Letter: Hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy on display

Tuesday, Dec. 27, 2005 | 8:17 a.m.

Regarding DeWayne Wickham's Dec. 26 column, "Defectors don't belong on Cuba team":

Finally, a voice of reason on the subject of Cuba and its national baseball team. Thank you.

The blatantly political action of President Bush and Florida Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart to exclude Cuba from the Baseball World Classic is both hypocritical -- considering our relations with communist China -- and immoral because it politicizes a means which could be used to improve, rather than exacerbate, relations between Cuba and the United States.

Successive generations of U.S. presidents have continued to maintain a 44-year-long embargo on the island despite the obvious evidence that its purpose -- to bring down Fidel Castro -- has not worked. Yet U.S. foreign policy, which punishes not Castro but the 11 million people of Cuba, remains the same, and why?

It is just as Wickham writes: Florida is the rich political plum that is of vital importance each election year.

Cuban Americans hate Fidel Castro, and their votes help shape U.S. policy toward the island nation. Call it the new political immorality; it's nothing less than what we have come to expect under the current administration.

John H. Esperian

Las Vegas