Did my ears deceive me?

[AusGail]

I heard on the news that Bush wants to bring democracy to Cuba. He intends to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to those in opposition to Castro to bring this about. To me it sounds like he wants to instigate civil war on an already troubled country kept poor by unfair sanctions. After the carnage he has caused in Iraq, don't you think that he should have learned by now that democracy doesn't suit every country. Also, he wants to make sure they have fair elections. I think he should clean up his own backyard first. What business is it of his anyway.

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. Castro took away the plantations from the United Fruit Co.

It would take 1,000 years for that wound to heal. Corporate america can't afford to let such a thing go unavenged.

[nancyr]

2. Democracy, hell.

He could care less about democracy...it's all about money. Oh, and perhaps some warped sense of acting like a "big man." Damned bozo.

[justinaforjustice]

3. Freedom, To Bush, Means Freedom for Corporate Theft.

We find it almost laughable to watch George Bush and friends claim to be bringing democracy to the Middle East, or Cuba, or Russia, or Venezuela, while subverting it in the U.S. Democracy is George's speech-writers' "shorthand" for allowing corporations to freely plunder the world wherever they might want to go.

The very first law that George's Provisional Iraq Administrator, Jerry Bremer, announced when he landed in Baghdad was the privatization of Iraq's industries, with foreign companies allowed to purchase them at fire sale prices, with no requirements that the profits be retained in Iraq and no requirement that Iraqi citizen be employed by the new private companies. There was enormous resistance to Jerry Bremer's new rules, and perhaps fortunately (if anything can be seen to be fortunate in poor, war-torn Iraq),the security situation has been so bad that foreign companies are scared off, even at the fire sale prices.

To George, freedom means freedom for untrammeled commercial exploitation. Truly democratic governance is anathema to him, which is why he blatantly ignores our U.S. Constitution as he stacks our Supreme Court with extreme reactionaries, after all, as George puts it so knowledgeably, it is "just a piece of paper".

[NJCher]

5. galls me, too

Whenever he's out there spouting off about democracy for Iraq and demonizing Hugo Chavez.

Welcome to DU, BTW, and excellent post.

:hi:




Cher

[snowbear]

4. Bush wants to takeover for Castro when his time is up here..

If you look through old articles by Googling, you can find at least 2 or 3 occassions where Bush has joked about how much easier life would be here under a dictatorship.

The man is completely insane!

[AusGail]

6. Does anybody remember

If Cuba was such a great country before Castro took over?

[blitzen]

8. It was run by a gangster (Meyer Lansky) and a dictator (Batista)

and it was Vegas before Vegas was Vegas



http://www.cubaheritage.org/articles.asp?lID=1&artID=222

President Batista appointed Lansky his advisor on gambling reform and gave him the authority to clean up the crooked gaming houses like the Sans Souci and the Montmartre Club.
`Fulgencio Batista saw the enhancement of revenues from foreign visitors, and from Americans in particular, as a major source of future income for Cuba – and for himself,` Lacey wrote.
Lansky went to Havana and immediately began to roust the crooked casino bosses. He kept Santo Trafficante Jr., the son of Tampa’s chief racketeer, but leaned on Sans Souci operator Norman Rothman to start running a clean game. He ordered dealers and croupiers – most of them American – who were crooked to be deported and started the practice of dealing Blackjack from a six-deck shoe, which not only helped the house in terms of percentage, but minimized cheating by the dealer and player.

While Meyer’s reformed Montmartre Club was the in place in Havana, he had long expressed an interest in putting a casino in the elegant Hotel Nacional, which overlooked El Morro, the ancient fortress guarding Havana harbor. Meyer planned to take a wing of the 10-storey hotel and create luxury suites for high stakes players. Batista endorsed Lansky’s idea over the objections of American expatriots like Ernest Hemingway and the elegant hotel opened for business in 1955 with a show by Eartha Kitt. The casino was an immediate success.
That spring, Lansky began working on his own casino, a 21-story, 440-skyscraper called the Hotel Riviera. When it opened it would be the largest casino-hotel in the world outside Las Vegas. The Hotel Riviera was Lansky’s second attempt at building a hotel from scratch – the first time was the ill-fated Flamingo Hotel in Vegas with his friend and partner Benny Siegel.



http://www.cubaheritage.org/articles.asp?lID=1&artID=221

`Honesty is the best policy` was the slogan of these hoods in Cuba. They had learned that more money is made faster when their enterprises had good public relations. They donned conservative, made-to-order suits, white shirts and ties, and cleaned up their grammar. With government charters, there was no need for gangland slayings a la Capone to bump off the opposition – because there was no opposition.
The tourists and well-heeled Cuban customers in the casinos had no need to worry about loaded dice, stacked decks or a fixed roulette wheel. The theory of mathematical probability and the laws of chance assured the house of winning.
So the racketeers kept it clean...to the point of hustling out of their fancy dens any slick operators who wanted to fleece the customers with unchartered methods. When word of this reached the United States via Madison Avenue, the gambling boom was on in Cuba.

When the American tourist reached Havana after a five-hour flight from New York, he had a choice of about five multi-million-dollar swank hotels. There were also numerous nightclubs in Havana which had facilities for gambling. All were million-dollar-plus establishment – Batista had changed the gambling laws in 1955 to allow gambling rooms in any club or hotel worth a million. His government also helped finance the buildings and put up millions to help with construction. Import duties were waived on materials for hotel construction and Cuban contractors with the right `in` made windfalls by importing much more than was needed and selling the surplus to others for hefty profits.
These schemes were what had aroused the wrath of Castro and the citizens of Cuba. They saw their government giving money with little return expected; what should have been returned to the government coffers with interest went to line the pockets of corrupt officials.

[Contrary1]

7. Maybe he just wants to enlarge

Gitmo, making the whole island a penal colony for all those terrorists
who resent the US occupation of their country.