Obama Visiting Cuba
President Obama will be visiting Cuba within just a few weeks. Although this announcement had been hinted at for months, it's still remarkable given the history of bilateral relations and the fact that the last U.S. president to do so was Calvin Coolidge.
This ties into what I've framed as building leverage. Obama is pressing Cuba to respond and in fact making it defensive (where it feels compelled to explain the response) in a way that has never occurred before.
More importantly, Obama is signalling to the Castro successors that the U.S. is ready and willing to talk. That could definitely yield benefits down the road, and in fact will be the core of whatever "legacy" this leaves.
2 comments:
Talking about Calvin Coolidge, he travelled to Cuba on the U.S.S. Texas. A battleship.....lol
As a matter of fact, I wanted to write a post on that visit, which I know nothing about! A very different type of message being sent...
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