It’s hard to say who the most corrupt member of the Senate is. But now that Kyrsten Sinema is no longer a Democrat, it’s easy to say who the most corrupt Democrat is in the Senate: Bob Menendez of New Jersey. He was the corrupt mayor of Union City, a corrupt member of the state Assembly, a corrupt member of the state Senate, a corrupt member of Congress and, after he was appointed to the job by Jon Corzine, a corrupt U.S. Senator. His son, Bob Junior, was just elected to his old House seat and he, no doubt, will be just like pops. In 2015, Bob Sr was indicted on corruption charges but one juror held out and he wasn’t convicted, although the Senate Ethics Committee “severely admonished” him. All that and his Dominican Republic escapades with underage girls are nothing compared to what he’s done— and continues to do— to the people of Cuba.
Yesterday, the NY Times published. A piece about Cuba’s current plight and the refugee crisis it is engendering. The refugee crisis— over a quarter million people last year alone— can be directly linked to the U.S. embargo. It’s a “mass exodus… larger than the 1980 Mariel boatlift and the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis combined, until recently the island’s two biggest migration events.”
The migration “has no end in sight and threatens the stability of a country that already has one of the hemisphere’s oldest populations. The avalanche of Cubans leaving has also become a challenge for the United States. Now one of the highest sources of migrants after Mexico, Cuba has become a top contributor to the crush of migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border, which has been a major political liability for President Biden and which the administration considers a serious national security issue. ‘The numbers for Cuba are historic, and everybody recognizes that,’ said a senior State Department official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. ‘That said, more people are migrating globally now than they ever have been and that trend is certainly bearing out in our hemisphere, too.’ Many experts say that U.S. policy toward the island is helping fuel the very migration crisis that the administration is now struggling to address.”
To appeal to [older, reactionary] Cuban America voters in south Florida, the Trump administration discarded President Barack Obama’s policy of engagement, which included restoring diplomatic relations and increasing travel to the island. Trump replaced it with a “maximum pressure” campaign that ratcheted up sanctions and severely limited how much cash Cubans could receive from their families in the United States, a key source of revenue.
“This is not rocket science: If you devastate a country 90 miles from your border with sanctions, people will come to your border in search of economic opportunity,” said Ben Rhodes, who served as deputy national security adviser under Mr. Obama and was the point person on talks with Cuba.
Although President Biden has begun to retreat from some of Mr. Trump’s policies, he has been slow to act for fear of angering the Cuban diaspora and incurring the wrath of Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat and a powerful Cuban American who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said William LeoGrande, a professor at American University, who has written extensively on U.S.-Cuba relations.
… While any significant rollback of sanctions remains off the table, the two governments are engaged in efforts to address the extraordinary migration surge.
Washington recently announced that it would restart consular services in Havana in January and issue at least 20,000 visas to Cubans next year in line with longstanding agreements between the two nations, which officials hope will dissuade some people from trying to make dangerous journeys to the United States.
Havana has agreed to resume accepting flights from the United States of Cubans who are deported, another move to try to discourage migration. The Biden administration has also reversed the cap on money that Cuban Americans are allowed to send to relatives and licensed a U.S. company to process the wire transfers to Cuba.
The Cuban government gas long blamed Washington’s sanctions and a decades-old trade embargo for crippling the country’s economy and pushing people off the island, and says a law in place since 1966 that gives most Cubans who meet certain criteria a fast track to residency is a key reason for migration surges.
The law essentially assumes that all Cubans are political refugees who need protection, but has been widely criticized for giving them privileges that are not provided to any other nationality.
…The floodgates opened last year, when Nicaragua stopped requiring an entrance visa for Cubans. Tens of thousands of people sold their homes and belongings and flew to Managua, paying smugglers to help them make the 1,700-mile journey by land to the U.S. border.
Katrin Hansing, an anthropologist at the City University of New York who is on sabbatical on the island, noted that the soaring migration figures do not account for the thousands who have left for other countries, including Serbia and Russia.
“This is the biggest quantitative and qualitative brain drain this country has ever had since the revolution,” she said. “It’s the best and the brightest and the ones with the most energy.”
The departure of many younger, working-age Cubans augurs a bleak demographic future for a country where the average life expectancy of 78 is higher than for the rest of the region, experts said. The government already can barely afford the meager pensions the country’s older population relies on.
The hemorrhaging of Cubans from their homeland is nothing short of “devastating,” said Elaine Acosta González, a research associate at Florida International University. “Cuba is depopulating.”
Just a few years ago, the country’s future seemed far different. With the Obama administration loosening restrictions on travel to Cuba, American tourists pumped dollars into the island’s fledgling private sector.
Now, travel is again severely limited and years of economic downturn have for many Cubans extinguished the last embers of optimism.
Cubans in Florida seem more wedded to the GOP now than ever. A new and more forthrightly enlightened policy towards Cuba isn’t going to hurt the Democrats’ political fortunes in the state. Maybe doing the right thing, unapologetically, will even win them some votes, at least from younger Cuban-Americans. The Díaz-Balart family is another good example of why U.S. policy towards Cuba is all screwed up. The Republican congressmen/brothers Lincoln and Mario Díaz-Balart-- Mario is still serving although Lincoln left Congress to devote all his energy to undermining Cuba and making himself president-- are sons of Rafael Díaz-Balart, a member of the fascist Batista cabinet, one of the richest and most corrupt men in Cuba and founder of the right-wing terrorist group in Miami, the White Rose. (Their aunt, Mirta, was Fidel Castro's first wife.)
I asked Will Sanchez, a prominent Miami immigration attorney and progressive activist, who people are trying to draft to run against Rep. Maria Salazar. Last night he told me that "Young Cuban-Americans are not as dead fast against the embargo as their grandparents were. They tend to have a more open and accommodating position, knowing that people to people engagement and trade between the two nations would greatly benefit Cuba and America. America has direct and extensive trade with communist Vietnam and China. There is no reason we cannot do the same with Cuba."
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