? There is a massacre of millions of dogs because of some cases of rabies. These are our pals. These are the people that are keeping our war expenses (not included in our budget, of course) afloat. These are the people that will come back to haunt us with our untenable debts.

Oh, well, at least we are keeping Cuba in its place. What a completely ignorant policy, and it is equally ignorant for democratic and republican administrations.

Warning: Don't let the neo-cons do the same thing with Venezuela. The DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED president is no friend of Bush, so don't let the hypocrisy rule!

Jan Knaus

Thank God that we, by contrast, live in a country which never imposes its ideas or its economy on any nation or people. I am glad that our military does not have advisors all over the world.

Compared to Castro, we'd be hard put not to hold the high ground. It's just that we're now looking down at him in that valley from the hillside, and not some higher peak.

We'd have to get out the tunneling equipment to meet him eye to eye.

Oh, BS! By that standard, first, the US has to come off worse than any small country, no matter how bad that country might be, just because you're comparing absolute numbers rather than percentages of the population, and we're really big.

Second, the Cuban government imprisons people for literally political offenses. Bush hasn't ordered the DLC jailed, last time I looked. Castro would in a heartbeat.

I'm not terribly thrilled about the detentions, or a lot of the victimless crimes that put people in jail, but actual political prisoners are quite thin on the ground here.

Man, a few of the comment here remind me of those loons who used to claim the Berlin wall was built to keep West Germans out of the People's Republic.

People break INTO the US, people break OUT OF Cuba, and that is all you really need to know, to understand our relative positions. We aren't any saints, but Castro sports horns and a tail.

OK, you just gave yourself away here, Karl R:

...Castro sports horns and a tail.

 Why, may I ask, is it necessary to make everyone that this administration doesn't like into an evil devil?  And as I asked above, why Castro and not autocratic rulers from say, oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia, or our debt-holders like the Chinese?  It all seems a little hypocritical to me.

Cuba is a little ISLAND!  If we normalized relations with it, we would have FAR more influence over it than we do now.  It is the Florida Cubans, who lust after power and property there that keep us from doing the sensible thing.

Jan Knaus

Well actually, the United States has a higher proportion of its population in prison or jail on a per capita basis than any other country except for China.

Now, THAT is true, and an ugly commentary on the war on drugs. But it's still the case that they're not political prisoners. Our government doesn't remain in power by virtue of jailing everybody who criticizes it.

Castro's government does.

And that really blows away the claim that Castro's regime is popular. Popular governments simply don't have to do that sort of thing.

People might argue that the US government remains in power by virtue of ignoring and marginalizing everyone who criticizes it. That's even more effective than jailing people (because it generates no blowback). The other part is the US electoral system, which is frighteningly effective at maintaining stability at the cost of common sense and progress.

It's really an excellent idea, and really would go a long way towards the winning of hearts and minds that's so direly necessary. Unfortunately, I just can't think of many reasons for Cubans to feel positively towards the U.S. right now. The embargo combined with the lack of any non-ideological outreach to the Cuban people mean that the main image they get of the Americans is what Castro tells them in his speeches, backed up by the gruesome rituals that CNN International shows going on in the streets of Miami. Castro may be feared, but he is not much loathed, and the sight of people celebrating his death is truly savage, and surely complements the rhetoric about warlike imperialist Americans that they get from the state media quite nicely.

I regard this sort of reasoning as a libel against the majority of blacks, who somehow manage to stay out of prison by the simple expedient of refraining from committing felonies. Which says something about the minority who don't manage that utterly unimpressive feat, irrespective of my view that too many acts are felonies today.

Driving while black isn't responsible for the frighteningly high level of black on black homicide, for instance. It takes a pathological level of denial to pretend that high rates of black imprisonment aren't primarilly due to high rates of black crime.

And if we arbitrarilly set a cap on how many blacks we imprisoned, it would be their fellow blacks who suffered the predations of criminals left on the street.

Look, I've been subject to that surveillance you mention. I've attended protests, and seen police snipers stationed on rooftops around us. During the last admininstration several organizations I belong to were subject to those audits you complain so vaguely of. Explicitly political audits, proven in court to be at the direction of the White house. (I'm genuinely curious how common that sort of thing has been during THIS administration.) It was harassment, it was political, and it didn't put me, or any of my friends, in prison.

I'm asking for a sense of perspective here. Castro is a dictator, who runs a genuine, accept no substitutes, go straight to jail if you criticize him, police state, that people risk their lives to escape.

For all our sins, we're not in the same class as him. Not remotely.