When I quit smoking, I made my wife promise that she would not say a word when I could finally legally buy and smoke a Cuban cigar. I always said that this would be the silver lining of normalizing relations with Cuba: the cigars. Well…
I spend a fair amount of time in Europe, where there is no Cuban embargo, and thus you can buy all the Cuban cigars you want. I’ve had some, but for the most part I’ve given them up. The Dominicans and Nicaraguans are much better cigars nowadays. The great Cuban cigar makers brought tobacco seed with them when they fled Castro’s tyranny, and over the course of the past half-century they have gotten better and better. More important, they have good quality control, whereas the Cubans don’t.
My reaction to this is somewhat like old Chuck Heston’s:
I don’t know WHY I expected the Commies to not f*ck up the cigars, mind you. I mean, they’ve f*cked up everything else. And yet, my soul was pained by this news.
Via Instapundit.
If you had read PJ O’Rourke’s essay on the time he went to Cuba, you wouldn’t be surprised. And you would at least have gotten a laugh out of it.
So does this mean that lifting the sanctions won’t have much of an effect? Once the novelty wears off, they really have nothing we want to buy and no real money to buy stuff from us.
Maybe, except can’t families start sending money back home?
In theory, if by “back home” you mean to The Castros pockets. Cuba has a MAXIMUM wage of $20/month. Let’s see all the dumb*ss burger flippers spend some time in The Worker’s Paradise…
Duuuuude! We got to go to Cuba! We’ll get a month’s minimum wage in just one hour!*
Sooooo awwwwesommmme!
(Stoner math isn’t pretty.)
Marxism, which promised a material world of scientific organization of society and its resources in order to maximize the physical comforts and luxuries of the most menial of laborers, impoverished Germans.
That is all.