"A Hallelujah Day"

Florida Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, called today a "Hallelujah Day" as he hailed President Obama's dramatic announcement moving the U.S. toward normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba.    It has been a long time in coming since the total break in early 1961 and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis in the fall of 1962 that brought the world closer than ever to the brink of nuclear war.    Many politicians representing districts with significant Cuban exile populations in Florida and elsewhere, such as Nelson's fellow Florida Senator Marco Rubio, condemned the move as recognizing a dictatorial regime's "permanency."   What rock is he living under?   Most Cuban Americans can't even remember the Castro revolution.   The Soviet Union, despite Putin's recent moves, is gone gone.   Cuba's oil supplier, Venezuela's socialist President Chavez, is dead after creating his own economic nightmare in that country.   Dictators, communist or not, justify their whole existence based on paranoia; the U.S. has conveniently played the boogie man to Fidel Castro and his successor, brother Raul.    

Over fifty years of embargoes have not brought Cuba into the democratic world.   It is high time to try a new strategy.   Open up this country at our doorstep to new economic and political possibilities.   Fidel Castro may have been totally willing to plunge everyone into World War III in 1962, but we have maintained diplomatic relations and traded with many other countries whose human rights records would make Cuba look stellar.   Let's hope this new relationship produces positive results in the lives of Cuba's ordinary citizens.   They are the ones who have suffered the most from this outdated isolation policy.