Submitted by carlton solomon, Aug 23, 2007 11:51

Regarding Barack Obama's comments on softening restrictions on Cuba I believe he may be making a mistake. The first point I always make about anything that has to do with Cuba, regardless of what anyone does, with or without the embargo, with or without the Cuban Adjustment Act, with or without Venezuela there's going to be a mass exodous that makes everything else a waste of time. More about that in a moment.

If Obama believes that he's going to win the Florida primaries with this, let's say for the sake of argument that every Cuban-American Democrat agrees with him, they only make up 16% of CA voters and Hilary's lead seems insurmountable. Beyond that if you look at the Florida International University poll, one of the questions was "Do you or a family member send money to Cuba"? Think about the phrasing for a moment. Say there are three Cuban-Americans, two don't send money, one does and you ask do you send money?, you get two no's and one yes, if you add or a family member you get yes three times but which is more accurate? The question was asked to get as many yes answers as possible, and even with that 58% said no. Truth be told most CA's dont send money to Cuba. This estimate you keep hearing of 800 million dollars doesn't stand up to analysis. Another question was whether the travel restirictions had had an impact on their family, and a majority said no.

Going back to what I said at the beginning, look at Cuba for a moment. When you have a small country where Castro wanted three sugar-cane harvests a year and slash-and-burn methods so much for soil conditions. When it comes to petroleum and nickel deposits, the most optimistic oil predictions I hear of come out to a few months of energy for the US and those predictions are always exagerated; when it comes to nickel we're talking about a country of 11,000,000 inhabitants, you need far more than what that provides.

Then people say tourism. Look at the Dominican Republic, massive tourism, massive poverty, people doing what they can to get out.

Bio-technology exports? There's a Cuban medicine that supposedly reduces cholesterol, for the first time there have been foreign studies not financed by the Cuban government and it's a placebo. Then people say that the answer is assembly plants like Mexico and Central America, and guess what? People doing what they can to get out. While all of this is going on there is not a Cuban who does not know that 90 miles to the North his own are doing well.

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