Originally published July 2, 2015.
For decades the American left has done its best to convince us that Cuba is a benign, progressive paradise that just needs to be unshackled from our tyranny. But the record is clear: the Castros are running a murderous dictatorship 90 miles south of Key West that has exported violence around the world.
Enter Barack Obama.
Yesterday he took to the White House Rose Garden to celebrate normalized relations with the most despotic regime in the Western hemisphere. It is meant to be his crowning foreign policy accomplishment, which is appropriate, because it every bit as ill-conceived as everything else Obama has done overseas.
The Castro brothers are now in the good guys club. They are getting a U.S. ambassador, and no doubt piles of American aid, on top of the cash from trade and tourism.
And they’ve done nothing to earn it. Raul Castro has made no meaningful concessions. In fact, the Castro regime wants the U.S. to “return to Cuba the territory illegally occupied by the Guantanamo Naval Base” and “compensate the Cuban people for all the human and economic damages caused by the United States policies.”
And what do we, and more importantly the Cuban people, get? Zilch.
We’re assured that Secretary of State John Kerry is going to negotiate a deal. As he has in Syria and Iran.
The goal of influencing a violent dictatorship through engagement may be laudable. However, the Obama administration has shown no aptitude for it, and it’s questionable whether the president even recognizes the extent of the evil.
Maybe Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz could tell him. As she said in a 2010 USA Today Op-Ed, “The Cuba Archive Project has documented more than 90,000 non-combat deaths — including executions, extrajudicial assassinations, death in political prisons, and disappearances.”
But the president is too blinded by his own legacy-affirming platitudes.
“The progress we make today is another demonstration we don’t have to be imprisoned by the past,” Obama declared.
“Imprisoned by the past” seems a poor choice of words while discussing an island gulag.
All indications are the president is more concerned about the 100 or so terrorists we have locked up in Guantanamo Bay, than he is about the 11 million people living under the Castro nightmare on the other side of the wire.
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