Year after U.S. move, Cuba heads in wrong direction
It’s been a full year since President Barack Obama announced he would recognize the dictatorship of Raul Castro, and the tally so far is grim. Cuba is further than ever from becoming a democracy where people enjoy normal civil liberties; it is in fact closer to becoming what China specialists have identified as a rival model, a “resilient authoritarian regime.”
Just last week, the Castro regime thumbed its nose at the world by arresting between 150200 dissidents on Human Rights Day. Castro knows he can act with impunity because the world has never complained about what he does, and now that, too, includes the United States.
For 34 consecutive Sundays, regime-organized mobs have blocked a brave group of middle-aged women known as the Ladies in White from marching after church service. These women are always insulted, often beaten and occasionally arrested.
Meanwhile, Castro has put family members in charge of a corrupt regime that can now expect to have durability after the two Castro brothers pass from the scene. Castro’s son-in-law, Gen. Luis Alberto Rodriguez, controls an estimated 90 percent of the Cuban economy through the holding company he leads, GAESA.
The island’s defenseless dissidents have bitterly denounced what they term Obama’s betrayal of their movement. On the day of the anniversary this week, more than 100 former political prisoners who served close to 2,000 years in Castro’s Gulag signed and prepared to deliver to the administration a letter citing an increase in politically motivated detentions.
As is customary with Obama, his belief that he’s done the right thing remains unshakable. In fact, he recently told Yahoo News that he wants to reward the Castro brothers with nothing less than a presidential visit next year.
The Yahoo interview revealed once more that Obama’s Cuba policy is imbued with extraordinary (and dangerous) naïveté.
Of Castro, he said, “I do see in him a big streak of pragmatism. In that sense, I don’t think he is an ideologue,” said the president, who even sees the totalitarian leader as a forward thinker. “I do also think that Raul Castro recognizes the need for change.”
On Raul’s pragmatism and ideology, these views are contradicted by everything we know about the dictator, who’s long been considered the more ideologically committed of the two Castro brothers. He is renowned also as the more bloodthirsty one.
The Cuba Archive Project has documented 191 executions on Raul’s orders in the first month and a half of his tenure as military governor of Oriente Province in 1959. These are just the cases that were documented.
Eyewitnesses said that Raul personally administered the coup de grace to at least 78. The killings have continued for the 5½ decades the Castros have controlled the oncewealthy island of Cuba.
This is the man with whom Obama will meet and joke if he goes to Havana.
Obama told Yahoo that he would make the trip only if he can meet whomever he wants, presumably meaning dissidents.
I spoke to one of them this week, Antonio Rodiles, who happens to be visitingWashington. He told me that he’d be delighted to be invited to the White House. “I don’t think they’ll have me, though. They don’t want to hear anything that contradicts their failed predictions.”