Understanding Cuba

NY Review - Cuba on the Verge

To read this article, you will have to subscribe to the Review, so you can read all its excellent articles. This article says, for example:

Seen from Cuba, the ascendance of Trump at first invited bemusement. He seemed to represent a throwback to the 1950s, when Havana was run by New York mobsters who lined the city’s oceanfront with shiny casino-hotels. Everyone in Havana knew that Trump had made repeated attempts in the early 2000s, before it was legal, to pick up where Meyer Lansky (who built his Riviera Hotel not long before Fidel seized Havana) left off. “This is a time for doing business, and Trump is a businessman,” became a kind of mantra in Havana. Many Cubans thought Trump could be good for US–Cuba relations. What this hopeful stance didn’t account for, as they soon learned, was that mounting a campaign for the US presidency as a Republican still requires appeasing hard-right Cuban-Americans in Miami. Even more important was Trump’s sheer will, once in office, to undo as many of Obama’s achievements as possible.

In November 2017, the administration formalized the new regulations, whose imprecision still frustrated many (including Rubio), but did see Trump’s Treasury and Commerce Departments issue a list of several dozen hotels, stores, and travel agencies owned by the Cuban military where vacationing Americans are now officially banned from spending money.

I knew an American once, who had visited Cuba back then - and enjoyed the services of its whores. He did not realize these were ordinary, desperate woman, who only did this to survive. He had no idea what was really going on in Cuba - and didn't want to know. 

This is still true of Americans. If they are tourists, they only want to see the sights - nothing more!