Barack Obama’s approach to tyrants might have been described as “tough love,” except that there was never anything tough about it. He attempted to make nice with the mullahs in Tehran, giving them crates of cash in exchange for unenforceable promises about their nuclear program. But it was in his own hemisphere that he made the most gratuitous concessions. In late 2014, the Obama administration normalized relations with Cuba and lifted travel and economic restrictions to the island, some of which had been in place since the Kennedy administration. In the spring of 2016, President Obama visited Cuba, where he took in a baseball game with Cuban “president” Raúl Castro.
The only thing missing from the grotesque spectacle was a mojito.
There was no pressing reason for President Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba — it was not necessary or even advisable — but the president suggested that comity between the U.S. and Cuba, and a heavier exchange of goods and people, would help to relax the regime’s grip. More than two years later, it is clear that this is not true. While Americans are enjoying Cuban rum and cigars, the regime has stepped up its repressive activities since the “thaw” was announced. During the first six months of 2016, there were on average 1,095 short-term political detentions, according to the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation; there were 718 on average in 2015.
Dissidents such as the Ladies in White have been increasingly targeted by the regime for persecution. Recently, authorities have been intimidating successful entrepreneurs; a restaurateur in Havana was arrested for nothing more than failing to bribe the appropriate officials. (The vice president of the island’s sham legislature recently declared that Cuba “will not allow the concentration of property and wealth.”)
The Trump administration has made an important reversal. The Castro dictatorship was not, never has been, and never will be America’s friend.
President Trump also took a rhetorically hard line toward the regime, calling out its human-rights abuses: “To the Cuban government, I say, put an end to the abuse of dissidents, release the political prisoners, stop jailing innocent people, open yourselves to political and economic freedoms, return the fugitives from American justice, including the return of the cop killer Joanne Chesimard.” The last is a reference to Assata Shakur, who murdered a New Jersey State Police trooper in 1973; she has been shielded from extradition by the Castros since 1984 and is currently on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List. Donald Trump has hardly been a reliable defender of human rights, but these remarks are a very welcome change. Administration officials say that political reforms will be a prerequisite to future negotiations; we hope the administration stays true to that intention.
The president faces criticism from several sides: from the regime and its apologists, from opponents of the regime who nonetheless favor a thaw, and from opponents who think the president should have gone further. We’re in the last camp. There is more that the Trump administration can do, publicly and behind the scenes. The administration should think seriously about reinstating the wet-foot/dry-foot policy that protected Cuban refugees who made it to American shores. It should consider how to curtail Cuba’s continued willingness to support terror abroad, especially in North Korea. (The Obama administration removed Cuba’s deserved designation as a state sponsor of terror.) The administration should also rethink the unseemly latitude toward cruise lines, which enable Americans to gambol on Cuba’s shores while dissidents are beaten a few miles away.
Nonetheless, the Trump administration has made an important reversal. The Castro dictatorship was not, never has been, and never will be America’s friend, and it required a special species of naïveté to think that the overseers of tropical concentration camps would throw down their guns because Major League Baseball had arrived on the island. Barack Obama gave the regime an extraordinary gift, demanded nothing, and in doing so managed only to facilitate more brutal repression of Cuba’s embattled democrats. Donald Trump is charting a different course. It’s a better route to a true Cuba libre – not the Castro brothers’ mockery of one.
READ MORE:
Raul the Reformer and Other Cuban Fables
The Struggle for Freedom Continues in Cuba
President Trump’s Foreign Policy
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