Why does the United States consider Cuba an enemy?

The United States considers Cuba an enemy because Cuba is bad.

Not bad like Shaft was bad, or bad like "Put your pants back on, you naughty boy." But bad in an evil way. Cuba is a threat to the American way of life. How?

• Cuba is a dictatorship.

Fidel Castro and his brother, Raul, have run Cuba since 1959. Dynastic rule is like the cold virus and Cuba's only 90 miles from the Florida Keys. Cuba's dynasty virus could drift over to the United States and infect us. Then, instead of having a Bush, Clinton or Dole on every U.S. presidential ballot since 1976, we'd only have one of them.

These days, Americans are cool with dictatorships, even repressive ones like Cuba's, as long as they're far away.

It's OK to fork over billions to Pakistan's dictator Pervez Musharraf, who took power in a military coup in 1999, or Egypt's President-for-life Hosni Mubarak. It's cool when President Bush holds hands with the corrupt King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia – a country ruled by one man (Ibn Saud) and five of his sons since 1902. They're far away, so we're not gonna catch their dictatorship disease.

• Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism.

In 1982, the State Department put Cuba on its list of terrorist-sponsoring nations because it was sending military support to ideologically like-minded people in Latin America and Africa. Sending your military abroad to further your nation's objectives is terrorism. Unless we're doing it. Then it's called foreign policy. Those right-wing death squads we sponsored in Central America that killed hundreds of thousands of people, they weren't terrorists. They were freedom fighters.

In 1998, the U.S. government determined that Cuba was not actually a threat to U.S. security, but neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations have seen fit to take Cuba off the terrorist list.

What Cuba needs to do to get off the list, it seems, is kill some Americans. That's what Chile did. That's what Iraqi insurgents did between 2003 and 2007. You might recall, Bush and Co. referred to them as terrorists pretty much every day. In 2007, many of them switched sides. Now we're paying them money and bragging about how they're helping stabilize Iraq.

The formula is simple. People who aren't a threat to America = terrorists. People who have killed a few thousand American soldiers = crucial allies. Neat how that works.

• Cuba was allied with the Soviet Union.

After Fidel Castro took power, he kicked out the American-backed dictator (Batista) and overturned the corrupt economic system through which American corporate and crime interests were sucking the Cuban people dry.

Aware that the United States was not pleased with this, and that the United States was in the habit of using the CIA to overthrow governments (ex.: Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954), Cuba befriended the Soviets for protection.

This alliance almost led to nuclear war, thanks to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even though the Soviet Union has been gone for nearly two decades and we're actually friendlyish with Russia now, we still hold a grudge against the Cubans.

• Castro refuses to die.

From pretty much the moment he came to power, we've been trying to get rid of Castro. We've tried to poison his cigars, plant explosives in his cigars, plant explosives in conch shells and attempted to sneak depilatory chemicals into his wardrobe so his hair would fall out. Oh, and we sponsored a military attack on the island in 1961, the disastrous Bay of Pigs Invasion.

But the jerk won't die. The nerve!

• Florida is a swing state.

The Electoral College presidential voting system bestows enormous political influence on small special-interest groups in states that are closely divided between Republicans and Democrats. Neither political party wants to alienate Florida's staunchly anti-Castro Cuban exile community for fear of losing Florida's Electoral College vote.

As a result, the United States' policy toward Cuba is nothing but a cheap pander to a small group of Cuban extremists who hate Castro because they sat atop the oligarchy that Castro toppled. No one actually benefits from the policy, least of all the Cuban people. Oh, well.