> I am not going to hold my breath for that one to happen.
> My understanding is that Obama won a chunk of Cuban
> voters in south Florida. He's going to have to think of
> that when dealing with Cuba.
I was just IM-ing with a friend who lives in Camagüey, one of Cuba's central provinces, now under threat by the new hurricane Paloma. She's white. (Camagüey is perhaps Cuba's whitest province -- the province that resisted most the revolution's anti-racist policies.) She works for a Cuban media outlet. She told me that people, regular people in Camagüey were "elated" with Obama's victory. How come? -- I asked. Aren't they illussioned that U.S. policy with Cuba may change soon? No!!!! She said emphatically. It is *not* about self-interest.
The reaction is "entirely" (not mostly, not mainly, but entirely) related to the fact that he is the first black president in U.S. history. I probed: But what if the change is merely the skin color of the U.S. president, with little or no change in foreign policies? She laughed. The fact that he is black is *the* change itself.
I don't know. I wouldn't go so far. But this adds to my recent conversation with a neighbor. She's a black woman in her late 40s from the Dominican Republic with a grandchild the age of my son. A worker: her daughter is a nurse and she works cleaning houses. She just returned from Santo Domingo. The first thing she said when we met at the park yesterday, with a huge smile: "We won!" She then told me about the reaction in DR to Obama's victory. But, I asked her, aren't you expecting Obama to help the DR, financially or with the drug and insecurity issues that are now front and center there? No! -- she said. And added that people *know* that Obama is going to be under a lot of pressure and that he won't be able to fulfill all of his promises or change things for them. But they *still* support him.
This doesn't surprise me a bit. I'm sure this is similar to the support that most African Americans will grant Obama. It's going to be steady. So, the political disappointment theory that some in the left may cling to has no objective basis on reality.