By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
President Barack Obama inadvertently found the perfect
photo-op for his Cuba visit at a wreath-laying ceremony at the Jose Marti
Memorial in Havana.
A news photo at Revolution Square caught Obama standing
together with American and Cuban officials, with an enormous mural of the
iconic revolutionary Che Guevara looming over his shoulder on the adjacent
Ministry of the Interior building.
Che is, of course, ubiquitous on dorm-room walls and
T-shirts in the United States, and a hero of the Cuban revolution. He also was
a cold-blooded killer who set up the Cuban gulag and presided over summary
executions of political prisoners (trials were, per Che, “an archaic bourgeois
detail”). No doubt, he would have been astonished at the Yanqui president
coming to Revolution Square to pay his respects — and exceedingly pleased.
President Obama’s trip is self-consciously historic. As
the president’s introducer at an event at the U.S. Embassy put it, Obama often
said, “Yes, we can,” and now we can say, “Yes, we did.”
But did what? The trip ensures that the first visit to
Cuba by an American president in almost 90 years will be part of Obama’s
legacy, and it seeks to make his opening to Cuba, announced in December 2014,
irreversible. If that means extending credibility and a financial lifeline to a
Castro regime that has no intention of reforming, so be it.
The regime made it clear that it wouldn’t bother with
maintaining a pretense of relaxing its grip, with the arrest of protesters at a
march of the dissident group Ladies in White while President Obama was en route
to the country. A reporter with a government news outlet told the New York Times that he and colleagues
had been warned not even to discuss Obama’s visit with friends.
At a press conference with President Raúl Castro on
Monday, Obama spoke in euphemistic terms of our “two different systems,”
eliding the fact that one system is open, democratic, and prosperous, while the
other is closed, dictatorial, and economically ruinous. Castro railed against
alleged human-rights abuses in the United States — Obama obligingly said he
welcomed the dialogue — and El Presidente denied holding any political
prisoners when reporters dared ask about it.
There is no sign of greater openness in Cuba since
President Obama forged his break with long-standing U.S. policy. Political
arrests have accelerated. There were
more than 8,000 in 2015, four times as many as in 2010. The exodus of desperate
Cubans to the United States has picked up. And the country still ranks below
Zimbabwe and Iran on Internet connectivity.
But Obama’s opening has produced a financial windfall for
the regime. The Cuban military occupies the commanding heights of the economy
and controls the tourism business, which has been thriving with the influx of
American tourists. Starwood Hotels and Resorts just got special permission from
the U.S. Treasury to operate three hotels in Havana, in a boost, not for the
free market, but for the Cuban government.
If Cuba were a repressive, small-minded military
dictatorship of the right, Obama’s visit and accommodationist attitude wouldn’t
be considered so broad-minded. But a patina of revolutionary romance, embodied
by that image of Che looking down on President Obama, still hangs over Cuba. It
makes its human-rights abuses, theft, and lies an afterthought, or even
excusable, for the American Left.
After the Cuban missile crisis, Che said that in the
event of a U.S. attack, “if the rockets had remained, we would have used them
all and directed them against the very heart of the United States, including
New York, in our defense against aggression.” It would have been beyond his
imagining that so many decades later, with the revolutionary regime
cash-strapped and decrepit, the imperialist Goliath would come bearing gifts
and asking for nothing substantial in return, except a line in President
Obama’s Wikipedia entry.
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