A Pirate Looks at 90

Cuba looks so small, yet it has loomed so large in American politics for decades. From Colonel Lansdale's failed Operation Mongoose to Jesse Helms notorious Helms-Burton Act, Cuba has been able to thumb its nose at the United States for over 50 years. As Stephen humorously noted on one of his last episodes of The Colbert Report, "the CIA was this close to taking down Fidel Castro with the deadliest weapon of all -- time!"

Fidel is 88, and while it is hard to guess how many years he has left in him, he no longer represents a threat to the United States. Don't tell Marco Rubio that, who flew off the handle in his latest rant against the President, claiming that the deal to free Alan Gross has put a price on all Americans' heads, echoing the same reaction Congressional Republicans had to the deal Obama struck for the release of Bowe Bergdahl. Remember him?

In case you're curious, Alan Gross was working for USAID at the time he was arrested, er abducted, for providing satellite phones and computer equipment to the Jewish community in Cuba without a permit. Not like he felt he needed one. He was part of a "democracy promotion program," initiated under the Bush administration, to provide communications equipment to break Cuba's "information blockade." It was like one of those lamentable Lansdale schemes, doomed to failure, as Gross couldn't speak a word of Spanish and was an easy target for Cuban officials. Maybe it was meant that way to divert attention away from other nefarious schemes. Who knows and who really cares? These subversive campaigns have gone on long enough and are no benefit to anyone, as I'm sure Cubans can get plenty of computer hardware and software through Latin America and Europe. It's not like they are that isolated, although I suppose the satellite phones were meant to help offset the antiquated phone lines and Internet connections.

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba has been cultivating stronger ties with Europe. The EU has slowly opened up relations with Cuba over the last two decades, with large strides made since Raul Castro took over for his ailing older brother in July, 2006. Granted, Cuba has yet to renounce Communism, but it is a far more open country now than it was 10 years ago. It has bilateral relations with Canada, including a joint venture in developing Cuba's recently discovered offshore oil reserves. Something, American oil refineries have long coveted.

Cuba is a lucrative market in many ways, not just rum and cigars. This is what led the US to take such an active interest in the 1950s, propping up a failed dictatorship for the better part of a decade so that it could exploit the island nation. None other than Errol Flynn pointed this out in 1959.

We could have established relations with the new government in Havana, but instead chose to place Fidel Castro on the most wanted list, turning him into the biggest hero in Latin America since Simon Bolivar. This political pirate has obviously gotten the last laugh and there are a lot of conservatives who don't appreciate the irony in it.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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