When the cameras are off and the microphones hidden away, and all the "anti-kommanist" rhetoric is put back in its bottle, the radical right sees Haytts, Marriotts, and Holiday Inns plus Hertz and Avis at Martí Airport, which is probably looking to award some big contract to expand the number of runways right about now.

If you can get down there as soon as diplomatic relations have been restored, do it. Within two years of restoring diplomatic relations, I'll bet not even the Cubans will recognize the place.

My guess is they'll have to make due with whatever building they have until we have a Congress that is willing to spend money on an embassy. First things first of course, get the agreement and have a ceremony. The rest will have to wait until 2017.

Congress has to allocate funding for it and has threatened to explicitly block any for Cuba. However there are general "embassy maintenance" lump sum lines in the current State Dept. appropriations, so they might be able to pull it off, assuming they haven't spent it all already (and in this case, the money rolls into later fiscal years until it's all gone based on the way it is written). When searching through the document (which was an Omnibus appropriations), the main prohibition related to Cuba was pretty much associated with direct aid/assistance (not counting the cultural exchange stuff) and frequent mention of Guantanamo, but nothing about the embassy (which was probably never even on their radar when this was enacted versus where we are today with respect to relations with Cuba). So in actuality, there is no explicit prohibition re: Cuba. I expect whatever they are working on for 2016 is probably going to include some sort of prohibition slid in there but that could be vetoed along with most of the garbage the GOP puts together.

Watch this space.

No one believed me. No one thought it was possible. But it's happening.

And I'm glad Obama is going to get credit for it.

has to be one of the dumbest things our politicians have ever enacted. And that's saying a lot.

was keeping it decades after it had proven itself a complete failure.

Especially since it'll make reich wing heads explode.

Cuba exports sugar and products made from it (primarily rum), and products made from tobacco.

Sugar is going to be a moderate pain in the ass. The best place to grow cane sugar is on an island because it responds well to that kind of atmosphere - hence, the cane sugar we eat in the States usually comes from Hawaii. Cuba has the island atmosphere AND lower labor costs. Fortunately, sugar is a commodity so no branding issues should arise - Domino Sugar can fill its bags with Cuban sugar as easily as they can American. The only problem is price, because the Cubans could easily put the Hawaiians out of business by undercutting them. This could easily be fixed by getting the Cubans to agree to sell their sugar to the US for the same price per ton Hawaiian companies receive. ("You mean you WANT us to raise our prices? What a country!&quot That's cool though because the number-one sugar product the US wants from Cuba is their rum...which is good enough that they can charge whatever they want for it.

Tobacco is the real problem - because cigars are a branded product, and the most famous brands of hand-rolled cigars sold in the US come from companies whose founders defected from Cuba with a bag of seed and a set of cigar-band plates, but without the people who knew how to cure tobacco and roll cigars. We therefore run into the situation where companies on the mainland like Altadis (the biggest cigar maker in the free world) are producing since 1960 the same brands the Cubans have been making since the 19th Century.