Saving Comrade Castro
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The Soviet Union did not have to fall. If Carter
had won a second term and Mondale had succeeded him,
the Communist dictatorship might have received the
outside help it needed to survive.
And we would still be living under the shadow of the
Cold War.
Carter
couldn’t save the Soviet Union, but he did his best
to save Castro, visiting Fidel and Raul in Cuba
where the second worst president in American history
described his meeting with Castro as a greeting
among “old friends”.
Raul Castro called Carter “the best of all U.S.
presidents”.
Obama’s dirty deal with Raul will make the worst
president in American history, Castro’s new best
friend.
Carter couldn’t save Castro, but Obama did. This was
not a prisoner exchange. This was a Communist
bailout.
Obama boasted that he would increase the flow of
money to Cuba from businesses, from bank accounts
and from trade. When he said, “We’re significantly
increasing the amount of money that can be sent to
Cuba”, that was his real mission statement.
The Castro regime is on its last legs. Its sponsors
in Moscow and Caracas are going bankrupt due to
failing energy prices. The last hope of the Butcher
of Havana was a bailout from Washington D.C.
And that’s exactly what Obama gave him.
Obama has protected the Castros from regime change
as if Communist dictators are an endangered species.
From the beginning, Obama put his foreign policy at
the disposal of Havana when he backed Honduran
leftist thug Manuel Zelaya’s attempt to shred its
Constitution over the protests of the country’s
Congress and Supreme Court. And its military, which
refused to obey his illegal orders.
Obama’s support for an elected dictator in Honduras
should have warned Americans that their newly
elected leader viewed men like Zelaya favorably and
constitutions and the separation of powers between
the branches of government unfavorably. It also
showcased his agenda for Latin America.
His embrace of Raul Castro brings that agenda out
into the open even if he still insists in wrapping
it in dishonest claims about “freedom” and
“openness” while bailing out a Communist
dictatorship.
Obama began his Castro speech with a lie, declaring,
“The United States of America is changing its
relationship with the people of Cuba.”
The Cuban people have no relationship with the
United States because they have no free elections
and no say in how they are governed. The only Cubans
who have a relationship with the United States fled
here on rafts.
Obama did not make his dirty deal with the Cuban
people. He made it in a marathon phone call with the
Cuban dictator. When Obama claims that his deal with
Raul Castro represents a new relationship with the
people of Cuba, he is endorsing a Communist
dictatorship as the legitimate representative of the
Cuban people.
This
is a retroactive endorsement of the Castro regime
and its entire history of mass murder and political
terror. Obama is not trying to “open up” Cuba as he
claimed. He likes Cuba just the way it is; Communist
and closed.
Obama did not consult the Cuban people, just as he
did not consult the American people. He disregarded
the embargo, Congress, the Constitution and the
freedom of the Cuban people.
His dictatorial disregard of the embargo, which can
only be eliminated by Congress, in order to support
a dictatorship, is a disturbing reminder that the
road he is walking down leads to a miserable
tyranny. Cuban-American senators from both parties
have been unanimous in condemning the move. These
senators are the closest thing to Cuban elected
officials. But Obama disregarded Senator Menendez, a
man of his own party, Senator Marco Rubio and
Senator Ted Cruz.
Instead Obama chose to stand with Raul Castro and
his Communist dictatorship.
Obama tried to whitewash his crime by exploiting
Alan Gross, a USAID contractor who was imprisoned
and abused by the Castro regime, as if the release
of an American hostage justified helping the men
holding him hostage stay in power. And the media,
which was reprinting Castro’s propaganda claiming
that Gross’ imprisonment was justified, is busy now
pretending that it cares about his release.
He had similarly tried to whitewash his Taliban
amnesty by using Bergdahl and his parents as cover.
If a deal is struck with Iran, the release of Robert
Levinson, Saeed Abedini or Amir Hekmati will almost
certainly be used to divert attention from the fact
that their own government has collaborated with the
thugs and terrorists who took them hostage.
Even though Obama criticized European countries for
paying financial ransoms to ISIS, his own ransom
paid to the Castros is worth countless billions. And
the blood money pouring out of American banks into
the Castro regime will encourage other dictatorships
to take Americans hostage as leverage for obtaining
concessions from the United States. Americans abroad
will suffer for Obama’s dirty deal.
No European country recognized ISIS in exchange for
the release of hostages. Only Obama was willing to
go that far with Cuba, not only opening diplomatic
and economic relations, but promising to remove the
Communist dictatorship from the list of state
sponsors of terror despite the fact that the last
State Department review found that Cuba continued to
support the leftist narco-terrorists of FARC.
FARC had taken its own American hostages who were
starved and beaten, tortured and abused.
Now Obama has given in to the demand of a state
sponsor of terror to be removed from the list of
state sponsors of terrorism in exchange for
releasing a hostage.
Obama has sent a message to Iran that the best way
to secure a deal is by wrapping it in an American
hostage. He has told ISIS that we do negotiate with
terrorists. And he has once again demonstrated that
his vaunted “smart power” is nothing more than
appeasement wrapped in excuses and lies.
But Obama did not act to help Alan Gross. He did not
even act because he genuinely thought that
diplomatic relations would open up Cuba. In his
speech, Obama used the claim commonly put forward by
Castro apologists that the very fact that the
Castros were still in power proved that sanctions
had failed. Yet the lack of sanctions against Cuba
by the rest of the world certainly did not usher in
the new spirit of openness that Obama is promising.
Rewarding dictators with cash never frees a nation.
This was not about saving Alan Gross. It was about
saving Raul Castro.
Obama and Castro are both weakened leaders of the
left. Like the Castros, Obama has lost international
influence and his own people have turned on him. The
only thing he has left is unilateral rule.
If Obama saw something of his own hopes and
aspirations to engage in a populist transformation
of the United States in Manuel Zelaya or Hugo
Chavez, his horizons have narrowed down to those of
Raul Castro. His ability to remake the world has
vanished and the American people are revolting
against his collectivization efforts. They want open
health care markets, free speech and honest
government.
Obama can no longer remake the Middle East, he
certainly can’t bring the Soviet Union back from the
dead, but he could still bail out Raul Castro and
maintain Communist rule in Cuba.
No
matter how often Obama claims to be “on the right
side of history”, the Castros are a living
reminder that to be on the left is to be on the
wrong side of history.
Obama did not want to see the “Berlin Wall” fall in
Havana on his watch. After watching his own grip on
the United States collapse, he did not want to see
the left fail again.
We can never know how history might have been
different if Carter had gotten a second term or if
Mondale had replaced Reagan. But Obama’s deal with
Castro reminds us that the end of the USSR was not
inevitable. It happened because we stood up against
the tyrants in the Kremlin and their useful idiots
in the White House.
A good man like Reagan could make a difference by
bringing down the USSR. A bad man like Obama can
make a difference by keeping Cuba Communist.