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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   23862 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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How is Cuba an allowed exception? Cuba is still embargoed, despite being no worse than Vietnam.

Because the US has explicitly committed to not invading it despite hosting Russian military bases.

I could find only that since Cuban Crisis USSR/Russia had only sigint base on Cuba, not military.

Yet it is still subject to an incredibly harsh embargo. Long after similar "communist" regimes and direct Russian allies that killed relatives of mine have become major trading partners. That doesn't really fit with "allowed."

That’s because of Cuban exiles in Miami-Dade County. Florida was a critical swing state in American electoral politics and Miami-Dade county was critical for winning Florida. Any party that normalized relations with Cuba would have lost the White House for the next 25 years.

That doesn't really point to Cuba being "allowed" to exist peacefully in opposition to the United States.

The reason Cuba has been "allowed" to exist for so long is not out of some reasoned exception to the Monroe Doctrine, it is simply because the Castro regime has historically been competent and popular enough that overthrowing it has not been practical.

In Venezuela, Chavez poked the United States more than Maduro ever did, but he was a competent strongman and so he lived to die of cancer in power.

I think it’s a few things.

•The first likely window for an invasion was the Cold War. Kennedy’s handshake deal not to invade Cuba meant that Cuba wasn’t going to be invaded for the last 30 years of the Cold War. Even if Washington doesn’t value honor, nobody wanted to pick at that scab after the nuclear near miss in ‘62, and several other fronts of the Cold War were more important anyway.

•The next likely window for an invasion would have been in the 90s, after the USSR fell. But no one had any appetite for major military action in the 90s, and Cuba wasn’t engaging in any particularly theatrical genocides that would have moved the US to action.

•The third likely window for an invasion would have been during the post-9/11 paranoia spiral. But Cheney’s priority list was Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, and the Iraq boondoggle meant that he never even managed to finish the top five, much less cleaning up the D-listers.

•After that there was a pretty big phobia of wading into regime change, and Cuba just kind of kept lumbering on due to inertia.

Good explanation

Because since at least 1991 the US has been technically and geopolitically capable of invading Cuba and overthrowing the communists there without provoking a global crisis and hasn’t done so.

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