“We are going to have diplomatic relations with the United States without having ceded one iota.”- Gerardo Hernandez, Cuban spy sentenced to life in prison for murder conspiracy freed by Obama as part of his deal with Raul Castro.
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| Raul Castro, First Lady Michelle Obama, President Barack Obama in March 2016 |
On September 3, 2020 Vice President Joe Biden in an interview with Jackie Nespral of NBC6 said he'd "try to reverse the failed Trump policies, it inflicted harm on Cubans and their families. It’s done nothing to advance democracy and human rights, on the contrary, the crackdown on Cubans by the regime has gotten worse under Trump, not better.” What the Vice President is stating is that he would return to the Obama Cuba policy. However human rights worsened under the Obama Cuba policy.
Consider the following during and after negotiations:
Machete attacks
The United States and Cuba held secret negotiations for 18 months beginning in 2013. Coinciding with the start of these negotiations were a series of machete attacks against opposition activists. On June 8, 2013 in Holguin, Cuba Werlando Leiva Batista of the Christian Liberation Movement was attacked with a machete on a public street. Later that same month on June 21, 2013 in Camaguey, Orlando Lazaro Gomez Hernandez, a member of the Pro Human Rights Party of Cuba stepped out of his home with a sign supporting hunger striker Luis Enrique Santos Caballero. Seeing this protest the president of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), ran out of his home with a machete and attacked Orlando Lazaro with it, cutting part of his right hand and also striking him on the back. Others came out as the activist fell to the ground and began to kick him.
Freeing spy convicted of murder conspiracy of three Cuban Americans and a Cuban resident
The December 17, 2014 announcement by the President broke new ground in only one area releasing Gerardo Hernandez, a Cuban spy and terrorist, convicted of murder conspiracy of three U.S. citizens and a resident. Not only did President Obama commute the sentence but tried to rewrite history calling an act of international terrorism, the Brothers to the Rescue shoot down, a tragedy. Freeing unrepentant killers is not a good policy for promoting human rights.
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| Brothers to the Rescue shoot down victims. |
Small number of political prisoners released
Obama administration attempt to claim that the release of 53 political prisoners in early January 2014 was a human rights improvement. But once the names were released it was revealed that 17 of the 53 had been released prior to the agreement and had nothing to do with it. This meant that a total of 38 political prisoners were freed at the time. Some context is needed to understand how small this number is. The Swedish NGO, Civil Rights Defenders, on January 13, 2020 reported that " approximately 8,400 Cubans currently serve time for ”pre-criminal social dangerousness”.
According to a report in The New York Times on January 13, 2020 documents were examined that "showed that approximately 92 percent of those accused in the more than 32,000 cases that go to trial in Cuba every year are found guilty. Nearly 4,000 people every year are accused of being “antisocial” or “dangerous,” terms the Cuban government uses to jail people who pose a risk to the status quo, without having committed a crime." Furthermore, the article says that "records show that Cuba’s prison system holds more than 90,000 prisoners. The Cuban government has only publicly released the figure once, in 2012, when it claimed that 57,000 people were jailed."
Regime behavior worsened in the immediate aftermath of the normalization announcement.
Skyrocketing arbitrary detentions
The number of politically motivated arbitrary detentions documented by the Havana based, Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation since 2008 demonstrates a dramatic rise in repression between 2008 and 2016, that spiked dramatically in the year of the Obama Administration's new Cuba policy announcement in 2014 from 6,424 arbitrary detentions in 2013 to 8,899 in 2014. This also occurred with troubling incidents of violence by regime agents.
During President Obama's last year in office the number of arbitrary detentions reached their highest number since 2010 with 9,940 arbitrary detentions. Despite this, on his way out of office in January 2017, President Obama closed the door on Cuban refugees.
During 2017 there were 5,155 Cubans arbitrarily detained,
and although still far too high, it is a dramatic improvement over 2016. There are still prisoners of conscience enduring horrid and dangerous conditions in Cuban prisons and dissenters sent to psychiatric institutions for punishment.
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| Sirley Avila Leon: Before and after May 2015 machete attack |
More extreme machete attack in 2015
Six months after the announcement of normalizing relations on May 24, 2015, Sirley Ávila León was the victim of a brutal machete attack that cost her her left hand and also left her right upper arm nearly severed and knees slashed, leaving her crippled. She was denied adequate medical care and was told quietly by medical doctors that if she wanted to get better she would need to leave Cuba. The regime had been embarrassed by a campaign she organized to keep a school open. She arrived in Miami on March 8, 2016 unable to bend her legs, or use her remaining had.Thanks to a team of medical doctors treating her, by September 2016 Sirley had regained the use of her hand, and was able to walk short distances.
Negative international trends for human rights in Cuba under Obama Cuba policy.
Human rights worsened in Cuba as the dictatorship was legitimized internationally by the Obama Administration's Cuba policy, and March 2016 state visit that led to Cuban dissidents and human rights defenders becoming more isolated.
EU's High Representative Federica Mogherini with Raul Castro
The Obama Administration's Cuba policy had a negative impact internationally on human
rights in Cuba internally. The decision of the European
Union to "open a new chapter" on relations with Cuba that dropped human rights as a condition for normalization and ended a European Common Position adopted in 1996. This arrangement was formalized in a signing ceremony on December 12, 2016. Twenty years of linking improved relations between the EU and Cuba to improvements in human rights ended.
Gaslighting the Cuban American community with the claim that the Obama Cuba policy was good on human rights in Cuba is leading to Biden's poll numbers tanking among that demographic.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry recognizing this reality began to change the campaign's triumphalist message in order to bring it closer in line with the facts on the ground outlined above when told journalist Andres Oppenheimer earlier this month: “It’s fair to say that everybody shares a little bit of disappointment about the direction that the government in Cuba chose to go” after the normalization of U.S.-Cuba ties. Cuba seemed to harden down after the initial steps were taken.”
No kidding.
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