.@keithboykin 50+ years of leverage via embargo didn’t work @marcorubio. Embargo is a massive failure.

— lawhawk (@lawhawk) December 17, 2014

50+ years of failing policy, and the GOP response, is that we must hold on just a bit longer, and then it will succeed.

Nope. It wont. It hasn’t until now, and there’s no reason to think the embargo will change anything next year or 10 years from now.

We’ve managed to normalize relations with Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia. We have normal relations (ambassadors, embassies, etc.) with rivals like China and Russia, each of which have human rights abuses as bad or worse than anything Cuba ever did.

We have normalized relations with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and any number of other countries with horrendous human rights records. Yet, Cuba is the only one with which we don’t have an embassy or ambassador. Why is that?

It boils down to Castro. He “won”, which is to say that an autocrat managed to survive for decades. And it’s not like we haven’t dealt with autocrats before too - like Mubarak, Saudis, etc.