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Comment by reb | Hacker News Reader

I haven't bumped into his work before, this was an interesting read. What do you like about it?

I think presenting the situation like "China and the U.S. are fighting beneath the waves" sweeps under the rug how the preceding state of affairs—unchallenged U.S. dominance—was utilized by the U.S. to cut off countries like Cuba from the internet or finance with impunity, and makes it seem like China's challenge to this system is a scary departure from "peaceful normalcy" rather than the slow and difficult return of justice.

Just look at this map of undersea water cables to see how embargoes and sanctions designed to torture Cubans have led to silly and wasteful design decisions:

https://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/images/news/2015/10/r...

(And yes, that single connected spot in Cuba is Guantanamo Bay.)

Cuba is still taking it for those missiles, after how many decades.

The world is not just at all. There is no reciprocy and not all voices are being heard.

Thanks for your input. That's all

Edit: you got downvoted while I was typing this. The status quo defense force is working overtime these last few days

Nobody cares about the missiles anymore, nor the embarrassment of our failed invasion of the island. I mean, hell, we're friendly with Vietnam these days.

It's almost entirely due to one of the shitty aspects of how US elections work.

Enough Floridian ex-Cubans and their descendants, who got their land and businesses seized, are against warming relations at all, that moving that direction is seen as risky for Presidential hopefuls—which would hardly matter if we had a national popular vote for President, but instead, it's state-by-state and (mostly) winner-take-all at the state level, so that constituency's power is greatly multiplied by their mostly living in one "swing" state with a high elector count.

Miami doesn't want us to stop stepping on Cuba's throat, so we keep doing it. Why do we listen to Miami? Because our elections are dumb and bad and we (and Cuba) were unlucky with where Cuban refugees/exiles settled.

"The slow and difficult return of justice" and the current regime ruling China are not two things most people would ever put together

Cuba is welcome to lay their own undersea cables. No one is stopping them. They can hook up to their allies in Venezuela or whatever.

That map shows ALBA-1 (which lands in two places in Cuba, neither Guantanamo, and connects to Jamacia and Venezuela), which opened in 2012. Since then another cable - ARIMO - opens this year and connects Cuba to Martinique [0]

The two cables into Guantanamo -- GTMO-PR (opened 2019) and GTMO-1 (2016), after that map opened.

[0] https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/brazil-us/arima...

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