Obama: Cuban Information Minister?

Townhall.com ^ | April 17, 2015 | Mona Charen

[Kaslin]

Two relatively recent photos of Barack Obama with foreign leaders reveal much about his deep-dyed leftism. The first features President Obama and democratically elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of one of America's most loyal friends. Obama looks strained. His face is stiff, and his eyes are veiled. The second is a snap of Obama at the recent Summit of the Americas in Panama. He's seated with "President" Raul Castro, leader of a bitter enemy, who has never received a single free vote. Obama is grinning, his eyes dancing with pleasure.

In contrast to the bitterness with which Obama addresses Netanyahu, he is all honey with Castro. "So I want to thank President Castro for the spirit of openness and courtesy that he has shown during our interactions. ... President Castro earlier today spoke about the significant hardships that the people of Cuba have undergone over many decades. I can say with all sincerity that the essence of my policy is to ... make sure that the people of Cuba are able to prosper and live in freedom and security. ... "

Did you catch that? Castro was assigning blame for the "hardships" Cuba has endured since the revolution to the U.S. -- and Obama was agreeing with him! It wasn't the first time. Back in December, when he first announced the opening of diplomatic relations with Cuba, Obama said, "I believe in the free flow of information. Unfortunately, our sanctions on Cuba have denied Cubans access to technology that has empowered individuals around the globe." So the U.S. embargo is responsible for the Cuban peoples' denial of the "free flow of information." Not Cuba's iron-fisted repression? A Cuban propaganda minister couldn't have put it better.

While Obama and Castro were speaking, goons from the Cuban security services beat Cuban human rights activists who had traveled to Panama City at the invitation of summit organizers. That's a ho hum story. Happens every day of the week in Cuba. But this one happened under Obama's nose, yet he didn't retreat an inch from his embrace of the man who ordered it.

Everything is forgiven when it comes to the Castros. Putting homosexuals (and later AIDS patients) in camps? Ruthlessly suppressing women? Beating and jailing those who criticize the regime? Shooting down American planes in international air space and killing three Americans? Consigning teenagers to forced labor because they were Christian or because their parents were political prisoners? Leftists of the Obama stripe wave it all away.

Look, they protest, we tried "isolating" Cuba for 50 years and it didn't work. Depends what you mean by "work." No, the embargo didn't force the Castros to stop torturing democracy activists, or to stop fomenting communist revolutions in other Latin American countries, or to stop shipping weapons to North Korea. But at least we didn't have it on our consciences, and we didn't subsidize it.

Well, they reply, we have relations with other bad actors like China and Saudi Arabia. True, the world's a savage place. But 1) we established relations with China to keep another enemy (the USSR) off balance, not because we imagined we would change the nature of the regime by being more friendly, and 2) our cooperation and "people to people" contacts with China haven't relaxed the regime's repression one iota; and 3) Saudi Arabia is no picnic, but our capacity to affect its behavior is limited.

Cuba, by contrast, was dangling by a thread economically. Read Michael Totten in City Journal on Havana. Outside of the tiny tourist zone, it looks like post-Katrina New Orleans. Cuba depended upon subventions from the USSR. When those ended, it relied on Venezuela. The latter's rapid decay (due entirely to adopting economic policies like Cuba's) combined with the oil price drop left Cuba uniquely vulnerable. Had Obama been interested in reform, he could have asked for some. A freer press? Release of political prisoners? Liberalized labor laws? He asked for and received nothing in exchange for everything the Castros wanted. Otto Reich, former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, who was born in Cuba and maintains close ties, says the Cuban regime thought it was some sort of trick. That's why the negotiations -- in which we gave everything and they gave nothing -- took 18 months. They were looking for the catch.

Who benefits from the thaw with Cuba? Not the Cuban people, who earn a maximum wage (yes, you read that correctly) of $20 per month. More trade and commerce will benefit their oppressors -- the worst regime in our hemisphere, a sworn enemy of the USA, but Obama's newest pals.

[armydawg505]

Wait until you see him grinning and smirking next to the Iranian Mullahs.

[deadrock]

The Totalitarian Information Minister.

[MIchaelTArchangel]

That would then make him Havana’s Barack Hussein Obama bin Barack Hussein or Havana BHOBH!

[Dqban22]

OBAMA TO THE RESCUE OF CUBA’S STALINIST TYRANNY

Birds of a feather flock together

MISSILE CRISIS AND BLACK FRIDAY MASSIVE TERRORIST ATTACK PLOT

October 1962 - the Missiles Crisis - Fidel Castro and Che Guevara pressured Nikita Khrushchev to nuke New York and Washington.

On Nov. 17, 1962, J Edgar Hoover’s FBI cracked a terrorist plot by Castro-Cuban agents that targeted –not only Macy’s—but also Gimbel’s, Bloomindales and Manhattan’s Grand Central Station with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set to go off the following week, the day after Thanksgiving.

A little perspective: the March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all 10 of the explosions that killed and maimed almost 2000 people, used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT. Castro and Che’s agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the three biggest department stores on earth — and on the year’s biggest shopping day, for good measure.
Thousands of New Yorkers— probably mostly women and children given the date— were to be incinerated and entombed.

CASTRO SPEAKS IN TEHRAN MAY 2001

In a packed auditorium on May 9, 2001 at Tehran University, hundreds of students, faculty, and administrators Fidel Castro addressed the throng with these words:

“You destroyed the strongest gendarme of the region not with guns, but with your thoughts — and the people of the region should thank you for that,” Castro said. “Today, there is a king in the world a thousand times stronger than the shah you overthrew, and that is the imperialist king living next to my homeland. However, this imperialist king will finally fall, just as your king was overthrown.”

According to Claire Sterling, the foremost American scholar in terrorism, Castro’s terror network was the cradle of international terrorism. “All the world’s emerging terrorist bands in the 1970s were indebted to the Cubans and their Russian patrons for that honeycomb of training camps around Havana. None could have started without rudimentary training, and those who didn’t train in Cuba were trained by other who did it.” (The Terror Network by Claire Sterling.)

Obama’s meteoric political career started in the home of domestic Marxist terrorists, the Ayers/Dorhn founders of the Weatherman underground that terrorized the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Since his early childhood Obama’s life was tied to American haters and radical communists, his rush to rescue the Cuban Stalinist regime is the culmination of his love affair with communist terrorists.

THE GREAT BETRAYAL

April 2015 – Obama is giving Carte Blanche to terrorist Iran to produce nuke bombs while forcing the American taxpayers to become the sugar daddy of the bankrupt Cuban bloody terrorist tyranny.

OBAMA WISHES AWAY CUBA’S TERRORISM SPONSORSHIP

A MUST READ

Posted By Joseph Klein On April 17, 2015

In Daily Mailer,FrontPage

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/joseph-klein/obama-wishes-away-cubas-terrorism-sponsorship/print/

The “state sponsors of terrorism list” is mandated under Section 6(j) of the Export Administration Act of 1979, as amended, under which the Secretary of State makes a determination when a country “has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism.” As explained in a report on “Cuba and the State Sponsors [1] of Terrorism List,” [1] prepared by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in 2005, “certain trade benefits, most foreign aid, support in the international financial institutions, and other benefits are restricted or denied to countries named as state sponsors of international terrorism.”