When M. Romney finally revealed his choice for a running mate, Paul Ryan, a bug-eyed Congressman from Wisconsin and a professional walker-back of this, that, and just about everything, I happened to catch just a snippet of something that in my eyes stood out more than anything else on his rap sheet, though I guess that to most other people it was of towering insignificance, compared to budgets and Medicare. A while ago, long before he reached his present notoriety, Ryan voted at least three times for an end to the Cuban Embargo!
As far as I know nothing has been said about this in the campaigns of either party, undoubtedly because of the Cuban refugees in Florida. They draw attention because they are the most Republican group among the Latinos, and they have pretty much taken over the Miami-Dade County area in Florida, and neither side wants to risk kicking that hornets nest -- the Republican campaign because they wouldn't it to be known that Ryan did this, and the Democrats because they wouldn't want to be seen by the ex-pates as suggesting that the embargo has not been any kind of an act of kindness.
Surprising as it was to hear of a Republican voting to end the pain and suffering of dark-skinned people by any means other than by shooting or starving them to death, Ryan probably did this back in the days when Republicans could now and then take a side excursion or two into the land of being reasonable. Nowadays, within their party, that kind of thing isn't safe at all, and since then he has predictably and obediently voted the other, misguided way, just as he is now trying to make it look as if he didn't actually cuddle up, in spirit, inside Ayn Rand's petticoats.
It seems that Ryan voted that way not out of ordinary human decency but instead because he believed in free trade, and he was trying to be consistent in seeing trading with Cuba to be no different than doing business with the Chinese, which of course is the most sensible point of view. But then China hasn't had the bad luck of having its refugees turn against the mother country with as much malice aforethought as have the Cuban immigrants, and there is no enormous colony of Chinese Nasties that have taken over the entire city of San Francisco or any other American burg.
Castro had hardly taken power in the late 1950's when it became clear as day to me that the surest and quickest way that Cuba could be brought back under the American armpits was to continue leaving that island purely in the hands of the tourists. And I still believe that if that had been done, without Castro throwing up a stone wall completely around the place, the tourists would have subverted things there so much without even trying, that Castro and his regime wouldn't have lasted much past ten years.
But what happened instead was that, ever since then, U.S. leaders of all persuasions have feared the political power of the vengeful refugees who kept pouring into and reproducing in Miami, and so we've had the enduring crime of the Cuban Embargo. By seeing that that embargo always remained firmly in place, the Cuban refugees, obviously short not only on compassion but also on foresight, have kept the Castro Revolution going all these years, instead of ending it, as was presumably always their desire. That embargo merely threw the stay-at-home Cubans farther back on their own resources, and that has proven to be enough to keep them from going under. And they take pride in that, and for one thing, they are said to have that all-important amenity, a great medical system, and it's hard to see how they would ever welcome back those who fled.
But the way that things have turned out keeps insisting that, no matter what they preached, ending the Revolution was never the goal of the refugees. Their intention was always instead to keep those who remained behind, voluntarily or for other reasons, deprived of the material things in life to the max and so to make those staybehinds suffer. Above all, the key role that racism plays in nearly all the problems of the world also can never be discarded here, since the refugees are reputed to be preponderantly European in origin, while those who remained behind with Castro have a more generous proportion of African ancestry, and we know how that always goes.
(Cross-posted, with certain modest changes, from my weblog, "Unpopular Ideas")
