Reasonable minds should be able to agree that it's not in the United States' national interest to assist anti-American dictators in searching for oil to support their repressive, failing regimes. It won't drop the price of gas in the United States or do anything to enhance our "energy independence."
Yet American assistance to make oil-drilling in the Florida Straits profitable is exactly what Cuba's dictators Fidel and Raul Castro hope to gain as they use the threat of oil-drilling to maneuver the Obama Administration into once again unilaterally lifting U.S. sanctions on Cuba.
Cuba's search for leverage over the United States is not new. The Castro brothers have been using offshore-drilling as a lure to extract economic and political concessions from various nations since 1991, when the collapse of the Soviet Union ended that country's hefty subsidies to Cuba.
Brazil recently declassified documents showing that in 1993 the Castro regime offered oil rights on the "most promising" areas of Cuba's offshore waters to then-President Itamar Franco and Brazil's national oil company Petrobras. In exchange, Cuba wanted Brazil to shun Cuban dissidents and cancel a meeting of Cuban exiles at Brazil's Washington Embassy. The Franco government all-too-happily complied. Years later, Petrobras exited Cuba empty-handed.
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