On the one hand, we're seeing the consent manufactury kick into overdrive and a lot of state department goblins seem to be absolutely itching for a fresh round of meddling. Cuba as a client state would open the door to all manner of renewed imperial nightmares in the carribean and South America.
On the other hand, it feels like most people's reception of the situation outside of dedicated chuds and Floridians (but I repeat myself) is muted, and I've already seen a few small anti-intervention protests pop up. After two decades of war, with a domestic civil society whose coherency is hanging by a thread and a global presence that is increasingly challenged, I feel like a flubbed regime change effort there would be the true beginning of the end for the U.S.' empire.
If this is a dumb-dumb take, please don't hesitate to tell me so.
It just seems like the media / Biden are attacking a different country every few weeks. Before they were obsessed with China. Before that, it was Putin’s soulless eyes. Before Putin, it was ISIS (I know, not a country.) Who the fuck is it going to be next week? Grenada? The way things are accelerating, within a few years it’s going to be a different enemy country every five minutes.
Grenada
Man, I've been playing way too much EU4 lately, as I got real confused as to why Biden would be demanding intervention into a part of Spain.
The Granada War ended 529 years, I think it's time to let that dream end.
They are probably trying to see what the population will go for and see what sticks. However after decades of cable news, we have no attention span.
So true. They've been cycling back to Trump now as well. They have kind of a serious problem because without their big wet boy in the White House nobody fucking cares. All the different corporate media outlets have lost at least half their viewers since President Civility took over.
The Price is Right spin wheel but for countries we need to "liberate."
it's a one week cycle now. Cuba's already out of headlines.
This is typically what happens when there is a senile ruler (or a child). There are constant behind the scenes palace intrigues that don't make any sense unless you are one of the few who understands what's really going on. From the outside it will appear disjointed and contradictory.
US intervention in Latin America is a neverending process. You only hear about Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, etc. because they're the big projects that make headlines. The US is usually a lot more subtle about it. They'll send reps over to talk to opposition parties, put in sanctions over damn near everything, and make us go through ridiculous loops to get the basic necessities.
Wasn't long ago when a Republican congressman married the daughter of our former dictator, and she was still a public official at the time too. They'll keep doing their thing, but just how effective they continue to be depends on a lot.
Even though people here have the Pfizer or nothing attitude, many have also taken the Russian vaccine out of desperation. Small signs like this show that the grip is still strong, but the cracks are beginning to show.
Wasn’t long ago when a Republican congressman married the daughter of our former dictator
Real medieval vassalage hours, blech.
Do they have meet and greets between American Republicans and the families of former/current dictators? What the fuck
As I just said in the megathread, I passed a Cuba SOS rally a few minutes ago in the downtown of my major city. It was decently sized, got a lot of honks, and I saw more people arriving. There is not a significant cuban community here. It was upsetting seeing all that support, especially knowing the only course that'll be taken from here bar these fizzling out is greater misery for the actual Cuban people. Of course I don't know what will happen, but currently I'm not feeling optimistic. Iraq was providing for it's people before both invasions, while struggling quite a bit before the second which also had an enormous anti-war movement more or less on its side at the time, and war still came. It's tough to imagine physical intervention on that scale here, but whether there's another bay of pigs or a coup attempt is another question. Cuba is resilient, but the US is unrelenting in it's brutality and the current situation, well, you hate to see it
This is part of why I'm nervous. The past week has given me real bad 2003 vibes.
I think the Biden admin saw what Trump's ratcheting up of the embargo was doing plus the downturn in the the economy with the drop in tourism, and decided this was an "opportunity". Really make the people of Cuba feel the pain. Because a US military intervention is still out of the question. And I don't think a coup is on the table, because you actually need some internal opposition; and by and large the Cubans are dedicated to the project that they are trying to build.
The idea is to so completely demoralize the people of Cuba that they lose the will to stand up for themselves. Make them suffer so much that no matter their ideological dedication to socialism and anti-imperialism, they decide it's not worth the cost. And I don't think the US would necessarily demand a US viceroy or even a massive change in government. What the US really wants is the ability for US capital to own Cuba. And I mean own all of Cuba.
I've been reading about East Germany, and that's exactly what the US wants to happen. Open up things up, tank their economy, and let US businesses swoop in and buy assets at bargain basement prices. Probably even let the gusanos buy "their" family land back (West Germany did exactly this, collective farms were destroyed and former Junker owners were allowed to buy back their old land at 40 cents on the dollar). I don't think the US cares if Cuba more or less keeps their political system in place. They just want the assets.
Thankfully, I think the people of Cuba know this and understand that surrendering their economy to the Americans will only result in even more severe pain.
That seems reasonable enough for the general overall idea, but I don't know if it's necessarily the Biden administration spearheading it, since there's kind of the expectation to continue Obama's thawing policy that Trump trampled on just for spite. Also despite the media pushing the narrative hard, the reality of the protests seems like they're quite small and not really indicative of a major shift in the Cuban public. So the media narrative itself seems to be the op above all else. Chapo's guest on the last episode floated the idea that it may be less of an attempt to manufacture consent for further aggression toward Cuba, and more about manufacturing dissent against trying to thaw relations once again like Obama.
Guess we'll see one way or another in the next couple years.
You're not wrong that this would be one of the last interventions the US would take, but I think it'll probably fizzle out as the Cuban govt retakes control and things fall by the wayside. I don't think there's enough popular appetite for it, and they could've done the same for Venezuela or Cuba itself decades ago.
Yeah, in my area maybe like 1 in 5 people even know there's something going on in Cuba, and of those maybe half care, one way or the other.
Yeah, the US unelected government at State and the Pentagon are furious someone took away their war. Just livid. They thought they had that stitched up for life. You can find speeches where diplomats and generals calmly inform us we'll be in Afghanistan for the next 50-75 years and we just need to get used to the idea.
A few of the people I interact with on a daily basis are conduits for the American media ecosystem, instantly regurgitating whatever's in the current zeitgeist. A few are plugged in on the lib side, most on the chud side. I've been able to use them to gauge a baseline of standard American views and they haven't let me down so far.
All of them have already forgotten about Cuba. It stuck in their heads for about three days and it's already gone. The chuds are already back to the whole Arizona vote audit thing. The liberals are on a mish-mash of nothing/brunch or Olympics talk. Both of them have completely forgotten anything happened in Israel this year and I expect them to also forget anything about Cuba. They already hate Cuba so it's not like the latest news story changed anything about their opinions.
Y'all know anyone on that vaguely apolitical slash watches the news sometimes spectrum who is still thinking about Cuba?
The chuds are already back to the whole Arizona vote audit thing.
Wait, was this the one where they were looking for bamboo fibers on the ballots?!
Yeah, there's still round the clock updates on that in right wing media. Trump himself was talking about it a few days ago. They're still on this and still think they're gonna overthrow the election.
I think this will probably fail, but I also think there won't be any "rock" that American Empire breaks itself on. That would be too cathartic.
American Empire will just lose credibility with one nation at a time, with a few of the more strongly-attached puppets clinging to belief in it right up until the end, while the nations who realize the reality of the American paper tiger will slowly poke their heads out and take actions we don't like that are in their own self interest (I'm here for more nationalized industries in the third world). There will be a day when America isn't the top GDP anymore, but there won't be a day when America suddenly stops being the preeminent world power - instead there will just be a period where we look around and realize that we haven't been that for a while.
And then we'll get into a Falkland Islands-style war. They'll loop footage of F-35s launching off a Supercarrier to bomb the US Virgin Islands set to patriotic music for a hundred years before this ship finally sinks, so get ready for that.
Yeah it’s most likely going to be the same as when Britain fell off as a world leader
That was actually a good thing for the British people. They stopped dying in foreign wars that never benefited them, and the government was forced to work on internal development instead.
America was never meant to be a world leader. We've done an awful job at it. Better to leave the job to those better qualified. If the US government was cut off from their wonderfully stimulating endless foreign wars, the result can only be positive for Americans.
You realize we lost top GDP status to China like half a decade ago, right? It didn't really make the news.
We're still about 6 trillion dollars ahead of them overall, China crossed us on GDP (PPP) which is an adjusted measurement that takes into account relative purchasing power.
I'm not sure there'll be a decisive moment when the empire breaks.
If there is a moment it will either be one that we won't notice until we're looking back on it (maybe it already happened, eg the War on Terror), or it'll be unbelievably horrific for the US (like carrier groups on the bottom of the South China Sea).
balkanization due to climate change will end it. The hordes of people from the southern and western states will be yearning to move to the midwest and the north after their lives become untenable due to constant droughts, heatwaves, and lack of freshwater. This will create an underclass of people living in these states whereas the wealthier folk will move to Michigan etc.
"Okay bruh well let's get that material shit fucking changing bruh." — Karl Marx
"I mean, Timmy, do you think it's right that a doctor should earn as much as a janitor?"
:deeper-sadness: "No Mrs. Stonewall Jackson"
This whole thing joist shows how old and on the verge of death America is.
No one cares about it. No one is talking about it. The only people that care are boomers. It's an old tactic for old people in a old dying bewildered demented empire.
