I hope you don't imply that I think Clinton was a President that Americans should have any reason to be proud of? When a policy is carried over from one adminstration to another, or has been supported by both your parties, "Washington" seems a reasonable term to use.

Why should the USA and its friends worry about an island in the Caribbean going its own way, and wish to interfere with that? True, that doesn't make much sense, but then it never has. Cuba has had similar problems hadn't it?

The expression that has been used in this kind of context is "the fear of a good example", and the solution is to impose stresses that tend to distort the good example into a bad example, as part of an agenda of replacing the government with one that won't involve those kind of problems. The interests of the ordinary people involved is a very secondary matter indeed.