excitable honky

Thank you, Charles Pierce:

Damn it, I’m tired of this. In 1962, I hid under my desk at school for 10 straight days in October while the United States and the Soviet Union decided whether or not to lob nuclear missiles at my young ass. And why? Because a year or so earlier, a bunch of expatriate Cubans and some CIA cowboys launched an invasion of the island. Which prompted Nikita Khrushchev to take the genuinely insane step of installing nuclear missiles in Cuba to forestall any future enterprises of that sort. Which led to my being under my desk, mumbling Hail Mary’s at 78 r.p.m.

For going on 60 years now, the foreign policy of my country — and a good bit of its domestic politics as well — has been held hostage by a band of noisy irreconcilables in South Florida. The embargo is a joke to the rest of the world, the Helms-Burton Act a modern farce, ignored by such radical Marxist nations as Canada, Mexico, and Germany. The success of the exile community in Florida is a remarkable story, but, Lord knows, it’s not without its darker side. With the inexcusable aid of several U.S. presidents, and according to documents gathered by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, that community has harbored outright terrorists, including the men allegedly behind the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 78 passengers (including the Cuban national fencing team). By way of comparison, many Irish-Americans who conspired to arm the IRA during the Troubles wound up in prison. Here, though, President George H.W. Bush went out of his way to pardon one of the men alleged to have helped arrange the bombing of the airliner. The rules always have been different, because of the investment — covert and otherwise — that the U.S. has made in destabilizing Castro, and the centrality of Florida to just about every presidential election of the past 40 years.

Operatives from Miami were hip-deep in the Iran-Contra mess. The Cuban community in Miami went mad over the Elian Gonzalez affair, and the outrage over that controversy was central to some of the hooliganism surrounding the recount in Miami-Dade County in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. The first generation of émigrés are strong and they are politically active, and nobody ever says no to them, and it’s past time for them to get over themselves, a feeling that more than one survey has noted is shared by the grandchildren — and now great-grandchildren — of the original émigrés. This country doesn’t owe them or their tender feelings anything anymore.

My god, we’re doing business in Vietnam. The butchers of Tiananmen Square are the country’s primary landlords. We’d be building electronics factories all over North Korea if that country’s leaders weren’t all completely nuts. The émigrés who came from Cuba in the wake of the revolution can be proud of what they built, but they had it a lot easier than did, say, the Hmong people of Southeast Asia, whom the United States sold out at the end of the Vietnam War, breaking all kinds of promises about repatriation and leaving them to be slaughtered until, finally, we allowed some of them to come over here and farm chickens in Arkansas on the cheap for corporate agribusiness. And yet we can’t come to grips with a sensible policy for one small island in the Caribbean because a bunch of old men in Florida are carrying a grudge against one old man who refuses against all odds to die?