As always, Al, you provide us with so much knowledge and insight into what is REALLY going on; and especially with our President's ongoing chess game.

The brilliance the two of you exude is almost blinding!

Thank you very much; I know we here at the Field are particularly awaiting the President's visits to "countries called America"...

waterprise2 AKA Pam

Liberal with a Capital L!

Hey Al,

What an incredibly important point about travel restrictions for U.S. citizens and the equal protection clause. Hadn't thought of that. But then I wonder: Stricter travel and remittance restrictions were a Bush-era policy. So we're basically going back to a pre-2000 policy on travel to Cuba (for Cuban-Americans).

So why wasn't a similar Trojan Horse Supreme Court challenge successful (or attempted) in the past?

It's also possible, I guess, that all travel restrictions could be lifted, with the bulk of the remaining economic sanctions still in place. If this happens, Obama would be appeasing the Cuban-American center-right without totally sending them into a frenzy by supporting an end to the embargo, which he should do; it's even become electorally feasible (Florida). 

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is cutting many outdated military programs, such as the F-22 Raptor, that were reflective of the wasteful feeding of the military-industrial complex that has continued beyond all reason for decades after the end of the Cold War:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30071664/ if you don't mind the link.

I don't have his exact words here, though I'm sure they'll show up soon enough, but he made it clear that the United States military has many projects that are over budget and that this is a bad thing. The USA's unbelievably bloated defense budget isn't being cut, mind you, but this is still a move in the right direction. So much for those who whined and complained about it when Obama retained Gates' services.

I'm no journalist myself, I believe there's a very real potential for a storyline here for those who would seize it, about Obama as the first true post-Cold War President - with the not-so-subtle implication that most of those who aren't in the Obama boat haven't yet moved on from the Cold War, in terms of policy or in terms of politics. Like any good storyline, it rings true because it is true.

While I consider myself vehemently opposed to the entirety of the embargo and in favor of normal relations with Cuba, I don't see the incremental step of lifting of the travel ban as timid or appeasement. The fact is that even going that far has been heretofore politically impossible: "Freedom to Travel to Cuba" bills in 2003 and 2007 never made it out of committee.

Decriminalizing travel to Cuba will raise awareness of how archaic and asinine the remaining sanctions are. When Harold and Martha come back from their cruise to Havana and bore their neighbors with their slideshow, support for lifting the embargo and normalizing relations will become conventional wisdom, and its opponents will be exposed for the fanatics that they are. This could happen very quickly.

Riley - You make a very good point. One of the main reasons for the travel ban is to perpetuate the false image of Cuba as a "totalitarian" place of fear without free speech. As anyone who has traveled on the island - myself included - has experienced, Cubans voice a multitude of differing opinions about their government daily without fear of reprisal. Some of the jokes many tell about Fidel and Raul are as savage and funny as those told about Bush on the Daily Show.

People would also get to see what real national health care, child care, elderly care, pre-natal care, literacy, higher education and employment for musicians and other artists looks like. It doesn't exist on that level in any other country in the hemisphere.

I've long thought that the embargo on travel has long been mainly to prop up the false narratives in the US media about what the island is really like.

Nate Silver put this up yesterday:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/04/why-marijuana-legalization-is-gai...

His conclusion "As members of the Silent Generation are replaced in the electorate by younger voters, who are more likely to have either smoked marijuana themselves or been around those that have, support for legalization is likely to continue to gain momentum."

as paraphrased in the New York Times,

In the interview, Mr. Holder said he was sending an additional 100 agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to the southern border to crack down on the so-called straw gun purchases — in which one person submits to the federal background checks to obtain guns for someone else — that fuel much of the southbound smuggling. And with marijuana sales central to the drug trade, Mr. Holder said he was exploring ways to lower the minimum amount required for the federal prosecution of possession cases.

Odd, since there is no minimum quantity in current law for Federal prosecution. US Attorneys have set non-binding threasholds for their respective Federal Judicial districts, mostly 100 pounds, higher where they're overburdened with other cases, lower in a few, notably in NW Ohio, where they take the midsize possession cases the search-happy State Patrol station brings off the Tollway, and in the Western District of Pennsylvania where the USA, Mary Beth Buchanan, a DrugWar nutjob, likes to go after smalltime growers. (Why hasn't she been canned yet? Even Reagan's Attorney Genedral Richard Thornburg called for her ouster, while Bush was still President.)

The most benign interpretation I can put on Holder's remarks is a proposal to use the Federal option, and the ensuing draconian mandatory minimums on the Mexican cartel's direct customers. This might have an impact on cash flowing to the cartels, but only if it were accompanied by an easing of pressure on domestic growers, giving them a relative price advantage in destination markets.

Democrat for US Senate (Wisconsin 2012)

Al,

While there may be national employment for musicians in Cuba, it's also a dead-end for a musician who wants his or her music heard all over the the world.  I've recently spent time with Alfredo Rodriguez, a gifted 23-year old jazz pianist & composer, who defected from Cuba to the U.S. a few months ago.  He was also the go-to producer for all of the top musicians in Cuba, including his father who's a famous singer in Havana... as well as scoring all of the top tv shows in Cuba. 

Alfredo left the Island because his passion was music and felt Cuba's government policy was stifling his talent & artistry.  He also said that despite his steady employment, he was barely able to make ends meet financially.

No doubt the assinine American policy toward Cuba contributes to the lack of access for truly talented musicians and artists... but Cuba's governmental policies are equally culpable.  They prevented artists like Alfredo and the great Arturo Sandoval from realizing their full potential unless they defect... just as the top baseball players from Cuba often do.

BTW... Alfredo did his first public performance in the U.S. last month at the South By Southwest Music Conference... and will be performing at this year's Playboy Jazz Festival.  He's also now a protege of Quincy Jones.  Check out his greatness on YouTube.

Per my previous comment, here is the YouTube link for Alfredo Rodriguez performing last month at the South By Southwest Music Conference in Austin.  He accompanies Bianca Ryan on the first song and does a solo on the second song...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G7hrpdGoro

Al is right to applaud the fresh air that President Obama is bringing to relations with nations habitually treated by the U.S. as passive markets or venues for American military bases.  But this transformation, like everything else that this president is doing, will be evolutionary, not revolutionary.  That will be immediately apparent in Mexico.  The new and serious problem in Mexico is the rapidly increasing scale of organized violence from transnational gangs and syndicates, which has begun to damage ordinary people's lives and communities. 

No politician in any democratic nation will get re-elected if organized violence from criminal para-militaries is cowing the local police.  So in the near term, don't be alarmed if Obama has to promise police and military collaboration with the Mexicans to control this -- and don't interpret that as social or political repression, because this new transnational criminal violence is a serious threat not only in North America but throughout Africa and in Asia, where it's driving sex trafficking, slavery, and the looting of resources through expanded corruption.

If you don't believe me, check out Misha Glenny's new book, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld.

Allie Mann - So, Alex wanted the big bucks and he went to the US in pursuit of them. Others, like Chucho Valdez, winner of five Grammies, choose not to leave the island, and are more grateful that before they were famous, the Cuban government paid them and thousands more enough to be full time musicians and be able to pay rent, have food on the table, and raise families with dignity. Cuba puts a larger number of musicians, per capita, through music schools than any other nation, free of tuition, and pays more a living wage, per capita, than anywhere else.

I can't even begin to share the horror stories I've seen in the United States of great musicians starving, or having to resort to crime, in order to keep from being homeless, or those who just can't take it any more and fall into self-destructive behaviors, or those that simply have slit their wrists or chosen some other early exit because they were unable to ply their trade in that economic system.

The music industry is like a lottery ticket: only a very small percentage of musicians in the US get to the point of making a living wage off their vocation. For many, the potential for fame and millions is what drives them. But for most of the greatest musicians, it's not about that: It's about the music itself.

Years ago, at the Antonio Melia theater in Havana, I had the opportunity to see Chucho Valdez play the piano with a group of younger musicians he had mentored. The next day I bumped into him, standing on line at his neighborhood bakery to purchase bread. To his neighbors, he's not a celebrity to be leeched upon. He's a local guy who is good at his trade. Lord knows he's had plenty of opportunities to defect - playing the best theaters in the greatest cities of the world - but he's content just to be able to work on his music full time without starving, a privilege that 99.9 percent of great musicians in the USA will never know.

Tribunus - You may not be aware that I type these words from Mexico, as I have most of the words I've typed for 12 years. The president here is in his position because of a massive electoral fraud: not a few hundred votes in Florida, but, rather, the wholesale shift of 1.5 million votes illegally stolen or disappeared, in 2006.

The funds that Washington sends here are not genuinely fighting organized crime. They are merely removing one criminal in order to make room for another, usually depending on which has bribed the corrupt officials that make those decisions the most. The funds are used to build police forces that are sent in to places like Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, or the town of Atenco in the state of Mexico, to put down social movements, not drug traffickers.

I don't "interpret it as social or political repression." Facts don't need much "interpretation." I've spent these years documenting that repression, time and time again. At moments I have been on the receiving end of it. You can see stories on our front page this week that document it further. You can read them most weeks.

I suppose I could go to the McBook store to read a McNon-McFiction McTreatise to tell me what is happening in Mexico with the McMafias, but I trust my own lived experience and the investigations I've undertaken here more than those of some author for some corporate book McPublishing house that comes or goes but doesn't stay to live beside the people that suffer the consequences of these policies. Plan Mexico will accomplish nothing in terms of its stated goals. Such plans never have under prohibition. It's an expensive show and circus, meant on fooling the crowd into thinking that something is being done, when the harm is merely being perpetuated and eternally renewed by corrupt government policies.

Al - I live in deep South Texas, about 20 miles from the border.  There is violence on both sides of the border due to drug smuggling, both rival groups and groups with police.  There was even a running gun battle in Reynosa (where we used to go shop and eat) not long ago, which was reported as police against cartel.  There are reports of killings, beheadings, and kidnappings.  How are we to know which is actually drug related and which is the political repression you write about?  Or is the violence from different causes in different areas of the country?  We have always had a relaxed, pleasant way of life here and these developments are really unsettling.

JoAnn

Al, I trust your experience and wouldn't dispute you on the intractability of corruption and the political drivers of violence in Mexico, given the existing power structure in the country.  But the post by JoAnn has more to do with what I'm talking about:  The cross-border spillage of organized criminal violence.  The latter is now a symptom in many countries of transnational syndicates that are exploiting weak or corrupt states everywhere, threatening fragile democracies in Africa and helping to create "fragmented tyrannies" (what the social scientists call quasi-democracies that have so much systemic social violence that the average person's experience is equivalent to living under direct political repression).  Whatever Obama does with regard to Mexico, his administration will be constrained to develop international policies to deal with these transnational syndicates, or else any more aid money channeled to such countries will be increasingly wasted.

As for Misha Glenny's book, please don't be so cynical.  One of my colleagues met and talked with him earlier this week.  He's an investigative journalist who used to be Central Europe correspondent for The Guardian, and he knows how the collapse of Yugoslavia helped spawn the rise of criminal gangs in Eastern Europe. His new book deserves a serious read, notwithstanding the glib title (probably foisted on him by his publisher's marketing department).

We'll pay more attention to Narco News from now on.  Thanks for your good work...

No, Al... Alfredo Rodriguez didn't come to the U.S. for the big bucks.  He wanted to share his music with the world and evolve as an artist to reach his full potential.  In fact, he risked his life getting to the U.S.  Being in the entertainment business, I understand how the music business works far better than you do... and I know the horror stories.  I've also worked with some of the greatest musicians from all over the world, who care about one thing -- music.  So the notion that someone defects to pursue his dream and art is somehow wrong in your eyes is an opinion I absolutely don't share with you.  As an artist myself, I will do whatever I have to do to express myself creatively and have done so, no matter what others think. 

Allie - Many people know about the music industry and also about the better situation for musicians in Cuba than any other country on the planet. Alfredo's father, his whole family, was able to be dedicated to music because the State made it possible for them to earn a living that way. So when you write, "While there may be national employment for musicians in Cuba, it's also a dead-end for a musician who wants his or her music heard all over the the world," you might as well say it about any country.

Hendrix left the USA for England. Lennon left England for the USA. Musicians move around a lot. But to turn it into a speech against Cuba - your words: "Alfredo left the Island because his passion was music and felt Cuba's government policy was stifling his talent & artistry.  He also said that despite his steady employment, he was barely able to make ends meet financially" - says to me that Alfredo is lying, whether to gain sympathy and support for his career from gullible power-brokers in the music industry, or create an "image" of an uber-artist with a heroic "struggle" of breaking free from a "repressive" regime, the lie can be found in the very words you quote him as using: "barely able to make ends meet financially" means "yes, he was able to pay rent and put food on the table by making music, but he wanted MORE."

I'm sorry. I have no patience whatever for that kind of crybaby stuff whether from Gloria Estaban or any other gusano musican that cranks up the crocodile oh-I'm-such-a-victim tears for the poorly informed American public as a career move.

I don't know what part of the industry you work in, but I've watched as SONY drove my best pal Jeff Buckley to accidental suicide, I've watched my old friends from CBGBs days die one after another of overdoses and other consequences, I've seen what has happened to musicians who were top stars in their 20s as they got older and less pretty with no continued financial support. THAT is the rule, not the exception, in the United States.

It's all fine if Alfredo wanted to emigrate. But don't make it a political story. It's not. It's a career move. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Juan Cole posted a highly positive analysis of much of it today:

http://www.juancole.com/2009/04/obama-us-is-not-and-never-will-be-at.html

His conclusion: "Despite some occasional awkward or false notes, I call Obama's speech a home run. It is precisely the sort of thing I have been calling for."

Al

Obama' s trip to Europe has indeed been quite successful if one looks at it from a critical perspective. A lot of media were looking at it in rather simplistic terms of "Europeans want peace by being left in peace" and that the "gambling tendencies" of the US are not conducive to their "conservative nature" be it GW or Obama. Since Obama' s trip is not really about "gambling" but one of above all changing the perception and modus operandi it has been very sucessful.

Carey F. Onyango

Nairobi, Kenya

Neal - Very funny. It's a time honored story of young men in such a hurry to rise to "the top" in (fill in the blanks: Hollywood, music, media and other celebrity career tracks) that they spend their days and years obsessing with the climbing rather than working to better themselves at their chosen crafts. Seems like the guy has hit a brick wall. (After all, when Jesus was his age he'd been dead various months already.)

...for that link.  I never read Sirota---my life is way too busy so I have to choose wisely.  Despair is a pretty common occurrence among activists.  If you expect instant change or that some angst ridden column will bear immediate results, you will constantly set yourself up for disappointment, frustration, and failure.  Let's see if he actually uses his existential crisis to reexamine his own contributions to his despair instead of just projecting out to the unfairness of the world.

Of course I am not blind to injustice, nor am I immune to feeling discouraged but I certainly don't dwell in those feelings.  I have found that making phone calls, knocking on doors, sharing my story, learning about someone else's life--these things sustain me and keep me feeling hopeful.

Honestly, I can't believe how much we have accomplished in such a short time.

It seems not even the "sanity of the Rocky Mountain West" can save that guy's mind. Maybe Costa Rica would do him some good.

David Sirota seems to be doing some kind of solo role-play -- a kind of pundit-envy masquerading as Big Lebowski Moment.  What's truly bent is this statement:  "It's not the conservatives that really get me - their existence/success at least has a rationale...It's the unskilled - the classic No Talent Ass Clowns, if you will. I work in a business that treats Andrew Sullivan and David Broder and...Tom Friedman as Very Important, Very Serious, Very Newsworthy People."

So Glenn Beck saying on Fox that Barack Obama should have a "stake" driven into his heart and Gingrich saying that Obama is trying to become a dictator are of no concern to Sirota?  But the respect that Andrew Sulliivan gets is a great threat to our discourse?  I'd remind Sirota that Sullivan has a Ph.D. from Oxford in political philosophy, has written a couple of eloquent books, and broke with his fellow conservatives last year by enthusiastically endorsing Obama, since in his eyes the Republicans had self-incinerated when it came to fiscal sanity and individual rights. (And no one on the right was more blistering about the inadequacies of Sarah Palin.) As for Broder and Friedman, they are Establishment defenders to be sure.  But Broder pounds the pavement during campaigns and talks to voters in beauty salons and PTA meetings, and every so often comes up with such a well-reported column from the grass roots, that you have to pay attention.  And Friedman, notwithstanding his economic globaloney, is passion on wheels when it comes to fighting climate change and investing in science and engineering education.  They still get listened to, because they do their homework and bat around .300 when they use their skills as career journalists. 

In contrast, I really doubt that "What the F%$@! Are We Doing?" is the clarion call to brilliant thinking that we've all been waiting for.

As a conservative I do not necessarily agree all of the President's agenda, but I cannot tell you how proud I am to be an American when I watch and listen to President Obama represent us abroad. He is the best of America, representing hard work, humor, intellect and style. After the debacle of the past eight years, we deserve a break. Reaching out to the Muslim world has no downside; he appeals to the moderates, while alienating the fanatics in the middle east. This is decidedly to our advantage. As a jaded, overweight, southern, Jewish conservative, out-of-shape American, I thank the stars the election turned out the way it did. May god protect President Obama. david oberlander

@ Neal Thanks for the link. What a whiny, envious diatribe and yet I think part of his purpose was satisfied by the ego strokes harvested in the comments, judging by the first 20 or so I skimmed.  It was striking that none of the comments addessed the substance of his post.  For example, I might have pointed out that this statement is just a tad bit over the top.  [The worse truth - the one I simply cannot grasp - is that for every Harold Meyerson (ie. for every legitimately brilliant progressive writer) there are 25 Joe Kleins (ie. braindead megaphones).] But most of the comments were along the lines of Oh, Dave don't jump as in "We need you.", "You're a damn fine blogger/pundit", "Pull it together. You are needed".

I just have to share this link.  The poster asks what else can we blame Obama for and many of the following comments are perceptive and hilarious.

Pirate Drama: Blame Obama

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/us/politics/09immig.html?hp

It seems that President Obama plans to tackle comprehensive immigration reform sometime within the next year. This is one of the most important issues that he could tackle, up there with economic stimulus/stabilization, EFCA, and universal health care, and as with those other issues, it's one that will be tremendously important to the future of American politics. I know that President Obama doesn't have to deal with the same situation or the same political base that Bush ever did, but this is one of the issues that hobbled the Bush agenda as a major political force, and clearly emotions will run high on all parts of the political spectrum. I think we'll soon have even more reasons to be happy to have Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, though I don't believe the hype put forth by those who would claim (in what seems to me like an attempt to divide and conquer) that Democratic-voting union workers have a big problem with immigration reform. My instinctive guess is that the registered Democrats who have the biggest problem with the immigration reform we need are the "Reagan Democrats" (i.e. the Wallace Democrats, i.e. the Appalachian Clinton Democrats, i.e. the Appalachian anti-Obama Democrats) who are not really a part of President Obama's political coalition anyway even though they'll likely be cast, by folks transparently hawking an agenda, as part of a 'bipartisan opposition' to immigration reform. At the very least it ought to be interesting to watch the sparks fly, and, of course, to see the right thing be done at last.