Obama’s Cuba Trip Highlights U.S. Failure to Curb Abuses

Barack Obama has a history of gravitating toward the worst of humanity, being an apologist and a cheerleader for them, accommodating them, and seeking to expand their influence.

He got his political start in the home of domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn. Frank Marshall Davis, a devout communist and likely pedophile, was like a father figure to him. His mother, father, and stepfather all hated America. In his autobiography “Dreams From My Father”, Obama spoke of how, as a college student, he gravitated towards Marxist professors and leftist radicals.

Before he ran for president, he spent two decades in the church of the racist, hate-spewing “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright. After being elected president, Obama cancelled a missile defense system with our Eastern European allies that would have protected them from Russian aggression. When Iranians took to the streets in peaceful protest following the rigged election of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama was virtually silent as Iranian police and the Basij (paramilitary) clubbed, kicked, beat, and shot the demonstrators.

Deeply embedded in his ideological DNA, Obama has followed this pattern throughout his presidency, so it was disgusting, but not all that surprising, when Obama in 2014 announced that he was reversing decades of U.S. policy regarding the murderous, communist Castro regime, and re-opening the U.S. embassy in Havana as part of a resumption of diplomatic relations. This week, Obama announced that he would be the first U.S. president to visit Cuba since President Calvin Coolidge in 1928, though that was under far different circumstances.

The Cuban embargo has been in place for half a century, primarily because the Castro regime refused U.S. offers to resume relations and implement favorable trade terms in exchange for the liberalization of Cuban policies towards human rights and political freedom. As a result, the Cuban people have spent decades in abject poverty, oppressed by a man who promised to save them from the dictator Fulgencio Batista, but instead became a more brutal oppressor than the devil they’d known.

So what did the Castro brothers have to promise in exchange for the resumption of diplomatic ties? Absolutely nothing. No end to the persecution, imprisonment, and murder of political dissidents. No promises of free speech rights for the Cuban people. In fact, David Thorne, senior advisor to Secretary of State John Kerry, recently dismissed calls to tie favorable relations with Cuba to the protection of human rights for the Cuban people, saying “As in other parts of the world, we are really trying to also say, Let’s find out how we can work together and not always say that human rights are the first things we have to fix before anything else.”

You might get away with that while arguing for the necessity of diplomatic relations with global behemoths like China (for which former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once stated that objections to China’s human rights abuses would not be allowed to “interfere” with more important issues like global warming) and Russia, but Cuba has little strategic interest for the United States and an economy that can barely feed its own people, much less be a significant trade partner for America. In other words, there is zero reason for Obama to capitulate to the Castro brothers other than the fact they are his ideological allies, and he wants to.

It can be seen as nothing other than an absolute victory for the Castro regime after a half century of being marginalized and isolated by the U.S. Immediately following Obama’s announcement in 2014, Cuban President Raul Castro declared victory over the U.S., and declared that the re-opening of U.S.-Cuban relations did not mean an end to communist rule in Cuba.

At a time when the U.S. would have been in a strong position – due to the collapse in oil prices and therefore the Cuban economy – to demand democratic changes from the Castros, Obama demanded nothing and got less. The Castro regime gets the prestige of formal diplomatic relations with the U.S. and an influx of U.S. dollars into the regime’s coffers from American tourists, even as the brutal crackdowns on democratic protestors have increased.

The protestors blame Obama. As Berta Soler, head of the human-rights group Ladies in White, said in an interview with National Review, though Obama promised his actions would lead to greater freedoms and protections for the Cuban people, “we are seeing that what he has done is give a green light to the Cuban government to crush civil society.” She is anguished because Obama and other Western leaders “have turned their backs on us.” Cuban-born Democrat Senator Robert Menendez said that “…Obama’s actions have vindicated the brutal behavior of the Cuban government.”

Many pro-Communist liberals have claimed that the ongoing embargo has been a failure because it has not caused the Castro brothers to step down or liberalize their policies, but that is a false standard. The embargo has limited Cuba in its efforts to further export communism to the Americas and financially support other communist regimes.

Obama knows he needs the support of Congress, which he assuredly does not have, to formally end the Cuban embargo. However, the White House has indicated that Obama will use a series of executive actions to get around Congress and expand trade relations with Cuba as much as possible (just like he has done to bypass Congress on “global warming”, cap-and-trade, immigration, etc.).

In doing so Obama has revealed yet again that his heart lies not with the poor, downtrodden, persecuted and oppressed of the world, but with the oppressors and abusers. It is to America’s lasting shame that we elected such a man not once, but twice.