Visiting Cuba...Much Ado...

No, not this Cuba...

A few on the right are up in arms.  Is it over the budget? No.  Is it over immigration? No. Is it over gun safety? No.

It is over the visit to Cuba by Beyonce and Jay Z.  Now to be fair, all of the issues above are important and as such do we really need to be worried about two singers going to Cuba?  Are they really propping up an evil, dictatorial regime with their injection of money into the Cuban economy?  That is now the complaint since after the first objections discovered that the two had not met with any leaders of the Cuban government.  Let's see...hmmm...since the embargo on Cuba some fifty or so years ago, will Jay-Z and Beyonce really save the Castro regime? Uh, no.

The embargo was established during the Cold War, and it was actually more to stop USSR from establishing bases in Cuba than to destabilize the Castro regime. Well, the Cold War is over, and the USSR does not exist.  If you really want someone to experience Democracy, keeping it out of those countries is really not going to solve the problem.  To be blunt, the Castro regime is struggling and we have done business with governments that are far worse about human rights violations than Cuba.  We have seen a revolution in the Middle East as the young have discovered what a free society has to offer because their restrictive governments were no longer able to keep out contact with those groups via the internet.

To complain about the visit, approved by the Treasury Department, not the White House, is silly.  There have been visits by others and to single these two out is inane and purely political.  Who else has visited and injected their dollars into the Cuban economy?  Stephen Spielberg, Winton Marsalis, Oliver Stone, Clive Owen (okay he's British), and numerous other musicians, actors and film makers have visited Cuba.  In fact, in 2011, nearly 500,000 people visited the island from the USA.  Most were Cuban Americans visiting family, but some 90,000 were Americans on licensed visits.  With that said, then one must wonder why these two people were actually singled out?  Can you say agenda politics?

The visit to Cuba by Beyonce and Jay Z...is much ado.