Sunday, March 21, 2021

Lessons from President Barack Obama's detente with Raul Castro

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

On March 22, 2016 the President of the United States did the wave with a dictator

President Barack Obama had good intentions with his outreach to Cuba, but was ill served by those who presented him a false history of U.S.-Cuba relations and the intentions of Cuba, led by a regime driven by an ideological mission that views the United States as existentially hostile. Below are some lessons from President Obama's detente with the Castro regime: :

Cuba policy is now being reviewed, and there is always room for improvement, but one must also learn from the past and recognize the nature of the regime in Havana. There are scores of brain damaged U.S. diplomats that are apparent casualties of not doing this. Doing the wave with Raul Castro, a dictator who killed Americans, at a baseball game in March 2016 legitimized his dictatorship, but did not advance U.S. interests.


2 comments:

  1. Obama's claim that pre-Obama Cuba policy failed to dislodge the Castros doesn't just overlook that Nixon jettisoned regime change in favor of containment (LBJ initially continued JFK's regime change policies but abandoned them due to preoccupation with the Vietnam War and a growing recognition among LBJ officials that Fidel Castro's popularity far greater than they had thought) but also seems to be based on a quote from a State Department memo by Lester Mallory dated April 6, 1960: The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship… a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

    No one knows if any Eisenhower administration officials decided that using sanctions to force political change in Cuba through hunger and disease was inhumane.

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  2. Except that the The Eisenhower State Department's trade embargo on Cuba (October 19, 1960)"covered all U.S. exports to Cuba except for medicine and some foods." Memos are recommendations not policy. The above claim is a slander against the Eisenhower Administration. https://time.com/4076438/us-cuba-embargo-1960/

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