This week USDemocrazy is going hysterical historical. Our weekly film festival is featuring an important and quite recent historical event.

November 9th marks the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, a structure that separated East and West Germany and characterized the Iron Curtain for decades until 1989.

We found four interesting videos about the event starting with the video above. It is an ABC News report of the fall that gives a brief overview of the context of the situation.

Motivation for the fall came from the United States under then President Ronald Reagan.

On June 12, 1987, Reagan made an appeal to the Soviet Union’s General Secretary Gorbachev to “tear down the wall” in his famous speech.

The amount of people mobilized for the actual fall is astounding. Included above are two video clips that show the power of the moment and the emotion of those involved in the struggle for freedom during the chaotic and politicized years.

Today, Berlin will have a 20th anniversary celebration in which it will stack a foam replica of the wall that will be symbolically toppled.

Okay… Hands up anybody who remembers the Cold War? And communism? And the Cuban Missile Crisis? And that movie Thirteen Days? 

Well, we here at USDemocrazy have recently learned from top intelligence reports (OK, a news article in the Washington Post)  that President Obama wants us to forget all that stuff.

You see, President Obama has decided to nudge open ever-so-slightly the door of friendship to Cuba.

He is giving the green light for  Americans with family members in Cuba to go and visit the beseiged island nation whenever they want. More importantly, he wants them to spend however much money they want.

Spend money? What’s the big deal about that you may ask…? We at USDemocrazy consider ourselves experts at spending money.  This new spending spree is different. Let us tell you why. (We always do!)

Back during the Cold War, the U.S. had some serious issues with the spread of communism around the world. The U.S. felt seriously threatened when Cuba, a nation at America’s doorstep, turned to communism under Fidel Castro. 

To isolate this perceived red menace, the US employed economic embargoes on Cuba. Fifty years later, those embargoes (and communism) still stand.

To make a long story short (you can read it all on Wikipedia anyway…), among those embargoes were restrictions to keep American people and money out of Fidel Castro’s commie grip. Some of these historic embargoes are now history.

President Obama has decided to start a new era on Cuban-American relations. You can read all about the newly-lifted restrictions here, as well as what this move means for Cuban-American relations. 

So, maybe you can’t cross into Cuba to buy a bunch of cigars just yet… but it is encouraging to see some of these old embargoes going up in smoke.