Barack Obama joked that it took Calvin Coolidge, the last president to visit Cuba, three days on a battleship to reach the island, whereas it took him just three hours on Air Force One: one difference between 1928 and 2016.  A similarity between those two years consists of a coming crumbling of stability.  In 1929, capitalism committed suicide, not for the first or last time, when the stock market crashed, causing a worldwide ripple, economically devastating numerous countries, creating fertile soil for authoritarian regimes, exploiting the turmoil, to gain and hold power.  Herbert Hoover, a well-meaning man with his head up his ass, succeeded the laissez-faire capitalist Coolidge, but failed to turn a nation around, employing the same dumb ideas that put the world in the shitter in the first place.
     In 2008, just weeks before the presidential election, another major stock market crash shuddered the world.  This one, traceable entirely to unpunished greed, happened during laissez-faire capitalist and war pig George W. Bush's presidency.  The Republicans looked and sounded particularly bad in 2008.  Senator John McCain and his unmanageable puppet, Governor Sarah Palin, were profoundly wrong as executive possibilities during such a fucked up economic period.  Along came Obama.
     He hasn't stopped the overall war begun in 2001 and carried out on various continents.  He escalated remote control warfare; he hardened the national security state.  If he's a liberal, so is Clint Eastwood.  He did open relations with Cuba, a country ostracized and abused by the United States since 1959, when the wily Fidel Castro showed his true color, red, and assumed the leadership of a nation that had been run by American-approved dictators, had supplied American mobsters with casino lucre; had, in short, been one of the many whore countries scattered about the Caribbean and Latin America, that part of the world James Monroe deemed it right and good we fuck with impunity.
     The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, spent a lot of money, compromised morals, to get rid of Castro.  He outlasted all of them, including the efforts of CIA men working with American mafiosi, to assassinate him.  The relationship between America's Cuba obsession and the death of John Kennedy cannot, logically, be attributed to mere coincidence.
     It's popular opinion among America's Right, both the smart and stupid, that making nice with Cuba is a huge mistake.  It's funny when you consider the capitalistic gains American businesses will obtain by infiltrating and dealing with a country now ready to go to bed with Washington, D.C. and Wall Street.  Cuba will gain a great deal economically, but, like in America, its poor will be treated the same as they are in the U.S.
     Senator Marco Rubio, the recently failed presidential candidate and a Cuban-American of the old school (no deals with Cuba as long as the Castros are alive), grumps about Obama's Cuba policy, but the older generations, the exiles--the kinds of people who toasted the death of JFK--are reduced before the ever-growing number of young Latinos who don't give a shit about what happened in 1959, but are excited to now have the chance to visit lost relatives in a homeland that may as well have been Atlantis so long as the typical American view prevailed.
     What does Donald Trump say?  Shall I indulge the reader with another Trump story?  Will he surprise us with his newfound sense of generosity and compassion?  Will he think twice about sounding like an ignoramus?
     Reacting to Obama's arrival in Havana and the fact that Cuba's leader, Raul Castro, didn't meet the president at the airport, Trump complained that Pope Francis got met by Castro, that other leaders have also been met at the airport by Castro.
     "This is amateur hour," Trump griped, earning himself another minute of coverage on the cable news shows.
     "He [Obama] should've gotten back on the plane and flown back!"
     But, you see, Trump, he's a professional.  Meeting Raul Castro at the airport wasn't part of the plan in the first place.  A president who would get so pissed off because the head of state of another nation doesn't arrive at the airport for a meet and greet photo op, sounds exactly like an amateur.  If Trump becomes president, even Herbert Hoover would seem like the Messiah.

                                                                              Vic Neptune