For almost all Americans, the political storm will seem a new thing.
We should have either bought or taken Cuba long ago (not for the sake of the Cubans, of course) back in the first half of the 19th Century. Just as Jefferson, contrary it seems to his own (lousy) principles, arranged for the Louisiana Purchase.
It is symptomatic of American political structural weaknesses that we did not; and that now something like a gathering of Chinese force in the Caribbean can be discussed, in some ways, in a rather similar political environment.
To see how American political and diplomatic blundering has almost always been structural and endemic in our system, you have to read something like the account in Nevins' Ordeal Of The Union Volume II Chapter 10 "Cuba, Ostend, and the Filibusters"
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