I just finished watching a cable news extravaganza about the Obama-Castro love fest in Panama. What a spectacle. The Cubans are behaving understandably. The Castro government has so mismanaged the island’s economy that only corruption, the black market, money orders from their Miami relatives and a police state keeps the whole place from collapsing into the sea. Cuba isn’t a country, its a colossal racket, a gangster enterprise. They need US investment and trade because its pretty clear by now the system is not going to survive without it.

The show had a token conservative pundit making the usual excuses, that Cuba was never going to be a free market paradise and a constitutional democracy unless the US continued its half-century long economic strangulation of the island. The not-so-hidden subtext, of course, is that “Obama is an asshole.” So what else is new? The truth is, does the US have any right to meddle in other country’s affairs simply because we don’t like them?

Hey, don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of us using our economic and diplomatic clout to make things hard on dictatorships, and to try to promote liberal economic and political values in other countries. But if we’re going to do that, howzabout a little consistency, eh? We’ve been leaning on Cuba for a half century not because they are a brutal dictatorship, but because they made us look like fools by going Communist right under our noses. They had the audacity to nationalize our companies, confiscate our property, invite in the Soviets, declare themselves Marxist, oppose our politics in South America and Africa, and to kick our ass at Playa Girón (the Cuban name for Bay of Pigs).

Our policy in Cuba has nothing to do with freedom and human rights, its all about the Cold War. Now that the Cold War has been over for decades, why do we persist? Its not like we don’t have full diplomatic relations with a number of other brutal dictatorships. Long after the Iron Curtain came tumbling down and the Soviet and Chinese empires transformed themselves into Gilded Age Capitalist oligarchies we still continued playing the same game with Cuba. We’re trading and diplomatically engaged with all sorts of sleazy dictators, including a few remaining Communist ones. The hypocrisy is truly breathtaking, and obvious to the whole world, except for the American taxpayer who pays for the carrier battle groups.

Part of it, of course, was to keep the Cuban exiles in Miami happy, because they controlled the swing vote in a battleground state. But the Miami Cubans no longer are a monolithic anti-Communist bloc. Most are American-born now, many of them are even the grandchildren of those who escaped from the Castro regime in the 60s. They don’t even speak Spanish any more, and many have moved out of Florida! The Miami Cubans are no longer the potent force in American politics they once were. And lets not forget that there are other forces on the American Right who no longer see in Cuba a brave little island struggling against a sleazy geriatric Communist Party. They see a place to do business, and make vast profits. The business interests want to see Cuba opened up, the Cuban exiles mostly don’t care (at least the younger ones don’t). The only people who still see Cuba in a Communist vs Capitalist scenario are the extreme Right of the Republican Party. There’s going to be a lot of talk about Cuba, especially about how Obama is selling FREEDOM (TM) down the river, but nothing is going to happen to stop it, mark me. You see, there’s real money to be made in Cuba. The Troglodyte Right can squeal like piggies all they want, but the US Chamber of Commerce is calling the shots now, and they’re backing Obama all the way. In fact, I’m pretty sure they’re the ones who got the ball rolling on this whole initiative.

So what’s in it for Obama? Only the usual excuses: he can get away with it, it will look good on his legacy, he won’t get any real opposition from the Republican Establishment, his Liberal base will break out into choruses of Kumbaya. It will make the rest of S. America ease up on their innate mistrust of us because of our long history of economic and military domination of the region and (something no one seems to be talking about, or even noticing); it will put a brake on Chinese economic development in Cuba, and in the New World. Yeah, that’s what’s really behind this. That’s the real threat. Not Communist infiltration of free societies, but a Chinese Capitalist assault on our markets and sources of raw materials and cheap labor.

Same as it ever was.