The View from Right Field

Being a Happy Person At Christmas – From “GeneracionY”

In this holiday season, it is perhaps useful to read about how other people approach the season.  These are excerpts from a post by Yoani Sanchez at the GeneracionY blog.  You can read the whole thing here.  Follow Ms. Sanchez and this blog,  You will learn a lot – and realize how much we have to be thankful for:

“Those December days are approaching when we all take stock, set new goals and forecast what is going to happen. The year 2023 arrives on an Island plunged into a deep crisis, with an uncertain outlook. In the absence of certainties, I want to venture on this list (very particular, subjective and absolutely determined by my circumstances) my personal and national toeholds, what I think will happen next year:

That Was the Team That Was: Cubs 2016

It was going to happen someday.  They were going to leave.  Maybe it was better they, or at least the three of them, left together.  They played together.  Maybe it’s right they left together.

This has happened before; I have seen teams leave.  Obviously, the late 60s and early 70s.  But 1977, too.  And ’84 and ’89.  1998.  2003.  It’s sad, but it’s what happens.  You have heroes, and it’s tough when they leave.  But those heroes, especially the real ones, they stay heroes.  Ernie, Ron, Billy, and Fergie.  The Reuschels.  Sut and Ryno.  Mark, Sammy, Woody.  And then the Boys of ’16. 

Bernie and Fidel

Like a lot of people on the left, though possibly more than most, Bernie Sanders has a Fidel Castro problem.  The problem is that Senator Sanders likes him – or, at least, he wants to like him.  Fidel said all the right things.  And he supposedly did all the right things: educating the kids, providing health care to everyone, transforming society.  (There was the lack of freedom, political prisoners, etc., but some people on the left sort of skip over that.) 

The difficulty for this view is that, regardless of what may have happened before 1990, things have gone downhill since the Soviet Union collapsed and money from Moscow stopped coming in.¹  But that apparently hasn’t stopped Senator Sanders from believing, as he said on “60 Minutes” last month:

Cuba’s Ladies in White Win the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty

Everybody has heard of the Nobel Peace Prize.  Over the years, it has honored people for doing great things.  Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War, George Marshall in 1953, Norman Borlaug in 1970 for the green revolution, and Lech Walesa in 1983. 

There have been deserving winners recently, too, such as Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year Pakistani girl, who won in 2014 after being shot in the head by the Taliban for going to school and writing about it, and Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human rights activist, who won in 2010 but was not allowed to go to Oslo to collect the prize (surprise).  He also became just the second winner to die in custody.

Others, however, have been questionable, such as Kofi Annan and the United Nations in 2001.  (The people of Rwanda were not consulted.  See, inter alia, here and here.)  Three recent winners seem to have won mostly because they weren’t George W. Bush: Jimmy Carter in 2002,¹ Al Gore in 2007 (he should have won the presidential election in 2000), and Barack Obama in 2009 (George W. Bush was finally gone).  Also, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons won in 2013.  We have seen how successful they have been.

Illinois and Cuba: Maybe Not All That Different

I probably got a little carried away with my post earlier today about the upcoming Illinois primary election.  Perhaps a better comment is in Yoani Sanchez’s post of February 28, “The Arrival of the Potato and the President, in Priority Order,” in her blog Generation Y about life in Cuba:

“An agitation has been running through the neighborhood since the previous afternoon, when the neighbors spotted a potato truck while it was unloading at the market on the corner. …

All life seems to revolve around a tuber that for months has disappeared from the state market stalls, where now sales are limited to just five pounds per person.

Dealing With North Korea: Richard Nixon-Style

Failing with respect to North Korea is a pattern with recent presidents.  Bill Clinton signed an Agreed Framework with the father of Kim Jong Un.  North Korea violated it.  George W. Bush seemed to be getting a little somewhere with financial sanctions, but then we backed off in order to open negotiations with North Korea.  The negotiations didn’t work.  Neither did Barack Obama’s strategic patience. 

On the other hand, if one of the reasons North Korea is developing nuclear weapons is because they are a little paranoid, then I am not sure all of the Trump administration's threats and tweets are helping the situation.  If we’re not careful, we might scare Kim Jong Un into doing something first, which would not be good.  Please understand I am not saying we shouldn’t do anything.  I’m just saying that maybe we could do it a little more quietly.

The 1970 Russian Nuclear Sub Base in Cuba That Could Have Been an Example for President Obama

President Obama held a press conference on Friday before leaving for Hawaii for Christmas.¹  The big topic, of course, was the intelligence reports of Russian election hacking and the CIA conclusion that the Russian hacking was designed to help elect Donald Trump.  As for foreign hacking that could interfere with actual vote counting, I’ve already talked about how we can deal with that.

Trying to sound cool and calm, President Obama said:

“There have been folks out there who suggest somehow if we went out there and made big announcements and thumped our chests about a bunch of stuff, that somehow it would potentially spook the Russians.  I think it doesn’t read the thought process in Russia very well.”

Fidel Castro: “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead”

When I heard that Fidel Castro had died, I thought of the song from “The Wizard of Oz”: “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead.”  Unfortunately, unlike the Munchkins, I don’t think the death of Fidel Castro is going to set the Cuban people free soon.  Raul Castro is still alive, and it is hard to believe he has designated a successor that would change the system that much.

But what will happen next for U.S.-Cuba relations?  Will Donald Trump follow through on his campaign statement that he would reverse President Obama’s opening up of relations with Cuba? He has said he would, but does anybody really know?  Following up on what I have said before, I don’t think reversing President Obama’s moves would be a good idea.  (I would actually go further.)  The embargo, the restrictions on travel and investment, etc., haven’t worked.  Would they work if other countries imposed them, too?  I don’t know, but I know it’s not going to happen.

How President Obama Can Make His Trip to Cuba a Success – For the Cuban People

President Obama is going to Cuba next week.  One of the big questions is whether he will get to meet with real human rights activists.  Last week, The Washington Post said that if he couldn’t, he should skip the Tampa Bay Rays baseball game and cancel his trip.

As I often do on questions regarding Cuba, I decided to see what Yoani Sanchez, Cuban activist and blogger (at Generation Y), had to say on the question.  It’s easy for Americans to say we should take all kinds of principled stands, but what about the little people in Cuba?  How would what we do affect them?

Libya, Drownings In the Mediterranean, and Obama Administration Foreign Policy Successes

The New Republic published an article last week in which Joel Gillin argued that, pending an Iran nuclear agreement, President Obama’s greatest foreign policy achievement is the opening of relations with Cuba.  Ignoring the question of whether this is all that much of an achievement (we are talking about Cuba, after all, not China), it is perhaps interesting to consider what were previously considered some of President Obama’s foreign policy successes and to see how they look, several years down the road.

In the late summer of 2013, in response repeated crossings by Syria of President Obama’s redline with respect to the use of chemical weapons, President Obama threatened military action against Bashar al-Assad’s regime.  Before he had to follow through on his threat, which you got the impression he really did not want to do, Vladimir Putin saved him.  Picking up on a comment made by Secretary of State John Kerry, Russia proposed that, instead of attacking Syria, Syria would give up its chemical weapons and allow them to be destroyed.  President Obama proclaimed this a great result, saying it was our threat of force that forced Syria to agree to give up its chemical weapons.

Where are we now?  If Bashar al-Assad is not as firmly in power as ever, it is because of ISIS (also known as Islamic State or ISIL), not any of the moderate opponents of his regime.  In fact, our bombing of ISIS in Syria has enabled Assad’s forces to focus more of their attention on the moderate rebels who we supposedly support.  Not only that, but there are reports that chemical weapons, now chlorine gas, are still being used in Syria.¹  While it has not been proven for sure which side, or sides, is using them, the most logical candidate is the forces of Bashar al-Assad.  And what are we doing to preserve the supposed success of 2013 in getting Bashar al-Assad to give up his chemical weapons?  About what you would expect.