Chewin in the Chung

The days of Che Gueverra T-shirts and Hammer & Sickle earrings may be over, but I must admit to a grudging admiration for Fidel Castro. He's like a communist Strom Thurmond, though perhaps without Thurmond's legendary libido. At the age of 77, Fidel pwned Bush yesterday:

Bush, charged Castro, could be having a difficult time ¡§distinguishing between relevant and inconsequential information.¡¨

I suspect that if Cuba had oil, we'd have liberated them by now. With cluster bombs.

And it turns out that this great communist menace off the coast of Florida might have been avoided.  Fidel Castro, at age 14, wrote to FDR, asking for ten bucks. Perhaps if FDR had not been so tight with the greenbacks, Castro might have grown up to be something other than a revolutionary. Like maybe a cartoonist or a marketing specialist.  

Since we're on the topic, let's consider once more the position of the U.S. government on the Cuban travel embargo: We sanction Cuba because it is a Communist dictatorship and we want to force change. We travel to and trade with China because only by engaging the communists there, can we force change. This strategy is so self-evidently wrongheaded that it needs no deliberation.  In one country we have 50 years of sanctions and a cocky little dictator that keeps giving us the finger. In the other we have 20 years of trade and tourism, and that country's military is actively developing an attack system to neutralize the U.S. Pacific fleet. Oh yeah, and they have Weapons of Mass Destruction.