If the Cuban community in Florida were not as powerful as I said, a guy named Al Gore would be the president of the United States. And we would have chucked the sillier aspects of the blockade a long time ago.

What really grabs me about this debate is how nostalgic many people seem to be for the cold war. Why should anyone want to bring that back (except maybe Republicans nostalgic for the good old Reagan days)? What earthly reason is there to go on fighting "communism" (Or, for that matter, defending it)? Castro's Cuba would be a lousy place to live. It's a dictatorship. But I can think of even lousier places, like maybe Guatemala under the government we set up there, or Nicaragua under Somoza. At no time was I ever convinced that the two "alternatives" for humanity were the deeply flawed system we have in the United States, and the truly horrible system set up by Stalin. Or that to criticize one of these systems was to praise the other.

I do not for one minute believe Cuban statistics about infant mortality, or literacy or anything else. But I will bet you anything that their infant mortality rate is lower than than in the United States, whose rate compares unfavorably to that of Jamaica.