Okay now, some reality. Cuba is a socialist polity and economy. They don’t have the personal freedoms and resources to buy American products, even if they wanted to. Our opening trade barriers isn’t going to change their political makeup. It’s not going to turn the Castro brothers into our newest bestest buddies. They are still going to repress and oppress the Cuban citizens that make up their “constituency.” They don’t have free election. They don’t have the right to free speech. They don’t have the right to protest. They do have the right to go to jail for trying to exercise any one of the daily freedoms we take for granted.

Providing a market for their limited national production effort will only line the pockets of a corrupt and oppressive government that has a 50-year history by which to judge it. Just because President Obama smiles and shakes Raul’s hand doesn’t mean Raul is not a despotic tyrant like his brother.

It’s all very convenient to think that if we show them this “grace” that we will be “humanized” and the leadership of Cuba will be “dehumanized.” But what does that mean? Does that mean that Cubans will want to come to America and stop loving their tyrannical “President?” They already do that. Cubans are willing to risk their own death to float here in small boats with only the current to direct them. They already hate their president. They only vote for him because a vote against him is a sure prison sentence. Let’s take off the Pollyanna glasses for a moment and pay a visit to reality. Let’s ask the question, “why did we start the embargo?”

We started the embargo to use economic pressure to both destabilize an unfriendly, Communist, regime … and to encourage a change in political direction more in line with a trade partner that we could do business with. Until Cuba’s “president” and “step-president” are willing to allow those individual freedoms to Cuban citizens that would restore their ability to even participate in an embargo-free relationship with the USA, I don’t see how you can honestly think that giving Raul and Fidel Castro access to US markets is a good idea. You think they have been entrenched in the past? Wait until they have the economic power of the entire state-run production sector making goods for the expansive US marketplace. You think any of the wealth that is created for Cuba through that enterprise will be shared with the masses of that island? I don’t see anything in the history of dictatorships that even hints at a precedence in history to substantiate the notion.

Why don’t you go down there and ask the Castros if they would be willing to share with the Cuban people the freedoms that we have been asking of them since the beginning of the embargo? Maybe you decades of PR experience can encourage them to do what they have been unwilling to do for 50 years.

You note the persistent hope of the Cuban citizenry. I assert that they also possess the wisdom to preserve that which serves them while discarding the rusty machinery of dying autocracy. I imagine a day soon when the current Cuban regime might want to restrict American participation, as that tide could swamp their rusty schooner. The people will shape what survives.