The sense among administration officials that I talked with was that they have inflicted enough pain for the Cuban government to want to talk—they do not want the situation to reach a point where it spurs an exodus of Cubans, or leads to a pandemic of some kind on the island. The fear is that if the U.S. continues to grant permissions to Russia, or turn a blind eye to Russia, the country could rebuild, once again, to be the kind of global menace that we saw in the years leading up to its invasion of Ukraine. In The Second Sex, first published in France in 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had written of the older woman who pursues “fresh flesh” because young men are the “only ones” she can hope will feel desire for a “maternal mistress.” The woman does so, too, to combat the anxiety of aging, de Beauvoir wrote, felt by “the one whose life is already finished, even though death is not imminent.” Ouch.
Author: Will Gottsegen
Published at: 2026-04-03 21:00:00
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