30 March—It’s mighty white of Donald Trump to allow Russian crude oil to be delivered to Cuba. Peace-loving kind-hearted humanitarian that he is, he reasoned, “If a country wants to send some oil into Cuba right now, I have no problem whether it’s Russia or not. We have a tanker out there. We don’t mind having somebody get a boatload because they need . . . they have to survive.”

What a guy! Forget that the United States has no right in the first place to blockade or impose extraterritorial sanctions of any sort on Cuba or any other country with which we’re not at war. Of course, Trump has said that “Cuba is next, by the way.” You wonder if he’s alluding to Cuba being illegally invaded like Venezuela or becoming the next state.

Frankly, statehood for Cuba makes more sense than statehood for Puerto Rico. Cuba, after all, is only about 100 miles from the U.S. mainland while Puerto Rico is 1,000 miles away. Moreover, Puerto Rico, while rich in biodiversity, doesn’t offer much in valuable resources of any sort, but Cuba has attractive mineral wealth and—far more important—the Vuelta Abajo, where the world’s finest cigar tobacco is grown.

The Vuelta Abajo, in Pinar del Río Province, is at the extreme western end of Cuba, about 100 miles from Havana. At the extreme eastern end, about 500 miles from Havana, is Guantánamo Province, home to the celebrated or notorious Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base, known officially as Naval Station Guantanamo Bay and familiarly and conveniently as Gitmo (from the abbreviation by contraction of GuanTanaMO).

The Gitmo facility, America’s oldest overseas naval base, has been a de facto extraterritorial leasehold of the U.S. since 1903. U.S. forces and Cuban allies had easily taken control of Guantánamo Bay for use as a naval base in 1898, during the questionable Spanish-American War, and in 1901 forced Cuba to sell or lease the land to “complete U.S. jurisdiction and control” in perpetuity—until abandoned or modified by mutual consent—as a condition of Cuba’s independence from Spain.

The original rent was $2,000 per annum, payable in gold. In 1934, the U.S. magnanimously raised the rent to $4,085—equivalent to roughly $100,000 today—but payable by check. Since Fidel Castro took over in 1959, the Cuban government has refused to cash the checks, maintaining—with complete justification—that Cuba was coerced into signing the lease. We won’t speculate on the disposition of the checks that have gone sour by now or the $269,610 the U.S. Treasury set aside for the payments. (The 1959 check was actually cashed, by the way—by mistake, according to Fidel.)

The 45-square-mile Gitmo facility is a fantastic piece of real estate, especially for a bupkes $100,000 a year, so you wonder why Trump hasn’t sold the lease to one of his family’s property grifts by executive order. Or at least tried to. The simple answer is that it would require congressional approval and too many of his corrupt congressional flunkies would demand a piece of the action to make it worth his while.

Still, Cuba as the 51^st state would probably be an easier sell than Venezuela, Mexico, Canada, Greenland, or even Puerto Rico . . .