Ryan Criticizes Obama’s Cuba Policy and Explains His Shift on the Issue.

[elleng]

On a morning intended to reassure hard-line anti-Castro voters, who are a powerful force in South Florida Republican politics, Representative Paul D. Ryan made a pilgrimage to a restaurant here at the heart of the Cuban exile community in Little Havana. Part of the reason: to criticize what he called President Obama’s “appeasement” of the Cuban government.

But the visit was also intended to do some fence-mending of his own: As a young congressman from a largely rural Wisconsin district, Mr. Ryan, now Mitt Romney’s 42-year-old vice-presidential running mate, supported ending the trade embargo with Cuba, an unpopular sentiment among many Republicans and Cuban exiles in this part of Florida, one of the most crucial swing states in the general election.

“If we think engagement works well with China, well, it ought to work well with Cuba,” Mr. Ryan had said a decade ago in an interview with The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

“The embargo doesn’t work. It is a failed policy,” he said, adding that while many Cuban-Americans were passionate in their support of the embargo, “I just don’t agree with them and never have.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/us/politics/ryan-criticizes-obamas-cuba-policy-and-explains-his-shift-on-the-issue.html?hp

[Drunken Irishman]

1. Flip-flop...

[Angry Dragon]

2. I believe Willard and Lyan own stock

[craigmatic]

3. It's stupid for America to base its foreign policy with one of our closest neighbors on the feelings

of a tiny minority group in south Florida. We have relations with China, Russia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia but some how we can't talk to the Castros. We even buy oil from Venezuela.