End of the Cuba Billboard

The Wall Street Journal has an op-ed lamenting how President Obama stopped using the electronic billboard erected at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. It was a "beacon of liberal solidarity in an otherwise benighted land."

This caught my attention immediately because it was the subject of my very first blog post ever, over nine years ago. I was so new that I forgot to make a title. And what I did was make fun of the billboard (with a link to the story that no longer works).

In its Interest Section in Havana, the U.S. government put up a sign that is beaming messages (such as the news that a conservative government won in Canada, though I am not sure how this would cause the Cuban people to get excited and overthrow Castro). Castro is now apparentlygetting really annoyed. The sad thing is that the U.S. has simply run out of ideas with regard to dealing with Fidel, and our policy has been reduced to trying to annoy him. Strangely enough, if that indeed was the goal of this particular stunt, it actually worked, which is a rarity for U.S. policy toward Cuba.

It's nice that we finally came up with a policy that goes beyond just being annoying.