The Obama visit to Communist Cuba infuriated and dismayed victims of government oppression around the world while encouraging the violent extremism of bloodthirsty dictatorships everywhere — but maybe that was the point. In a pathetic spectacle, Obama appeared to be groveling before the mass-murdering regime that once pointed nuclear missiles at the American people and continues to export terrorism and tyranny worldwide. Obama praised the autocracy enslaving Cuba, too, and even parroted dictator Raul Castro’s lies and his communist distortion of the concept of rights.
All the while, political prisoners opposed to the savage tyranny languished in Castro’s prisons, wondering why the supposed leader of the “free world” would be legitimizing the barbarism of their tormentors and persecutors. Others tried their best to flee to the United States as refugees from the oppression in record numbers, even as Castro urged his Latin American allies to make that more difficult.
“Here in Cuba nothing has changed,” explained Berta Soler, a member of the opposition group Ladies in White, shortly before she was arrested by Castro’s thugs ahead of Obama’s visit. “The Cuban government keeps trying to stop us, to demonize us, and we all live in fear.” Hundreds of dissidents, maybe more, were rounded up and beaten by Castro’s thugs in the weeks before Obama arrived to legitimize the brutal autocracy and demonize the United States.
More than a few critics of the charade wondered about the reason for Obama’s seemingly bizarre decision to coddle and defend one of the world’s most brutal dictators. But it all makes sense when Obama’s extremist background is considered — especially his decades of close associations with communists, which included launching his political career in the home of Castro-backed communist terrorist Bill Ayers. The terror group he founded, the Weather Underground, received financing, guidance, and support from Havana while it was murdering American police officers and bombing U.S. targets. It also planned to exterminate millions of American “counter-revolutionaries” after seizing power, according to the FBI agent who infiltrated the organization.
In his speech this week from Havana, Obama thanked “President” Castro — yes, the military dictator is now apparently the “president,” despite being appointed by his bloodthirsty brother Fidel. Obama also said that it was “an extraordinary honor to be here today,” as if he was in the presence of some sort of hero rather than a brutal tin-pot dictator with massive amounts of innocent blood on his hands, including the blood of many U.S. citizens and even children.
Almost incredibly, Obama celebrated the dictator’s “commitment to Cuba’s sovereignty and self-determination.” The people of Cuba have no sovereignty or self-determination, of course, just a ruthless tyrant whose goons machine gun rafts full of women and children as the tyrant’s victims risk their lives for a chance to flee the prison island for the freer shores of Florida.
The brutal tyrant, who has exported revolution, terrorism, and tyranny across the hemisphere and the world, will also hopefully “continue to play an important role in the hemisphere and around the globe,” Obama said. So far, the Castro brothers have mostly helped spread misery and communism with help from the Soviet Union, former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the Sandinistas, the Marxist narco-terror group FARC, and others. There have been no indications that anything will change, and in fact Castro has made clear that no matter how much Obama capitulates, there will be no change.
In an extraordinarily revealing remark about the administration’s extremist vision on education, Obama also praised the Castro regime’s indoctrination system used, only semi-successfully, to brainwash innocent children into accepting their slavery. “Cuba has an extraordinary resource — a system of education which values every boy and every girl,” claimed the man whose administration foisted national “Common Core” standards on American states using federal bribe money. The outlandish remark was then tweeted out by top Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett, who, like Obama, comes from a background filled with anti-American communists long under investigation by U.S. authorities. Critics promptly ridiculed the Orwellian remark, but the damage was done — the Obama administration had officially made a complete and utter fool of itself while defending, even touting, communist brainwashing.
Just weeks earlier, though, top D.C. officials also visited the brutal regime to seek help and ideas from Castro’s alleged “education successes.” The D.C. government presides over a “school” system that has produced a population that is two thirds functionally illiterate, according to a State Education Agency report. But rather than looking for real answers, the D.C. leadership came back from Castro’s slave empire with glowing reports about “high-quality teaching” and other absurdities.
Obama also bragged about how his agenda was “helping” the Cuban people, without ever mentioning that the real beneficiary would be the regime enslaving those people, which owns virtually the entire economy. He also promised more help for Cuba’s slave master Castro. “We’ve begun initiatives to cooperate on health and agriculture, education and law enforcement,” Obama said, as if helping a communist dictator on “law enforcement” were a positive development. “I have come to bury the last remnant of the cold war in the Americas…. It is time for us to look forward to the future together.”
After serving as an apologist for the Cuban dictator, even Obama’s phony praise for the United States was a boon for Castro’s propaganda. Obama made a reference to the United States being founded on the “rights of the individual,” for example. But then, he revealed the true intent behind his words by claiming that government-controlled and -provided goods and services were “rights,” as Castro claims, completely contradicting centuries of Western thought on the nature of individual, God-given rights that the government exists to protect.
“President Castro, I think, has pointed out that in his view making sure that everybody is getting a decent education or health care, has basic security and old age, that those things are human rights as well,” Obama said at a press conference with the smiling tyrant. “I personally would not disagree with him.” Leaving aside the fact that Cubans make on average less than $20 per month, goods and services financed with wealth extracted by force from others are known as privileges, not rights. Only in the mind of a communist tyrant or a “useful idiot” can a person have a “right” to another’s labor and property.
Obama also legitimized several key lies of the Castro dictatorship, including the notion that the U.S. embargo, rather than communist totalitarianism, was to blame for the shocking poverty that afflicts the Cuban people. “Before 1959, some Americans saw Cuba as something to exploit, ignored poverty, enabled corruption,” Obama continued, sounding like Castro himself. He also claimed Castro was involved in promoting “peace, security, opportunity, and human rights” in the Western hemisphere — a notion so ridiculous that it sounds like Obama must be living on a different planet. It isn’t due to ignorance, though, as the U.S. government knows full well what Castro and company have been up to.
“I’ve had frank conversations with President Castro,” Obama added, again legitimizing the tyrant by referring to him as president. “For many years, he has pointed out the flaws in the American system — economic inequality; the death penalty; racial discrimination; wars abroad.” Obama continued blabbering on about real and imagined problems in the United States before touting the positive side: “gay rights” and ObamaCare. Seriously.
Instead of demonizing America and praising Castro’s savage system for indoctrinating children, Obama might have apologized to Cubans for the crucial role played by the U.S. establishment — the Council on Foreign Relations, the U.S. State Department, and the New York Times — in selling the Cuban people into slavery. That sellout continues to this day, and the Cuban people are the biggest victims.
Obama claimed to “know the history,” but if that were true, he gave no indication of it in his speech, pretending that the U.S. government had always been hostile to the tyrant. As then-U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Earl Smith explained in his book The Fourth Floor, however, the U.S. State Department provided crucial support to Castro and his band of savage murderers as they lied to the world about their intentions and butchered their way to Havana slaughtering anyone who got in their way, including children.
Of course, some observers knew that Castro and his barbarian followers were communists, including Robert Welch, the founder of The John Birch Society. But the U.S. establishment supporting Castro insisted that he was actually a “freedom fighter.” Similar betrayals by the globalist establishment abound.
Critics were outraged by Obama’s visit and the groveling. Frank De Varona, who was born in Cuba and was captured and imprisoned by Castro while fighting to liberate the island from communism, said Obama had now made Cuba a U.S.-backed dictatorship. “This was appeasement of the worse kind for Obama to sit there in front of an international press and to accept this type of public abuse from a dictator who has executed more than 15,000 children, women and men and jailed over 300,000,” wrote De Varona at Bear Witness Central, the news portal of a pro-liberty group consisting largely of people who have experienced the horrors of communism and socialism first-hand. “The coward Obama needed to defend his nation and once again he did not.”
“For those who have been paying attention over the past seven years, it should come as no surprise that Obama envies dictators like the Castro brothers who control the means of production, kill their enemies, and decide how resources should be allocated regardless of the desire of their own people,” said Americans for Limited Government chief Rick Manning in a column blasting Obama’s groveling in Havana. “This totalitarian impulse was glimpsed once again when Obama whined about the difficulty of working with Congress to impose his will. So there we have it, once again America finds itself with President Obama limply ceding the moral high ground to some of the world’s most ruthless dictators.”
Senator Marco Rubio, the Cuban-descent chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, was also fuming. “On Sunday, President Obama will touch down in Cuba for what promises to be one of the most disgraceful trips ever taken by a U.S. president anywhere in the world,” he said. “This is an Obama presidential trip whose ultimate results will be giving away legitimacy and money to an anti-American regime that actively undermines our national security interests and acts against our values every single day.”
“President Obama’s entourage will sleep in hotels controlled by the Cuban military that were confiscated by the regime and are among the $7 billion in unpaid legal claims owed to American property owners,” continued Rubio, noting that Obama was conspicuously avoiding a visit to the church where the Ladies In White have shed blood for demanding their loved ones’ freedom. “As a whole, President Obama’s trip to Cuba and his policy of one-sided concessions to this regime are as naïve as his world view and as misguided as his foreign policy affecting other parts of the world.” Of course, naivety was unlikely to blame.
Cuban dissidents Ailer González and Claudio Fuentes of the Forum for Rights and Freedom also slammed the visit. According to the U.K. Guardian, after years of struggling against the Castro regime’s oppression, the two felt that the “leader of the free world” had let them down by befriending their oppressor. They had been beaten by Castro’s goons the day before for trying to get on the Internet at a hotel. And the beatings, torture, and oppression will undoubtedly continue.
Countless supporters of freedom in Cuba, the United States, and around the world were outraged that Obama was legitimizing and even rewarding tyranny and mass murder — and he was. In fact, he may have been saving it in Cuba. As Castro’s allies and financiers in Latin America crumble amid growing public uprisings, Obama threw the Cuban tyrant an urgently needed lifeline. Many Americans and members of Congress from both parties have already spoken out about Obama’s shameful behavior. But the American people should make clear to oppressed Cubans and the world that the Obama administration and its fawning over a mass-murdering tyrant do not represent the United States.
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is normally based in Europe after growing up in Latin America. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at [email protected]
Photo of propaganda poster showing Raul Castro and President Obama: AP Images
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