You didn’t think the social media giants were on Team Biden just for his glowing personality, did you?
Should Joe Biden become president in January, he’s made clear that he wants to reverse the Trump administration’s Cuba policy and would instead normalize relations with the communist island nation.
As Politico notes, this would be a big win for the U.S. tech industry, which views Cuba as a highly lucrative potential market. It’s safe to say that the mainstream social media platforms’ support for Biden and suppression of pro-Trump content that touches the issue of voter fraud is no coincidence given Silicon Valley’s vested financial interest in a Biden presidency.
When Barack Obama was president (with Biden as his VP), the administration announced a “reset” of Cuba relations that included “loosening of restrictions on the sale of telecommunications equipment.”
When Donald Trump came into office, he re-tightened some of the restrictions his predecessor had loosened, especially when it came to travel and remittances. Although President Trump did not make many changes on the telecommunications front, his White House’s overall Cuba policy created uncertainty that put major investment plans on pause.
For the Tech industry to realize its dreams of a “wired” Cuba, it needs the Trump policies peeled back and travel to the communist nation unrestricted.
Google is among the firms that can’t wait to sink its teeth into Havana. The search engine giant, which also owns YouTube and sponsors the Android mobile operating system, signed an agreement last year with Cuba’s state-run telecom to share Internet traffic, but that’s seen as little more than a baby step toward where the company really wants to go.
Nancy Scola of Politico writes:
Enter the president-elect. Biden has said he’ll overhaul the U.S. approach to Cuba: “In large part, I’d go back,” he said. What exactly does that reset look like? TBD.
When it comes to Cuba policy, “what you can expect under Biden is that empowering the Cuban people and empowering the Cuban private sector — and the growing tech entrepreneurial sector — is a priority,” says Ricardo Herrero, executive director of the nonprofit Cuba Study Group….
Should Biden launch a meaningful effort to unthaw U.S. relations with Cuba (again), it could be a boon to U.S. tech. Just opening up travel by Americans to Cuba could increase demand for the sort of robust connectivity that American companies can help provide.
Who cares if Cuba is a human rights-abusing dictatorship that promotes communist abroad and hates the United States? So long as Big Tech gets to line their pockets, who cares how much we enrich and empower the Castros? And who cares about the danger that their proximity (103 miles) to the U.S. could pose? Google certainly doesn’t.
Remember when big business and liberals combined to tell us that normalizing relations with Beijing would be a great idea? It would make American companies lots of money while reducing tensions with a communist nation.
Then Richard Nixon went to China and, thanks to massive investment from the Western World, the communist regime has become the world’s second greatest superpower and an existential threat to America. If the left and tech elites get their way, that story will play out all over again with Cuba.
Big Tech has other monetary reasons for supporting Joe Biden. Under the Democrat, Trump-era visa rules would be repealed so that corporations would have an easier time hiring and giving H1-B visas to foreign workers instead of to college-educated American citizens.
TechNet, a group of industry executives from companies such as Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, and Google, filed amicus briefs in support of lawsuits challenging the Trump administration visa rules.
“[The Biden Team has] indicated they are going to be very different than the Trump administration on high-skilled immigration, immigration in general,” said TechNet CEO Linda Moore. “High-skilled immigration … has led to so much growth and technological superiority and competitiveness for the U.S.”
With Biden already planning to fill his administration with Big Tech bigwigs such as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, his presidency would be nothing more than a front by which Silicon Valley directly dictates national policy. It would really be Big Brother sitting in the Oval Office.
