Fidel's farewell

There was word out of Havana today that Cuban President Fidel Castro is stepping down after nearly 50 years in control of the island nation. Castro, by all accounts, is a very sick man, probably near death, but he will go to his grave with the knowledge that U.S. efforts to topple him were entirely unsuccessful. The Bay of Pigs invasion was an unmitigated disaster, but the real joke in U.S. policy toward Castro's Cuba has been the decades-long embargo against the country. We'll do billions in business with China, one of the most repressive regimes on the face of the Earth, but our politicians, cowering in fear at the reaction of Cubans in south Florida, have consistently voted to preserve an embargo on Cuba that has succeeded only in hurting the people of that country. Do you really think Castro and his fellow leaders have been deprived of anything they wanted because of U.S. policies? The only thing the embargo accomplished was to drive Cuba into the arms of the Soviet Union and create a threat against our security from Cuba that hadn't existed before. The United Nations has been condemning the embargo for at least the past 20 years. In 2006, the vote against the United States' policy on Cuba was 179 to 4. Supporting the U.S. were Israel, Palau and the Marshall Islands. What a mighty coalition this is. We buy oil from Middle Eastern nations that serve as incubators for people who want to kill Americans, and we buy millions of gallons more from the raving, U.S.-hating lunatic Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, but I can't get a good Cuban cigar from Havana. Does this make any sense?