Oil Exploration Update: U.S. To Play Catch-Up
With Cuba
Author: Tom Attea

Startlingly enough, it looks as if the time will soon arrive
when the USA will have to play catch-up with Cuba in oil
exploration. The diminutive and destitute communist enclave
that serves as Fidel Castro's personal cigar plantation now
realizes that it has enough oil reserves under its coastal
waters to prop up its no-go economy for decades and, incapable
of assembling the capacity to out the oil itself, the island
nation has begun to license drilling rights to other countries,
including China, the prospect of which alarms us, and Spain, the
idea of which invites us to think of tapas.

In wisdom wrought from its neediness, the resourceful islet has
also offered to license American oil companies.

Expectedly enough, the very prospect of Cuba scooping oil out
of the ocean floor while America has outlawed it for decades
has enkindled hot debate in Congress about the present wisdom
of our self-imposed interdiction. The debate has rapidly
blossomed into a gusher partly because America has even more
proven oil reserves in its coastal waters, no doubt principally
because it has even more coastal waters.

Persuasively enough in these oil-dear times, there seems to be
enough of the black gold there to meet all of our energy needs
for about 18 years, or long enough for all the leaders in the
Middle East who we aren't getting along with these days to go
the way of leaders everywhere who, we determine, are
irredeemably misguided.

Naturally, conservation societies have been galvanized into
opposition by the mere prospect of an oil bit chomping into the
emerald waters of our abundantly fishy coastlines in search of
the liquid treasure below the reefs.

As the debate bubbles on, we can only consider a worst-case,
best-case scenario. Worst case: we do nothing while foreign
companies who don't exactly have the most reverential
reputations in ecological propriety drill away and, as time
allows, send oil spills slithering onto our beaches. Best case:
we race to catch up with Cuba and maybe even preempt the
ill-advised entanglements that might otherwise drill down into
our hemisphere.

Since we're actually talking about drilling in our own backyard
pond, we might also, one hopes, do it in ways that are less
likely to lead to the shameful oil blights that fill us all
with remorse and send fish and fowl off to tarry death –
derelictions that strange countries in a strange land might
less assiduously labor to avoid.


About The Author: Tom Attea, creator of http://NewsLaugh.com,
has had six shows produced Off-Broadway and has written comedy
for TV. Critics have called his writing ""delightfully funny"
and "witty" with "good, genuine laughs."