#95 Sidebar: Notes From My Trip to Cuba and Other Stuff
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 14 November 2022
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This Sidebar episode starts with my notes from my trip to Cuba “in support of the Cuban people,” one of the exceptions to the general ban on Americans traveling there. Those notes lead to a story from American – Cuban relations: Three “filibustering” invasions of Cuba launched from the United States in the 1840s, the strange American origin of the flag of Cuba, the election of Franklin Pierce on the platform of acquiring Cuba for the United States, and the curious swearing in of his Vice President, William Rufus King, on a sugar plantation in Cuba.
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Selected references for this episode
Ada Ferrer, Cuba: An American History
William Rufus King (Wikipedia)
“As Cuba turns page on Castro era, economic reform gains urgency”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 95. |
| 0:11.1 | I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and I'm recording this episode on November 14, 2022, in Austin, Texas. |
| 0:20.0 | If you are new to the podcast, we are telling the history of the lands now encompassed by the United States from the beginning without presentism. |
| 0:29.6 | We believe there is dignity in our national story, along with tragedy, triumph, brilliance, hypocrisy, magnificence, depravity corruption venality inspiration oppression genius and |
| 0:46.6 | glory this episode's a sidebar which is our term for an episode off the timeline which i do |
| 0:53.4 | occasionally when I come across |
| 0:54.9 | something interesting or in recognition of a holiday, that sort of thing. As advertised to our |
| 1:01.0 | listeners on Twitter and such, I went to Cuba for a week with a couple of college friends. Every |
| 1:06.6 | couple of years, the three of us do a trip to someplace that our wives have no real |
| 1:11.7 | hankering to go. So this episode's about some things I saw and learned on that trip, plus |
| 1:18.0 | a couple of stories from the history of American-Cuban relations, which are in the usual |
| 1:23.5 | tradition of this podcast. Just to be clear up front on one point, we traveled to Cuba entirely within the requirements of the U.S. embargo, |
| 1:33.3 | the longest running sanctions regime imposed by the United States anywhere in the world. |
| 1:40.3 | Travel had liberalized substantially under President Obama, who created a general exception for cultural exchange. |
| 1:48.0 | Basically, you could come to Cuba legally and could substantiate your cultural exchange by writing a post on LinkedIn or a blog or presumably a podcast episode about the cultural stuff you learned in Cuba. |
| 2:02.6 | And anyway, I'm sure many people didn't even bother to do even that. |
| 2:07.6 | President Trump closed that easy exception, |
| 2:10.9 | and that's one of his policy decisions that President Biden is not reversed. |
| 2:15.7 | Now the easiest exception to the sanctions for Americans who want to go to |
| 2:19.9 | Cuba legally is, quote, support for the Cuban people. To meet this requirement, you have to spend |
| 2:26.4 | at least six hours a day engaging with the Cuban people in the relatively new private businesses |
| 2:32.3 | or even in their homes. As a practical matter, this means that or even in their homes. |
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