What Cubans Expect from Obama

[IndianaGreen]

What Cubans Expect from Obama

By Manuel E. Yepe

As expected, Barack Obama's electoral win has raised new questions all over the world given the United States of America's place in the current system of international relations.

We would be hard pressed to find a region or country whose links with the superpower are not important to their domestic and foreign policies.

That a non-white, non-WASP American has been elected president of the U.S. for the first time in history goes beyond the superpower's global policy or any consideration related to Obama's skin color or ethnic group. What matters is that it raises hopes for an end of the ferocious hostilities toward the revolutionary project embraced by our people as the crowning achievement of an independence struggle started 140 years ago against Spanish colonialism.

As we Cubans know only too well from our own hard experience, the facts and promises underlying this historic event – should they be fulfilled – would inevitably lead to a counterattack by the big financial and industrial/military corporations whose grim interests would be affected.

In order to defend both the status quo and their privileges, they not only count on the power of their weapons, but also on their tight grip on the media and most cultural and educational means, which they use to mess with people's minds and fool them into acting against their most elementary interests and rights within the framework of a legal and social order ruled by money and the marketplace which makes it sure that their wealth prevails over natural human aspirations of peace, solidarity and equality.

We Cubans have reason to expect that a president-elect who has promised change, himself an expression of change in the correlation of political forces right on the powerful neighbor's ground, will pave the way for a new stage in the relationship between Havana and Washington.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/7731/

[Billy Burnett]

1. Yes. Obama did change.

To the RW stance on the sanctions.

Obama Flip Flops on Cuban Embargo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OjOQ6xz1b8

[Tutonic]

2. Let the man have his inauguration before we start trying to blame

him for bringing down the Hindenburg, flying planes into the World Trade Center and assassinating Robert Kennedy. When we said Yes We Can, I assumed it meant we could wait for our President to form his team and policies before we blew him out of the sky.

[Billy Burnett]

4. It is his own words.

In Chicago 2004 he said the embargo should end.

In Miami 2007 he said the embargo should remain.

I blame him for pandering on the campaign.

I have no idea why you bring the Hindenburg, 9-11, and RFK into it.

Let's see what happens, but his latest position is the RW porition to keep the US embargo on Cuba.

[Captain Hilts]

3. He flipped on the embargo right after he flipped on FISA. nt