I just heard this on the radio today. Barak Obama has announced that his administration will be normalizing relations with Cuba, thereby ending trade sanctions against Cuba that have endured since 1959, or over 50 years.

In his announcement, Obama cited that no OTHER country in the world had partnered with the US in imposing trade sanctions against Cuba; the USA was the only one imposing their own trade sanctions on Cuba. And that the USA has had normal trade relations with China, another communist government, for well over 30 years now.

Apparantly, secret talks between American and Cuban officials have been going on for several months now, with many of those meetings taking place in Canada.

People should be advised that this change represents a tremendous potential windfall for Americans. Cuba can replace Mexico and China as a source for cheap labour in the manufacture of goods for the US market. Wages in Cuba are low, and they are located very much closer to the US mainland, and so US companies would not have to pay the higher shipping cost to ship finished products from China.

Also, in the 1940's and 1950's, Cuba was the American playground, just like Las Vegas is now. The beautiful beaches and climate that drew tourists to Cuba back then still exist today, and once hotels are built to cater to tourists, there's no reason to believe Americans (and Canadians and Europeans) won't be going back to Cuba as a vacation destination. Cuba's money is cheap, which means you can vacation like a king down there for less than the same vacation would cost you in Mexico or worse, Hawaii.

20 years from now, I expect Cuba will be a highly industrialized country whose factories produce inexpensive goods for the North American market, just like China does now, and who's climate attracts tourists from all over North America, just like Mexico does now.

Today might very well become an annual civic holiday in Cuba.

PS: Relations between US Presidents and Canadian Prime Ministers haven't always been smooth. One of our Canadian Prime Ministers, Pierre Elliiot Trudeau, got on Washington's "naughty list" when he personally befriended Fidel Castro and invited him to visit Canada. I don't know if Castro ever took Trudeau up on that offer or not, but Trudeau spoke very highly of Castro saying that he was using Cuba's economy to help the poor people of Cuba. And, in Cuba, pretty well everyone is poor, which is why Cuba can replace China as a manufacturing center.