Earlier today I blogged about President Obama\’s unbroken string of foreign policy disasters.
I intentionally left out Cuba. Not because it isn\’t a foreign policy disaster, but because I wanted to write about it separately.
But no need to do that. The Boston Globe\’s house conservative (the only one I know of at that hardline leftward paper), Jeff Jacoby, has written a superb column about Cuba that I cannot improve on.
You can read it all by clicking here. But, meanwhile, here are a few salient excerpts:
ON JULY 1, President Obama announced the formal resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba, asserting confidently that “American engagement … is the best way to advance our interests and support for democracy and human rights.”
On July 5, the Communist regime in Havana delivered its customary response. It arrested more than 80 democratic dissidents, including at least 60 members of Ladies in White, a peaceful group of brave women who march weekly in support of husbands, fathers, and other relatives imprisoned in the Castros\’ jails. Many of those detained were hurt, some severely.
There had been even more arrests and beatings in the days leading up to Obama\’s Rose Garden statement. Some 225 Cuban dissidents across the island were arrested the previous Sunday, with Ladies in White again prominent among those targeted.
There have been more than 3,000 political detentions on the island since last December, according to The Washington Post. The paper quotes Mario Felix Lleonart, a Cuban Baptist pastor who laments that he, like many, “had hoped, following the announcement about normalizing relations between the US and Cuba, that there would be a stop to – or at least a lessening of – the beatings” of dissidents. “We now know that what is happening is precisely the opposite.”
Like opposing same-sex marriage and guaranteeing that Americans could keep their health plan if they liked it, Obama reversed course on normalizing relations with Cuba, which he was clear could only come after, not before, “significant steps towards democracy.” Once upon a time, Obama maintained that there would be no American embassy in Havana until all of Cuba\’s political prisoners were free. Now he trumpets John Kerry\’s forthcoming trip to Havana “to proudly raise the American flag over our embassy once more,” even as Cuba continues to lock up men and women for daring to seek the democratic liberties Americans take for granted.
What an honest man. What a hard-nosed realist.
No wonder he is so adeptly cutting that great “deal” with Iran.
More than 18 months to go until this nightmare is over. I count the seconds.
