What Do Cuba and George Floyd Have in Common?

 The answer to this title question is this:

Neither George Floyd or Cuba can breathe. Derek Chauvin, a model of what policing really is in America, had his knee on the neck of George Floyd for over nine minutes and killed him. The United States, for 62 years, has had its knee on the neck of Cuba and Cuba is struggling for breath.

This is not an article about the long and tumultuous between the United States and revolutionary Cuba. It's about the cant, jingoism, and the raw hypocrisy of U.S. politics. Joe Biden, yesterday, referred to Cuba as a "failed state". Yet most of the world see's the United States as a "failed democracy". Cuba might or not be a failed state; its existence might be up in the air. The United States however is more than happy to prove itself over and over again as a "failed democracy".

If I had to throw additional abuse, let me line up Congressional Representative, Val Demings and ex-Congressional Representative, Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, both Democrats, both of Florida and both calling for some kind of invasion of Cuba. 

Demings and Mucarsel-Powell are willfully ignoring the fact that their home state is systematically suppressing voter rights, that climate change and pollution are destroying the State of Florida, that Florida's developer boom of the 70s, 80s and 90s has produced death-trap housing up and down its east and west coasts, and health care increasingly doesn't work for Florida's elderly and working class populace. 

Instead, Demings and Mucarsel-Powell have embraced the politics of the U.S's most reactionary, revanchist segment of the population, Florida's Cuban emigres. 

Personally and politically, I despise the politics of the Cuban emigre population. Talk about easy immigration! These emigres arrived in the USA and had silver spoons placed in their mouths. Why? Because they were defecting from a socialist state which went perfectly with Washington's Cold War politics.  That alone led to lots of privileges never accorded to other immigrants. Current immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and other Central American states would have thought they died and went to heaven if they got the same immigration treatment that Cuban Americans got, and Venezuelan wealthy people get now. 

Frankly, I'm also sick and tired of Florida's fascist emigres and their expectations that the U.S.'s foreign policy should center around returning this class of emigres to a nation they left 63 years ago because their personal property was more important than the rest of Cuba. Yet, these are the people Demings and Mucarsel-Powell have chosen to embrace.

It would be interesting to take a look at what Cuba would be if the emigres, Demings, and old right winger Cold Warriors had their way. Minus the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Cuba would look a lot like Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti or the Dominican Republic; maybe at best, Jamaica. With the possible exception of Jamaica, all these states are indeed "failed states" well within the orbit of a failing economic system called capitalism. That capitalism is failing the people of these states is proven by looking at the millions of people lining up along the U.S. border trying to get out of these failed states.

Finally, what this immediate cry to invade Cuba is really all about is the failure of the Republican Party, the generic right wing, and moderate Democrats to deal with the United States' own substantial and pressing problems. Rather than dealing with its own democratic failures and the closing net of an American oligarchy; rather than dealing with its own crumbling economy and the impoverishment of half or more of the U.S. population; rather than dealing with the existential threat of climate change; the right wing and their moderate Democrat friends have united around anti-communism and a retreaded McCarthyist anti-socialist politics. 

Anti-socialism and anti-communism are always the politics of those who are otherwise politically bankrupt. Anti-Cuban threats are an attempt to cover-up the political bankruptcy of people like Demings, Mucarsel-Powell, Marco Rubio and others by creating a dire threat that doesn't exist.

So, I'm not buying Demings, Mucarsel-Powell and others' re-hashed Cold War shit. And neither should you!