Comment Re:$1.1 Trillion over 54 years... (Score 1) 540
Has it ever occurred to you that it's possible Cuban Law is simply wrong on this point?
Has it ever occurred to you that the Cubans have the right to defend themselves? Because that's the right you are denying them. When the US interest are attacked, you don't ask for justification to invade your attacker. Yet when Cuba is, you claim that Cuban law is "wrong" for wanting to defend themselves.
Terrible straw-man. I mentioned some pretty drastic steps they could have taken to defend themselves that would not have convinced me they want the embargo to go away.
My argument has always been that their method of defending themselves was so extreme that they had to know it would guarantee the embargo continued until Obama left office.
In a world with nuclear weapons proportionality has to be a very important part of determining whether one state was overly-aggressive in defending itself. Otherwise the Russians get to nuke Kiev over Crimea.
Since you're talking about practice the actual letter of the law is irrelevant. What matters is convictions. Name one whose been convicted.
Seriously. Name a single person convicted of being an unregistered foreign agent who was not a citizen of the US.
The Cuban Five. Notice how I ignore the "not a citizen of the US part". Being a citizen of the US had nothing to do with the convictions: they were convicted for failing to register as agents, for "conspiracy to commit espionage" (even though the prosecution couldn't prove that any secret document was leaked) and "conspiracy to commit murder" (even though they had no way of knowing the outcome).
You set up arbitrary rules that effectively stop Cuba from defending themselves (like being free to enter the US without registering and being citizens). You asked earlier, that's what I meant by arbitrary. The Cubans don't play by those rules, because those "rules", besides made up, imply "just sit there and do nothing while we invade you." You cannot unilaterally make up a rule that benefits you and then claim foul when the other party unilaterally decides to ignore it.
It's so convenient for you to ignore essence of my argument. At least you admit this one is a straw man.
For the record, when they accepted US Citizenship the Cuban Five swore to obey our laws, and give up all foreign allegiances.
You realize you;re talking about thought crimes. He didn't have to do anything, but those thought he thought while he was in Washington DC were anti-Cuban, so he can be charged with thinking them while he was in Havana.
Sigh. Again. He acted in Cuba. And it's rich that you speak about thought crimes, given that the "conspiracy" charges are essentially thought crimes too, and you don't seem to have any problem with those, as long as they are not directed against your agents. But again, irrelevant, he wasn't convicted for sitting in DC thinking about what he was going to do. He was convicted for going to Cuba and doing his part in the conspiracy.
You do realize I've already conceded that the things he actually did in Cuba were crimes under Cuban jurisdiction? So your argument so far consists of straw men and repeating a point I'd already agreed with.
Your problem is most of the things you charge him with happened outside of Cuba. He didn't plan to overthrow the Cuban government from his hotel. The plan was already in place. He didn't go to Havana and then volunteer to be a spy.
In international relations when something pisses you off you don't bitch about in press releases for 25 flights, and then go straight for the jugular.
Read some history. They didn't "bitch about it in press releases for 25 flights", they denounced it, repeatedly, to the US authorities, only to be ignored until they took action.
You realize the scenario you're describing is literally legally impossible?
To denounce anything to US authorities they'd have to act through a) their Ambassador to DC or b) our Ambassador to Havana. Since neither of those people have existed for decades, the only way they could tell our authorities the flights pissed them off was press releases.
So now your argument consists of straw men, repeating a fairly trivial point I'd already granted, and an attempt to counter another point by rephrasing it in language more sympathetic to the Cubans.
If you're Cuba, and you want the thaw to continue, your job is let them get away with most of it and demonstrate you aren't trying to piss the US off in the rare occasions you do respond.
What else can I say. Read that document. That's just one decade. They have suffered through 6. They have gone through diplomatic channels repeatedly. And whenever they respond, some of you claim that they shouldn't have. Of course they wanted the Cubans to react, the thing is, the outcome would have been the same if they had reacted to any of the previous or future incidents.
So?
The Northern Irish of both sides suffered the atrocities of each-other for years. That didn't mean that it would have been smart of either side to respond to the Omagh Bombing by saying "Fuck this, I have the right to 100% of what I wanted, therefore I will freeze our relationship with the other side back where it was when all this started."
And both sides of that particular issue had a hell of a lot better grievances then the Cubans have.
Don't be ridiculous. Might has nothing to do with it.
Of course it has. You claim that the US has every right to keep provoking them, and that they don't have any right whatsoever to respond, under the threat of further violence or continuing embargo. And even if they don't do anything, the US still claims the right to harden the embargo (Torricelli act, 1992).
Right is an incredibly tricky word under international law. Cuba's rights, are (by definition) only restricted by the presence of the rights of other nation-states. Which is why I say with 100% confidence Cuba has no right to try a non-Cuban as a foreign agent planning to overthrow the Cuban government. They can try him for importing communications equipment, but nothing else.
And, while this is a fascinating point, it's irrelevant to the main point. When you're in a conflict with somebody else, and you want to reduce tensions, the thing you have to do is reduce tensions. That means responding as passively as you can to provocations. This is not a moral matter, or a legal principle. It's simply how conflict resolution among big-brained-but-still-incredibly-fucking-stupid primates works.
Note that both the exiles in the planes, and the Congressmen who insisted Gross be sent on his mission; wanted Cuba to over-react. It was their plan.
Either the Cubans are too stupid to see that, or Cuba's plan is to continue the embargo indefinitely.
You are being purposedly dense. It is unreasonable to expect the attacked to just "take it" for 50 years, and then blame them when, after giving ample warning, they defend themselves. Of course it was part of the plan. It has always been part of the plan for the last 50 years: don't you dare to defend yourself in any of those incidents, or else.
Here's your problem:
The Cubans only choose to defend themselves when doing so fucks up a President's chance of getting rid of the embargo.
Since Republicans really need the vote of the older Cuban-Americans to win Florida, they never try to end the embargo, and therefore the Cubans simply ignore the Dubya version of Gross. They ignore said older Cuban-Americans single-minded obsession with screwing with Castro. Don;t get me wrong. They protest everything all the time, but it never goes beyond protests with Republicans.
Then a Democrat appears, and seems like he'll make some progress, and they decide to go from "protest mode" to "arrest an agent and give him an unprecedented prison sentence" mode in a matter of months.
My argument has nothing to do with the justness of the embargo, the US Cuba policy, etc. It's based entirely on how a rational actor would behave if the US was embargoing him and he wanted us to stop.
Arresting Gross would always have resulted in drama. That's a given. You don't get a press release saying "we got a spy," followed by a week of secret negotiations, and a secret deal.
I just said that Cuba couldn't make the first move (or rather, that making a public first move would have ensured that no negotiation was possible). To think otherwise is to ignore 55 years of controversy.
No.
You proved there would have been a lot of BS thrown in the air during the fight, and that Obama's admitting Gross was a US agent would be seen as a defeat for Obama.
Here's the thing: Obama doesn't have to admit he's an agent for this to work.Obama didn't admit any of the guys we got back from Russia were agents.
Moreover you're missing a key fact about Obama: he doesn't give a shit how he's perceived in the short term as long as he gets what he wants in the long-term. If Cuba offered a deal that he thought would be better for him in a year-and-a-half then letting Gross rot in jail he'd take it.
If they wanted to avoid drama they actually should have let him through.
And there you have it, again. The only acceptable answer is to let the US do whatever they want. Everything else is unnacceptable.
Again a strawman.
I've given you plenty of alternatives. They could have detained him and negotiated. They could have not detained him and spied on him, which was apparently good enough for his first couple visits. You'll note that neither one of these actions is what the US wants, because the US wants Gross to accomplish his mission; but they are significantly less likely to really piss off Obama.
Offtopics
or sentence one of your guys to 15 years hard labor, or whatever.
Same "your" as the "you" in the preceding sentence: the US. Gross is the guy sentenced to 15 years.
Sorry, I'm even more confused now. I missed something about Gross being "my"/"our" guy. If you think this was an important part of the argument, please rewrite it (or ignore it if it isn't important). In any case, Gross was not sentenced to hard labor (??), there is no such thing in Cuba. He has spent his sentence in a hospital---the Cubans really don't want anything bad to happen to him.
"Hard labor" was hyperbole.
In the ways that are most important to my argument it's not hyperbole at all. Congress is the only player that can actually lift the embargo of Cuba, and a good 2/3 of that will never believe that Castro's prisons are any better then Dachau. They could have developed a holodeck, locked Gross up in it with his wildest dreams, and it would still have totally fucked their chance of ending the embargo.
If the charges are bogus then jurisdiction doesn;t really matter.
Except that they claimed jurisdiction (and dismissed the lack-of-jurisdiction claim) before testing if the claims were bogus. The US, or at least that prosecutor and judge, claimed jurisdiction over the russians. So, the US does what you claim is wrong for the Cubans to do (claim jurisdiction over actions ocurring abroad), even though the Cubans didn't do it and the US do it continously.
So Cuba, by charging this guy, claimed jurisdiction over what foreign governments could decide to do; and and it's not continuous because they only brought one case (which they won); but the US passes a law that does the same damn thing and loses it's one case and it is continuous? I kinda thought "never won a conviction" was less continuous then "convicted one guy."
Regardless, as I said before the US isn't known for it's respect for international law. I brought us up specifically because if even we don;t think we can get away with a piece of legal BS, it must be an incredible load of BS.