While Obama will not shy away from discussing human rights, “the difference here is that in the past, because of certain U.S. policies, the message that was delivered in that regard either overtly or implicitly suggested that the United States was seeking to pursue regime change . . . or the United States thought we could dictate the direction of Cuba,” Rhodes said.
Source: Obama’s goal for Cuba trip: Become a source of support – The Washington Post
Obama’s trip promises to set a new direction in Cuba policy. For the first time in sixty years, the president of the United States will say that the United States does not seek to control Cuba’s sovereignty but to bolster its people. This was the course that President Kennedy was contemplating at the time of his death.
Other presidents explored the possibility. Henry Kissinger privately reconsidered U.S. hostility to Cuba in the mid-1970s and the Castro government responded with cautious interest. Then Cuban exiles, close to the CIA, blew up a Cubana airliner in October 1976, killing 73 people, which would stand as the worst incident aerial terrorism in the Western Hemisphere until the September 11, 2001. The Castro government broke off exploratory talks.
In the 1990s, President Clinton made cautious moves toward restoring normal relations with Cuba in his first term. Then Cuban exiles, led by pilot Jose Basulto, flew a formation of small planes into Cuban airspace to drop leaflets on the Havana, a blatant violation of international aviation regulations. The Cuban government regarded Basulto as a potential assassin as he had been the triggerman on an August 1962 cannon attack on a Havana hotel frequented by Castro.
On February 25, 1996, Basulto led another incursion into Cuban air space. A Cuban air force jet chased the planes into international air space and shot down two of them, killing four people, while Basulto himself escaped. Congress responded by imposing new sanctions on Cuba and the possibilities for reconciliation were dead.
And so for six decades, the advocates of regime change in Cuba held sway over U.S. policy. Their reign is now coming to an end.
“Did anybody ever come to an island with good intentions?” – Paul Theroux
Sorry about the repost, Tom:
You don’t need to physically “change a regime” when you can diplomatically persuade (i.e. threaten and force loans on them that the same central banksters know can’t be paid back) the existing regime to pay tribute under the influence of fractional reserving via the BIS/IMF/WB that only benefits a minority on the backs of every taxpayer whose nation has a central bank. The only hold outs now are North Korea and Iran. Watch the rhetoric against them increase.
For posterity, remember Libya and Syria both joined the CWC in in a treaty that has similar interests to what Iran acceded to last year and both still got bombed to hell under separate lie-begin pretexts just a few years later; in Libya’s case, it was feared that Gadaffi’s gold dinar plans would usurp the City of London’s global central banking monopoly by introducing gold-back currency across the whole of the African continent i.e. make them independent of the “west”. Tyrant or not, Gaddaffi did something that most assassinated leaders get themselves killed for doing – he undertook unusually peaceful maneuvers that challenged the economic and actual hitmen’s monopolies that undergird their benefactors’ ultimate control on the international system of currency and everything that it intends to maintain control over, which is life itself. The City of London’s NATO/US conspiracy was not having any of that so long as AFRICOM could sustain its surgically precise progress after surrounding Sudan’s neighboring countries via tribal dilution in favor of western-backed militarization; Sudan was yet another hold-out “domino” to fall to the west’s communist central planners in the last 15 years.
This so-called “easing of tensions” is no easing of anything to begin with – that is an illusion serving as one of the many cover conspiracies that suborn the ongoing incremental wars on [insert lie-begin cause here] veiled by diplomacy and aid through USAID, NGOs, etc. that are only subsuming nations and individuals for the benefit of present-day cultural Marxist central planners who are hell bent on immortality to the detriment of the parallel societal structure we were involuntarily born into, indoctrinated, and deliberately miseducated within.
“They” own the BIS/IMF/WorldBank/UN, “they” stupervise the executive branch and the intelligence community, “they” indoctrinate from the operant conditioning newborn’s toys to the thesis defense, “they” disinform from the pressroom and the publishing house, and “they” placate via the pulpit.