February 3^rd

Mona Charen this morning tells us that Obama could have gotten a better deal with Cuba. Of course he could. In any negotiation both sides assume that they could have gotten a better deal. That’s why such things are called “negotiations.” At least Mona has not retreated into the usual Cuban-American position that just when we had Castro on the ropes (after fifty years of trying) we give him what he wants. Of course Raul, with whom we now deal, still has things he wants, so the negotiations will continue.

No one excuses Castro; he seized power and was a brutal dictator. But then he had replaced another brutal dictator. Mona tells us what a paradise Cuba must have been before Castro came to power. She says that, “Cuba’s per capita income was higher than in much of Europe." Of course “per capita income” hides the poverty of those at the bottom of the income distribution. Cuba’s wealth then depended heavily on the export of sugar. When the sugar cane was ready to cut the cane cutters had work—for three or four months. And then they had no work at all and they starved.

The dictator de jour during the prosperity Mona describes was one Fulgensio Baptista y Zaldivar. He was the architect of the economy Mona admires and whom Castro replaced. Mona neglects to mention that under Baptista Cuba’s economy depended heavily on catering to rich Americans from Miami who flew in to gamble and visit the various dens of iniquity available in Havana. Baptista was helped mightily in setting up his gambling and prostitution empire by Meyer Lansky. Lansky was a big man in organized crime in the US, but then came Castro and all of this went away. Baptista and many of his cohorts went to Spain. He managed to get out with $300 million; enough to keep in very comfortable circumstance until he died in 1973 just ahead of an assassination squad sent after him by Castro.

The financial circumstance of many Cubans changed dramatically with the arrival of Castro. The more Castro courted communism and Russia the more willing the US government was to welcome Cuban refugees and relax our immigration laws in their favor. Naturally this initially resulted in a flood of well-heeled refugees. Now there are over 1.75 million “Cuban-Americans” in this country, more than a million of them in Florida. They have political influence far beyond their numbers and nearly all of them are virulently anti-Castro. Most of these are law abiding citizens but not all: the Watergate break-in thieves were mostly Cuban-Americans, the terrorist who planted a bomb that killed Chile’s ambassador to the US was a Cuban-American; worst, the two terrorists who planted a bomb on a Cuban airliner that killed many innocent people were Cuban-Americans. Eventually, perhaps it will take a century, these Cuban-Americans will identify themselves as plain Americans. We can hope so.