Manbird wrote: 
ugh, sorry to hear that. What a bummer.
If you can, maybe you should.  

 Red_Dragon wrote:

I used to work for a medical gas company that had its own oxygen plant. I delivered and set up O2 delivery systems and worked with respiratory therapists. I saw how sick people can get from respiratory illness. It was pretty gross sometimes. And so many people on oxygen still smoked! Beyond the health issues, they could blow themselves up. Amazing. I was just diagnosed with COPD. My voice has become just a rasp - it's very hard to talk. I quit smoking (everything) 25 years ago. My blood sats are always in the low 80's. I could probably do with some O2 myself.  And a proper diagnosis. But I have medi-cal. Government standard medical care. It's a joke. When I told my new shrink that I had lived in Ireland he asked me if I could go back and live with family there to get better healthcare after I told him about some of my experience here. He was serious. Just sayin'...

Main Cuban oxygen plant fails amid COVID-19 surge

The Internet Is Widely Accessible in Cuba. Why Is the US Insisting It Isn’t?

Freedom House, a conservative think tank, argues that the Cuban government keeps the country technologically backward and censors dissident websites as part of repressing political dissent.

“Cuba remains one of the world’s least connected and most repressive environments for information and communication technologies,” according to a Freedom House report on internet usage.

That claim plays well to those who assume that governments led by communist parties must, by definition, be totalitarian. As Rojas’s ready access to a wide array of sites shows, however, Cuba’s reality is far different.

As of January 2020, in a survey by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), an international group monitoring internet censorship, the Cuban government blocked only 36 websites.

Most are sites created by U.S.-supported dissidents such as blogger Yoani Sanchez and the Ladies in White, a group that organizes anti-government protests in Cuba. However, Cubans who really want to read such sites can easily download a VPN (Virtual Private Network), which allows unfettered internet access.

Ironically, as part of enforcing the unilateral embargo of Cuba, the U.S. government prohibits Cubans from using hundreds of commercial websites, including Amazon, computer companies and banks. The U.S. government blocks more websites than the Cuban authorities, says John Nichols, a Cuba expert and professor emeritus at Penn State University.

Beggar thy neighbour...

 R_P wrote:
 

because russians

some of the older cubans here used to claim something similar

castro and company had something they called "the woodpecker"

some sort of tech they said could make people crazy (from a distance)

obviously it was pointed at south florida/keys and it worked pretty well

old guarijos (sounds like wahitos) folklore 

 ScottFromWyoming wrote:

It’s bad enough to be so reckless with such dangerous rhetoric. But when this is all accomplished through the shoddiest of “reporting” – mindlessly repeating what anonymous intelligence officials tell journalists to say without a whiff of evidence – then it’s clear that the same journalistic pathologies that led to front-page reports of Saddam’s nuclear stockpile and alliance with Osama bin Laden continue to shape corporate journalism today, particularly at NBC and MSNBC.

 ScottFromWyoming wrote: 
I'll take The Car for $1000 please Alex

Maybe it was Crickets!

netflix skirts rules and regs

now available in cuba?

it looks like it

Same old, same old. Some dictators are deemed 'beyond the pale' (esp. if they do not conform or compete in the right areas), while others are 'our closest allies':

Cuba: Top 5 other Dictatorships with which US has Diplomatic Relations

 RichardPrins wrote:


 
Amen to that.

 black321 wrote: 
Which pretty much validates what I said.

 sirdroseph wrote:
Having power (in some places) is also lucrative, and according to one well-known war criminal, apparently even an aphrodisiac. Votes (for one or another puppet) often seem to matter far less (the result might indeed turn out to be remarkably similar nowadays vis-a-vis policy).

Saying something is a (net) courageous step (esp. in a regressive, conservative climate) doesn't immediately amount to swooning, though there are certainly enough that do (whether for their Prez, their Party, their military, their country or their ideology).

It's what happens when the critical faculties take a leave of absence.

 sirdroseph wrote: 
Local news report last night interviewed folks from a Cuban area in NYC and all were positive on the move...basic message was they want to reconnect with their homeland.  Of course that could just be the liberal media filtering the responses.  Ha

 RichardPrins wrote: 

Call me a cynic, but I believe it is just because they are literally dying off now, their children do not feel the same way therefore they have calculated the loss of votes and felt like it was time.  Yes, calculated to the voter.  Political courage and our leaders is an oxymoron.  Votes and remaining in power are all that matter and anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves imo.  Now having said that, I agree with the decision as noted below and also think that it was a shrewd move by a lame duck president who is strengthening his legacy by this action with no risk to his own re-election and a calculated minimal risk to the Democratic party for reasons I have already stated.  Just forgive me if I don't swoon over the "courage" of our President.  What would have been courageous is if he had taken this action before the mid terms.

Cuban Five at Heart of US / Cuba Deal » CounterPunch

(...) Since the Cuban revolution in 1959, anti-Cuba terrorist organizations based in Miami have engaged in countless terrorist activities against Cuba and anyone who advocated normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba. Terrorist groups including Alpha 66, Commandos F4, Cuban American National Foundation, Independent and Democratic Cuba, and Brothers to the Rescue, have operated with impunity in the United States – with the knowledge and support of the FBI and CIA.

One witness at the trial testified that Ruben Dario Lopez-Castro, who was associated with several anti-Castro organizations, and Orlando Bosch, who planted a bomb on a Cubana airliner in 1976, killing all 73 persons aboard, “planned to ship weapons into Cuba for an assassination attempt on (Fidel) Castro.”

The three-judge appellate panel noted, “Bosch has a long history of terrorist acts against Cuba, and prosecutions and convictions for terrorist-related activities in the United States and in other countries.” Luis Posada Carriles, the other man responsible for downing the Cuban airliner, has never been criminally prosecuted in the United States. Declassified FBI and CIA documents at the National Security Archive show that Posada Carriles was the mastermind of the airplane bombing.

Several terrorist acts in Havana were documented in the panel’s decision, including explosions at eight hotels and the Cuban airport. An Italian tourist was killed and people were injured. Posada Carriles has twice publicly admitted responsibility for these bombings.

In the face of this terrorism, the Cuban Five were gathering intelligence in Miami in order to prevent future terrorist acts against Cuba. The men peacefully infiltrated criminal exile groups. The Five turned over the results of their investigation to the FBI. But instead of working with Cuba to fight terrorism, the US government arrested the five men.

Former high-ranking US military and security officials testified that Cuba posed no military threat to the Unites States. Although none of the five men had any classified material in their possession or engaged in any acts to injure the United States, and there was no evidence linking any of them to Cuba’s shooting down of two small aircraft flown by Cuban exiles, the Cuban Five were nonetheless convicted of all charges. (...)

Every year for 23 consecutive years, the United Nations General Assembly has called on the United States to lift the blockade, which has cost Cuba in excess of $ 1 trillion.

The US trade embargo of Cuba was initiated during the Cold War by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in response to a 1960 memo written by a senior State Department official. The memo proposed “a line of action that makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the government.” As Obama stated, that strategy has been a failure.

During the Clinton administration, Congress passed the Helms-Burton Act, which tightened the blockade. Obama promised to try to work with Congress to repeal this legislation.

Because of the significance of the Cuban exile community in Miami, and the strategic importance of Florida in US elections, no US president has dared to normalize relations with Cuba. As Alice Walker wrote in The Sweet Abyss, “Many of our leaders seem to view Florida’s Cuban conservatives, including the assassins and terrorists among them, as People Who Vote.” Obama has taken a courageous step in shifting US policy toward Cuba. (...)

 miamizsun wrote: 
Which of course is the primary reason it took 50 years to attempt to reestablish relations with Cuba.  Of course the cynic in me suggests that it took this long because the older generation who remember the horrors of Castro are dying off which in turn means it will not harm the Democratic party in particular with the hemorraghing of older Cuban American voters who are understandably not too thrilled with this decision.

Edit: for the record, I support lifting sanctions for the simple reason they did not and will not work.  Just as sanctions against Russia, though hurting them now, will ultimately backfire.  We cannot force our values on other countries, regardless of how much suffering they are causing.   We end up causing more suffering than was initially there in the first place, it is a no win proposition.  Please see Middle East as prime number one example.

i'm all for opening up trade with cuba (or anyone in the world)

the cubans here don't like castro for obvious reasons...
http://memorialcubano.org/News/News0003.htm

When asked what he would have done after the Cuban revolution if he was still president, Harry Truman said (more or less), "I would have said to Castro, 'Ok, you've had your revolution. Now you can come to us or to the other guys, so what do you need? ...And get a shave."

Learning the Art of Coexistence
The New Opening With the USA
by Raúl Castro