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Current Events

Vietnam Remembered

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It matters not whether you were there or not. In fact, some of you are too young to even remember the state of the country during those tumultuous years. While I am not 100% a Webb fan, he is an intelligent Marine brother and I respect his service and loved his first book. The author; however, asks some good questions and presents an  interesting perspective on all that went wrong and what went right – yes there were some things that we did right. The Cronkite’s and Rather’s be damned, we did accomplish something there, and we certainly were not all drug addicts and baby killers. It’s somewhat of a long read, but I ask you to read it and think about those days, especially if you were there in the mud. I do apologize for the tardiness of this post; it should have been posted last Thursday, but my house took priority.

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Jim Webb

By Barton Swaim WSJ

Arlington, VA

Echoes of Vietnam, 50 Years Later

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, popular culture had basically one message on the Vietnam War: that it was conceived in American arrogance, was perpetrated by American savages, and accomplished little but psychological devastation and national disgrace.

Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979), Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” (1986) and “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” (1987), Brian De Palma’s “Casualties of War” (1989)—these and a thousand other productions, documentaries and articles told my generation that the war had been a gigantic fiasco that turned those who fought it into war criminals and frowning, guilt-ridden drug addicts.

The war ended officially on Jan. 27, 1973, with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. That’s 50 years ago next Friday—an anniversary that will likely occasion a round of retrospective think pieces and cable-TV segments on the war’s legacy. More will follow in 2025 to mark the final American pullout from Saigon in 1975.

The country has moved on since the ’80s. The Vietnam War no longer elicits the sort of ostentatious regret it did a generation ago. To confine the discussion to Holly-wood, “We Were Soldiers” (2002) was one of the first major films to portray the average American soldier in Vietnam as decent and valorous; more recently “The Last Full Measure” (2018), though indulging in the usual antiwar pieties, acknowledges the bravery and decency of American soldiers.

We’ve moved on in politics, too.

The great scourge of supposed American war crimes in Vietnam, John Kerry—the man who averred in 1971 that American soldiers serving in Vietnam perpetrated war crimes “in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan”—was the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 2004. He felt obliged to refashion himself as a war hero, and he lost.

The Vietnam War doesn’t lend itself to unambiguous interpretations in the way many wars do.

But with media-generated myths no longer dominant, and with the pain of losing 58,220 servicemen subsiding, are Americans ready to think about the whole thing anew? “Maybe,” Jim Webb answers after a thoughtful pause. Mr. Webb, 76, who served as President Reagan’s Navy secretary (1987-88) and a Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia from (2007-13), commanded a Marine rifle platoon in the Vietnam bush in 1969-70. “Maybe,” he says again, looking unconvinced.

The biggest myth, to my mind, holds that the ordinary Vietnam combat veteran was so scarred by the experience that he couldn’t get his life together back home. Think of Travis Bickle, the lonesome, deranged vet of Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film “Taxi Driver.”

Is there any truth to the stereotype? Mr. Webb recalls an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1986 claiming to find that Vietnam veterans were 86% more likely than everyone else to commit suicide. “I read it,” he recalls, “I broke down all the authors’ numbers and figured out how they came to this conclusion, and it was total bulls—.” The paper considered only men born during 1950, 1951 and 1952, and only those who died in Pennsylvania and California between 1974 and 1983. That didn’t stop the press from touting the study, “in essence claiming if you served in Vietnam, you’re probably going to kill yourself.”

In 1979 Congress hired the Harris polling firm to survey Americans on what they thought about the war and its veterans. At the time Mr. Webb was counsel to the House Veterans Affairs Committee. “Of Vietnam veterans,” he recalls, “91% said they were glad they served in the military, and 74% said at some level they enjoyed their time in the military. And 2 out of 3 said they would do it again.”

Was the war worth fighting?

Mr. Webb thinks on balance it was. He recalls a meeting with Lee Kuan Yew, founder of modern Singapore. “I asked him a similar question,” Mr. Webb says, “and in his view, America won—only in a different way. We stopped communism, which didn’t advance in Indochina any further than it reached in 1975. We enabled other countries in the region to develop market economies and governmental systems that were basically functional and responsive to their people. That model has stayed, and I like to think it will advance, even in Vietnam.”

But clearly a lot did go wrong between 1963 and 1975. In his autobiography, “I Heard My Country Calling” (2014), Mr. Webb writes of “the arrogance and incompetence of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his much-ballyhooed bunch of civilian Whiz Kids whose data-based ‘systems analysis’ approach to fighting our wars had diminished the historic role of military leadership.” He repeats the same criticism of the war’s civilian leadership, and he insists the military tacticians in the field—American and South Vietnamese— did their jobs superbly.

Mr. Webb describes two problems the U.S. military was largely powerless to solve. First, the North Vietnamese government’s policy of sending assassination squads into the South. “Bernard Fall, a great French journalist, writes about this in ‘The Two Vietnams,’ ” a book published in 1963, Mr. Webb says. “It had been happening since at least 1958. The Vietminh started sending these squads back into the South, particularly central Vietnam. They were extremely smart and ruthless about it. These guys would go in and execute anyone with ties to any part of the South Vietnamese government—government officials, teachers, social workers, anyone.”

Over time, these murders sapped the population’s loyalty to the government in Saigon, and there was very little the U.S. military could do about it.

The second problem was the one many readers will remember well: the radical left’s successful use of the war, with the news media’s complicity. “Take Students for Democratic Society,” Mr. Webb says. “They were founded before there was a Vietnam War. The Port Huron Statement of 1962”— the document that founded the SDS—“doesn’t say anything about Vietnam. The goal of these revolutionaries was to dissolve the American system, and they thought they would accomplish that through racial issues. They didn’t get any traction—until about 1965 and the Vietnam War.”

Mention of the news media raises the subject of class.

The journalists reporting on the war, interpreting events for the American public, “were articulate, were from good schools, had important family connections,” Mr. Webb says. “You could see it all coming apart.”

Coming apart?

Mr. Webb describes a “divorce” between “upper strata” Americans and the military’s base of enlistees. That divorce didn’t begin with the Vietnam War, but the war accelerated and exacerbated it. “The military draws mainly from people within a certain tradition. It’s a tradition of fighting for the country simply because it’s their country.” Mr. Webb’s first novel, “Fields of Fire” (1978), is in many ways an imaginative portrayal of this fragmentation.

The book, which captures the war’s brutality but carefully avoids criticism of its policy makers, follows the war experience of three American servicemen. One, a Harvard student, means to get a spot in the Marine Corps band as a horn player but winds up as a grunt. He begins his tour by viewing the whole conflict through the lens of Jean-Paul Sartre (“Suffering without meaning, except in the suffering itself”) and ends, permanently maimed, shouting into a microphone at antiwar protesters back in Cambridge: “ I didn’t see any of you in Vietnam. I saw . . . truck drivers and coal miners and farmers. I didn’t see you.”

The military’s present-day recruitment difficulties, Mr. Webb says, have a lot to do with this cultural stratification. When civilian political leaders announce they’re “going into the military to purge ‘whites with extremist views,’ do they know what they’re doing? A lot of the U.S. military comes from a certain cultural tradition, and right now a lot of parents are saying to their kids, ‘Don’t go. You want to have your whole life canceled because someone said you were at a meeting where there was a Confederate flag or whatever?’ ” Mr. Webb sought the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, although he dropped out before the end of 2015. At a CNN debate Anderson Cooper asked each of the candidates: “You’ve all made a few people upset over your political careers. Which enemy are you most proud of?” Others answered predictably: the National Rifle Association, the pharmaceutical industry, the Republicans. Mr.

Webb’s response: “I’d have to say the enemy soldier that threw the grenade that wounded me, but he’s not around right now to talk to.” The liberal commentariat disparaged him for boasting that he’d killed a man, but Donald Trump won the general election by appealing to the sort of swing voters who weren’t offended by Mr. Webb’s remark.

Max Hastings, in “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy” (2018), writes of the Paris Accords that the U.S. “eventually settled on the only terms North Vietnam cared about, whereby its own troops remained in the South, while the Americans went home.” Mr. Webb, who speaks Vietnamese and has visited Vietnam many times as a civilian, agrees: “We did the same thing there as we did in Afghanistan: We cut our allies out of all the important decisions.”

“In 1972”—here he becomes animated—“ the South Vietnamese military was really starting to grow and become a lethal fighting force.” In the Easter Offensive, the North Vietnamese “ hit the South with everything they had.”

He picks up some nearby papers and reads figures: “14 divisions, 26 independent regiments and several hundred Soviet tanks hit South Vietnam. The Americans— we were nearly all gone by then. South Vietnam lost 39,000 soldiers; the communists admitted in their own records that they lost 100,000. They tried to take the South, and the South beat them.

And then, at Paris, we cut them out.”

Soon afterward, Richard Nixon resigned, Congress cut off funding, and Saigon fell.

“Then, of course,” Mr. Webb goes on, the communists “did the Stalinist thing—they put hundreds of thousands of the South Vietnamese finest into re-education camps. Two hundred forty thousand stayed there longer than four years. I have a good friend who was in a re-education camp for 13 years.”

Recalling a visit to Vietnam in 1991, Mr. Webb describes a night when hundreds of South Vietnamese Army veterans who had spent years in re-education camps gathered in a park near Saigon’s old railway station. “My Vietnamese friend told me many of these guys had been high-ranking officers. We could see some of them shooting heroin through their thighs. I thought to myself, ‘Wait a second— these were our people.’ ” Mr. Webb pauses for a moment, then recovers.

What have we learned from Vietnam? Not much, if the Afghanistan pullout is anything to go by. “The way they left was horrible, disgusting,” he says. “People said it looked like the fall of Saigon. No, it did not.”

As a military procedure, “the evacuation from Saigon was brilliant. In 1975, we had refugee camps all over the place ready to take people in—Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, Camp Pendleton in California, Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Operation New Life in Guam.

These places were ready to go before the fall. We got 140,000 people out of there. What this administration did was a disgrace. There was no excuse for it.”

Before I leave, Mr. Webb shows me various pictures and artifacts in his office. The leg injured by that grenade still troubles him; he walks around the office with a slight but discernible limp. One black-and-white photograph he particularly wants me to see.

Taken in 1979, it shows a much younger Jim Webb with two pals from his rifle platoon. Tom Martin, who enlisted in the Marines while a student at Vanderbilt and served as a squad leader, is in a wheelchair. Mac McGarvey, Mr. Webb’s fifth radio operator—three of the previous four were seriously wounded—has no right arm.

All three men in the photograph are smiling.

Originally posted 2023-01-25 15:04:44.

Current Events, Recent Posts

A Little History

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Failure in Afghanistan Has Roots in the All-Volunteer Military

For the past three decades, careerism among senior officers coupled with the disconnect between the American public and the All-Volunteer Force have led to failed and unnecessary overseas military interventions.
By Paul Cavallo

September 2021
Proceedings
Vol. 147/9/1423

The tragedy that unfolded over the past several weeks in Afghanistan began with the creation of the “all-volunteer” military in 1973 and the self-promoting careerism that has stalked the Pentagon ever since. Too few leaders have been willing to speak truth to power and say no to overseas military adventurism that had little bearing on the safety and security of this nation. And it goes without saying that those in charge when the war begins are never those who have to finish it.

We saw this most clearly when, in 1990-91, America sent its young warriors into the deserts of the Middle East. We called it “The Gulf War” and “Desert Storm,” but it was, in reality, America’s first mercenary war. The Bush administration cut a deal with the Saudis and Kuwaitis: our men, their money. Kuwaiti “princes” lived large in hotels from Saudi Arabia to Paris while our young soldiers and Marines dug fighting holes in the desert under a searing sun.

U.S. Marines in Desert Storm
U.S. Marines in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. (Naval Institute archives)
The peacetime, all-volunteer military, after all, was a good job with benefits and perks. And that “war” went relatively well and quickly with few American servicemembers killed or injured, to the high praise of the U.S. public who were entranced, awed, and seduced by the lethality, performance, and accuracy of our high-tech weapons, while forgetting that the troops on the ground, in the desert, held it all together and made the irrefutable success of the war possible. Yet it was also the start of the forever wars. Saddam Hussein remained in power after the war and the U.S. military remained in the Middle East—enforcing no-fly zones and oil embargoes on Iraq with naval forces in the Persian Gulf and air and land forces based in Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.

While it might be a “chicken or the egg” argument, it is hard not to see that the permanent increase of U.S. military presence in the Middle East went hand in hand with the rise of militant Islam and anti-American terrorism. How many Americans remember the 1996 terrorist bombing of a U.S. Air Force barracks in Khobar, Saudi Arabia? Nineteen U.S. servicemembers were killed and 498 wounded. Two years later, the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya killed 12 Americans and hundreds of civilians and wounded 4,500 people. Then came the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole (DDG-67) in Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors and injuring dozens of others. Less than a year later came the 9/11 attacks, answered shortly by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. A little over a year later, under the false pretense that non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction would be used against the United States, came the invasion of Iraq.

Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 in Saudi Arabia
The 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia killed 19 U.S. servicemembers and injured nearly 500 more. 

By the end of 2003, U.S. special operations forces had completed much of their mission in Afghanistan to capture or kill senior leaders and high-value targets within both al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The Pentagon, however, rather than putting their “swords” away somehow decided to “nation build” a medieval land of warring tribes into a Western-style democracy, ignoring the fact that our democracy took centuries and many great wars to achieve.

For the past 31 years, the brunt of the cost has been borne by the all-volunteer force. The majority of American citizens have not served (none were required to), and most know few who have. A few dozen—or even a few hundred—servicemembers killed per year was the cost of doing business. But where were the generals and admirals who should have stood up to the civilian leaders, without compromise, to say “enough,”—that foreign wars too often leave our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines dead and forgotten, and for what? Were the military’s senior leaders just following along in-line, waiting for their moment, their chance for another star, or a richly coveted post-retirement job with a “vendor.” Were they just inured to the burdens of the profession? Unable to see the giant machine in which they were cogs—the failed foreign policy that resulted in the spilling of blood and national treasure for questionable (if any) gain.

It is no surprise that the “war” in Afghanistan eventually became a bottomless money pit. More than a trillion dollars was spent; did it make our nation safer, or did it just make Washington-connected corporations rich? Some of that money was funneled back to Congress through campaign donations and favors, all the while young Americans were being killed and wounded. Walk into any Veterans Administration hospital and see first-hand the reality that was brought home.

So, with the most recent deaths and injuries at Kabul International airport—clearly caused by a lack of planning, foresight, and courage at the top—we witness more evidence of the ongoing tragedy and travesty that is American “foreign policy” and the willingness of senior military leaders to go along with it. Will we ever learn? History suggests, no.

Postscript: While some commenters on the  actual article disagree with the author, I do not. I understand where he is coming from and follow his line of thought completely. The disconnect between the American public in general and the military and their assigned missions is indeed relevant. A quick “war story” if I may.

Serving as a temporary Chief of Staff at a command when the actual made a quick decision to retire, I had to handle my job as well for a few months while the Corps had to find a colonel for the billet. After a few months of this double duty my general, a fresh-caught BG, comes in my office with a cup of coffee to shoot the bull. Out of the blue he calmly says, Jim you know you will never make general.” To which I laughed telling him all I ever wanted to be was a Gunny. He asked if I wanted to know why, and of course I knew he wanted to tell me so I said yes.

He told me he knew several generals who would jump at having me as their COS because I had a knack of letting seniors (and juniors) know that if they cannot handle your answer they should never ask me the question. He said generals cannot do that. They must always speak the party line or they will never move above one star, which is why so many generals retire as a BG. They spoke outside the party line once and were passed over, or they  want nothing to do with it and retire.

Personally, I took his comments as compliment as that philosophy helped me to rise from private to colonel, and I was not about to change it. When a general speaks, understand he is never telling you what he truly believes in his heart. He is simply a mouth piece for the admisntration at the time.

Originally posted 2021-09-07 10:06:43.

Current Events

Labor Day?

Since today is that day, here’s a look at what this holiday really means and how it came about. I learned something and I am sure you will also. From my favorite blogger, a Marine , and brother — Mustang. I loved it. Your comments here after you read it please.

Click on this link and ne enlightened.

Why Do Americans Celebrate Labor Day?

Originally posted 2021-09-06 14:13:09.

Current Events

What Lessons?

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Good Day Friends, Brothers and Sisters.

I have been out of comms for nearly a month. Left on 27 July for a trip up the East Coast in the RV to visit friends, brothers, and family and returned this past Monday.  But then you don’t need to hear all about that. What I did do of import was remove myself from eveything newsworthy.  China could have nuked LA and I would have been oblivious. I sent out an email asking to hold all emails; sadly, some of you did not do that. I answered no emails, simply deleted them without reading them. I did not want to know what was going on in this once great nation, nor what that incompetent jerk living in our white house was up to. No emails, no internet, and no TV. What joy that was. Oh I did hear rumblings about things like Afghanistan, but could have cared less. I mean, let’s face it, I knew anything that administration would attempt would be a disaster since no one there has a lick of sense and any one in the military wearing a star and many wearing eagles are incompetent as well. 

So now I am back, but remain aloof of the goings on in the sandbox. At my age and station in life, I really could care less. It has become somewhat fun watching what “they” do.  American’s, in general are stupid, absolutely stupid! I read this a.m. where “his” approval rating is down to 44%. Which tells me 44% of our population are absolute imbeciles.

Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know Nancy and I have returned and I will try and keep the blog going, but mind you it might be about things other than that idiot in the WH.  I did run across this one and thought I’d share it with you. Just another example of how stupid we are.

Semper Fi; Jim

A LOST LEARNING EXPERIENCE?

CIA Chief of Station, Saigon, Thomas Polgar, April 1975

  1. WITH RECEIPT PRESIDENTIAL MESSAGE ADVISING THAT EVACUATION AMERICAN EMBASSY SAIGON MUST BE COMPLETED BEFORE 0345 LOCAL TIME 30 APRIL, WISH TO ADVISE THAT THIS WILL BE THE FINAL MESSAGE FROM SAIGON STATION.
  2. IT WILL TAKE US ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES TO DESTROY EQUIPMENT. ACCOMPLISH BY APPROXIMATELY 0320 HOURS LOCAL. WE MUST TERMINATE CLASSIFIED TRANSMISSIONS
  3. IT HAS BEEN A LONG FIGHT AND WE HAVE LOST. THIS EXPERIENCE UNIQUE IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES DOES NOT SIGNAL NECESSARILY THE DEMISE OF THE UNITED STATES AS A WORLD POWER. THE SEVERITY OF THE DEFEAT AND THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF IT, HOWEVER, WOULD SEEM TO CALL FOR A REASSESSMENT OF THE POLICIES OF NIGGARDLY HALF MEASURES WHICH HAVE CHARACTERIZED MUCH OF OUR PARTICIPATION HERE DESPITE THE COMMITMENT OF MANPOWER AND RESOURCES WHICH WERE CERTAINLY GENEROUS. THOSE WHO FAIL TO LEARN FROM HISTORY ARE FORCED TO REPEAT IT. LET US HOPE THAT WE WILL NOT HAVE ANOTHER VIETNAM EXPERIENCE AND THAT WE HAVE LEARNED OUR LESSON.

SAIGON SIGNING OFF.

Postscript: Paragraph 5 says it all

Originally posted 2021-08-25 12:25:41.

Recent Posts

Cubans – My Opinion

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Cubans Are Fed Up With Communism. Democrats Aren’t So Sure.

Folks, I have some personal knowledge about this issue — I’ve been there!  We belong to Faith United Methodist Church, Fort Myers, Florida. Two years ago I was offered an opportunity to go on a mission trip to Cuba, (pronounced as Ku-Bah with a short U). While I had been to Cuba a few times during my career, I was packing a weapon guarding Guantanamo, I had never been inside the country, or any communist country for that matter; therefore I jumped at the chance. No surprises.

I expected eveything I saw, except such severe rationing of everything. Cuba’s primary agricultural product is sugar cane, so why is sugar so tightly rationed?  It is exported, that’s how the country survives economically. Another example, here is the meat department in a  town’s local grocery store.

If you are not there at the very hour the meat is put out, sorry. This is what you will eat and what we ate everyday.

Everyone lives by needs only, not desires; there are no such thing as wants. Examples, what’s missing in these photos?

 

 

 

The passenger does not see when it is raining, one doesn’t need a toilet seat, and regardless how many outlets a light fixture has, it only needs one bulb to see.

Our sponsor was a district head of the local Methodist churches; fifty-six of them! There are literally 1000’s throughout the hinterlands. Plus, so many other denominations are there as well. After seeing how many of these  mission churches there are, I came away convinced it was only a matter of time when the population would become educated, God loving, and  wanting to fill wants, not just needs. That. my friends, is what I believe you are seeing now, and it will only get worse. The government “tolerates” these mission churches for they know they best not try to shut them down. Without them those in the hinterlands could not survive. In effect, these churches provide a service the government cannot provide, but you can bet their are a deep thorn in their side.

This trip  simply reinforced to me these liberals who tout socialism, need to go there. And I don’t mean Havana, go to the hinterlands where we went. But they won’t as they know better; they want the U.S. to be degraded to the level of Cuba

Just prior to our arriving Raul’s gay daughter wanted to get married. All the mission churches form all the denominations banded together and produced a petition stating they would not perform a gay marriage as it was against their religions. So in retaliation Raul cancelled all religious VISAS; therefore, days before we were to leave we had to change ours to a Visitors VISA, and when we arrived we had tell a fib and tell the very inquisitive custom agents we were there just to visit. We found this sign posted on the door of every church we visited.

She was married, but not by one of the mission churches. These churches have filled a vacuum in Cuba and their flock gets larger by the day

AOC and her band of swamp creatures need to go there for a real look-see, they “might” learn something but I seriously doubt it. The regime would not dare show them the hinterlands, but the folks out there are getting restless by the day and learning there is life out here in the world; they see it daily with all the many mission trips.

From the Daily Beast

Matt Lewis Senior Columnist

Done with being hungry, unemployed, without water, without power”—as one 88-year-old protester put it—thousands of Cubans are, after 60 years of oppression, taking a brave stand against an authoritarian regime quick to crack down on dissent. As unprecedented street protests aimed at Cuba’s vengeful Communist government have continued, here in the comfortable confines of American politics, the Democratic Party risks blowing yet another opportunity to seize both the center and the moral high ground at a time when those have been largely abandoned by the GOP.

Who or what is stopping them from simply assuming this position as America’s mainstream, majority party? A small, but young and energetic and growing band of activists with outsized influence who support radical causes like CRT, “defund the police,” and socialism. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, like Bernie Sanders, prefers the label of democratic socialist.)

On important issues as diverse as crime and infrastructure, Joe Biden has had to walk the line between appeasing this base and delivering on his promise of being a centrist. The result tends toward a mushy compromise that is passable, but during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday, he delivered. “Communism is a failed system—a universally failed system. And I don’t see socialism as a very useful substitute. But that’s another story,” he said.

Better late than never. The danger, as Marc Caputo warned, was that the president “could blow it by being too slow to move, too timid in his actions or by embracing the messaging from progressives who have been reluctant to denounce the Cuban regime in strong, unqualified and moralistic terms.”

Cuba is a wedge issue, and if you doubt this issue still resonates, think again. One of the reasons Biden became the Democratic nominee was Bernie Sanders’ past praise for Fidel Castro. Likewise, California Rep. Karen Bass’s 2016 praise of Castro (“the passing of the Comandante en Jefe is a great loss to the people of Cuba”) helped scuttle talk of her being Biden’s running mate. She walked that back in 2020, but it was too little and too late to resuscitate her vice presidential ambitions.

That’s not one but two high-profile Democrats (one of whom came within a whisker of being his party’s nominee and still retains enormous influence) who had high praise for a Communist country and its bloodthirsty dictator. As much as the dark and authoritarian strains of America’s right-wing extremists have been rightly scrutinized, the left harbors its fair share of radicals.

For example, before Biden’s comments, Black Lives Matter (specifically, the group operating under that name founded by Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza) posted a statement blaming the U.S. government for Cuba’s problems that Cuban citizens are bravely taking to the streets to protest.

“Black Lives Matter condemns the U.S. federal government’s inhumane treatment of Cubans and urges it to immediately lift the economic embargo,” it reads. They are literally blaming America first.

To be sure, U.S. sanctions are squeezing Cuba (along with COVID and reduced support from Venezuela). But the fundamental problem is the communist system’s failure to deliver on its utopian promise by modernizing its economy. Cuba, not America, is responsible for the disastrous decision to develop their own COVID vaccine (instead of joining COVAX, the World Health Organization’s sharing program). By blaming America, progressives are parroting the communist regime’s own propaganda talking points even as lots of mainstream Democrats—like Rep. Gregory Meeks—are using the protests as an opportunity to call on the U.S. to end sanctions.

So why are they doing it?

Some of the radicals truly believe America is to blame. For others, it’s a political calculation. “There’s a concern by some in the party that if we condemn what happens in Cuba that we’re somehow making a moral judgment on the most progressive elements of our party who have described themselves as Democratic socialists,” z, a former Democratic state representative who is the son of exiles, told Caputo. “That concern about offending certain progressive elements in the party is why you see statements of the kind from the likes of Congressman Meeks.”

Squeezing Biden and the Democrats from the other direction, many Floridians are emotionally invested in these Cuban protests. “‘Where is Biden? Where is Biden,’ shouted Cuban-American demonstrators Tuesday in Tampa,” according to the Miami Herald.

This isn’t just a few protesters who can be easily ignored. There’s a good argument to be made that Elian Gonzalez defeated Al Gore in 2000. Since that time, though, Democrats talked themselves into the notion that Florida had changed, that Cuban Americans weren’t as important a slice of the Florida Hispanic community as they once were, and that younger Cuban Americans have different political sensibilities. Just as 2016 shattered notions about the “coalition of the ascendant,” meaning they could ignore working-class whites, this assumption about Cuban Americans seems premature at best.

A lot of emphasis has been put on Biden saying the right things, but while a Democratic president and party expressing solidarity with the protesters is helpful, it is not sufficient. The real test is action. One obvious thing America should do is open our doors to Cuban refugees, yet the Biden administration is warning that “if you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States.” Would the Biden administration really turn away Cubans fleeing persecution, and risk the political fallout that could entail? We may find out.

A more helpful and proactive idea comes from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is now calling on Biden to help restore Cuba’s internet access, which has been blockaded by the regime; this action alone would be instrumental in helping protest organizers and allowing the world to see any retribution. On Thursday, Biden gave a nod in this direction, saying: “We’re considering whether we have the technological ability to reinstate that access.”

Will Biden answer the call? His decision will have both moral and political implications. The stakes are high.

As Miami Herald columnist Fabiola Santiago puts it, “Before Trump, Cuban Americans twice voted for Obama. If Democrats bungle the bloodshed in Cuba, they will forfeit Cuban-American voters forever—and they will deserve it.”

I’m highly disappointed this article failed to touch on the effect these missions have had on the current state of affairs in Cuba. I firmly believe they are awakening the people.; I’ve seen it first hand. Oh and bear in mind they have yet to taste a Big Mac or a  Coke LOL. Is anymore wondering why Joey the puppet doesn’t want Cuban immigrants entering the U.S.? Who would they vote for? Go figure. 

In sum, Cuba is a country stuck in the 20th Century (1900’s), with a little 21st Century mixed in (2000’s), and a very small touch of the 22nd Century (2100’s). The more these missions provide of the  latter two centuries, the worse it’s going to get for the government.

Our Taxi.  By the way, he had a cell phone.

Originally posted 2021-07-17 16:11:27.