Didn’t they “burn” the assets by revealing this operation? I bet they did, and they don’t care about these people in Cuba probably being tortured right now. It’s just the news and publicity that counts…
Holy shit, man. Torture, lies and remote control death. America, fuck yeah.
Back in the day when missiles were short range it made sense to worry about a client state of the USSR close to the US. But now weapons have global reach. Low earth orbit is an important operational domain. Potential threats come directly from IS and Russia. In all honesty why does the US give a shit about Cuba?
Because of all the mainly-Republican-leaning exiled Cubans living in America, particularly Florida. It hasn’t been about actually punishing Cuba in a way that actually puts pressure on their government in a while, I think.
Not just that: the Cuban social model has failed in more ways than one, only some of them due to 50 years of trade embargo. There is no need to “stoke opposition” in Cuba: the population there is well aware that change is necessary and inevitable, the leadership is just trying to steer the boat slowly enough to maintain their privileges “à la chinese” and avoid a Russia-style glasnost-meltdown. Just sit and wait for Fidel’s political and physical corpse to float down the river, there is no need to throw money away.
A glastnost meltdown? According to this recent book, Putin’s assent is the endstage of a plan devised when Andropov wasn’t feeling too well…
How he and his cronies stole Russia
In other words, the most important story of the past twenty years might not, in fact, have been the failure of democracy, but the rise of a new form of Russian authoritarianism. Instead of attempting to explain the failures of the reformers and intellectuals who tried to carry out radical change, we ought instead to focus on the remarkable story of one group of unrepentant, single-minded, revanchist KGB officers who were horrified by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the prospect of their own loss of influence. In league with Russian organized crime, starting at the end of the 1980s, they successfully plotted a return to power. Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves. Once in charge, they brought back Soviet methods of political control—the only ones they knew—updated for the modern era.
“hip-hop covert op flop”
If none of the Cuban artists release this as an album, I’ll be disappointed.
Save that link for whenever someone complains about non-obvious/pointless/obscene arts funding, so you can say: “Yeah, but at least the artist didn’t torture anyone.” *
*: may not apply for some deep underground art circles.
I hope they never lift the embargo, is so rare to go to a nice sunny vacation spot and not have a bunch of fat ass American tourists complaining about anything and everything.
I suppose there’s still Vietnam.
This can’t be the first time they’ve done something like this… They sent jazz musicians on tours to counter soviet claims of American racism (laughable), though that was done more out in the open. We already know that the CIA funded all sorts of high art and literary programs under the Congress of Cultural Freedom (among other organizations)… So, this is hold hat.
I think we could have said the same of Yugoslavia as well. I know that lots of people from the former yugoslavia feel a deep sense of yugonostalia (and given what happened in the breakdown of the country, it’s hard to blame them - especially people from Sarajevo), but even there, serious problems existed that can’t just be chalked up to Soviet or US intervention. Tito rejected allowing Stalin to treat Yugoslavia as a colony, yet the Serb dominated center continued to treat the Albanian lands as a colony all through its history, and the Slovenes, Croat, and Serbs all benefited from that.
they don’t care about these people in Cuba probably being tortured right now
…by the CIA in Guantanamo?
That sounds awfully like an apologist position to absolve the Clinton administration of any wrongdoing. I remember who enabled Eltsin (and all but humiliated Gorbachev), and it wasn’t a secret cabal; and I remember who kept propping him up long after it emerged how hopeless he was.
Occam’s razor applies to Russia as to many other things: we all fucked up, both in the West and in the Soviet world. Pinning it all on a couple of Goldfingers is politically convenient but fundamentally dishonest.
Sure, but in soviet russia…
and while that is snark, the point also stands that ‘‘politically convenient and fundamentally dishonest’’ was not exactly imposed from outside in the case of Cuba or Russia.
To give up on giving a shit about Cuba now would be to show Weakness on Communism. Strength demands that any idea, no matter how idiotic, be persistently pursued until the end of time.(Also, republicans don’t need reasons to do stupid, bellicose, foreign policy things and democrats need them some Cuban emigre votes)
Good ol’ USAID again. Quite the track record, huh.
absolve the Clinton administration? Why? What must be absolved?
One can argue the Clinton Administration could’ve done a bit more to keep Russia from regressing so quickly into blatant crony capitalism.
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