By Ted Cruz
Saturday, November 26, 2016
Two decades of “Castro-is-dead” rumors are finally at an
end. And the race is on to see which world leader can most fulsomely praise
Fidel Castro’s legacy, while delicately averting their eyes from his less
savory characteristics. Two duly-elected leaders of democracies who should know
better, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and American president Barack
Obama, are leading the way. Mr. Trudeau praised Castro as a “legendary
revolutionary and orator” who “made significant improvements to the education
and health care of his island nation.” Mr. Obama offered his “condolences” to
the Cuban people, and blandly suggested that “history will record and judge the
enormous impact of this singular figure.” Now, he added, we can “look to the
future.”
With all due respect to Mr. Obama, the 60 years Fidel
Castro spent systematically exploiting and oppressing the people of Cuba
provide more than enough history to pass judgment on both Fidel and, now more
importantly, his brother Raul.
My own family’s experience is a case in point. My father,
Rafael, had been an early supporter of the revolution against Fulgencio Batista
— and spent a time in prison getting his teeth kicked in for his efforts. He
fled the island, only to return to what he hoped would be a liberated Cuba.
Instead, he found a new, even more brutal, form of repression had taken hold.
In 1960, he left again, never to return. His sister, my Tia Sonia, bravely
joined the resistance to Castro and was jailed and tortured in her turn.
The betrayal and violence experienced by my father and
aunt were all too typical of the millions of Cubans who have suffered under the
Castro regime over the last six decades. This is not the stuff of Cold War
history that can be swept under the rug simply because Fidel is dead. Consider,
for example, the dissidents Guillermo Fariñas and Elizardo Sanchez, who warned
me in the summer of 2013 that the Castros, then on the ropes because of the
reduction of Venezuelan patronage, were plotting to cement their hold on power
by pretending to liberalize in order to get the American economic embargo
lifted. Their model was Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia
(Sanchez called it “Putinismo”), and their plan was to get the United States to
pay for it. It worked. The year after I met with Fariñas and Sanchez, Mr. Obama
announced his famous “thaw” with the Castros, and the American dollars started
flowing. As we now know, there was no corresponding political liberalization.
Last September, Mr. Fariñas concluded his 25th hunger strike against the
Castros’ oppression.
Then there is the case of the prominent dissident Oswaldo
Paya, who in 2012 died in a car crash that is widely believed to have been
orchestrated by the Castro regime. His daughter, Rosa Maria, has pressed
relentlessly for answers, and thus become a target herself. When, just three
years after her father’s death, the United States honored the Castros with a
new embassy in Washington, D.C., Rosa Maria tried to attend the related State
Department press conference as an accredited journalist. But she was spotted by
the Cuban delegation, who demanded that she be removed if she dared ask any
questions. The Americans complied, in an act of thuggery more typical of Havana
than Washington.
Finally, I had the honor last summer to meet with Dr.
Oscar Biscet, an early truth-teller about the disgusting practice of post-birth
abortions in Cuba who has been repeatedly jailed and tortured for his fearless
opposition to the Castros. I asked him, as I had asked Senores Farinas and
Sanchez, whether his ability to travel signaled growing freedom on the island.
He answered just as they had three years earlier: “No.” In fact, he said, the
repression had grown worse since the “thaw” with America. Didn’t we realize, he
wondered, that all those American dollars were flowing into the Castros’
pockets, and funding the next generation of their police state?
That is the true legacy of Fidel Castro — that he was
able to institutionalize his dictatorship so it would survive him.
There is a real danger that we will now fall into the
trap of thinking Fidel’s death represents material change in Cuba. It does not.
The moment to exert maximum pressure would have been eight years ago, when his
failing health forced him to pass control to his brother Raul. But, rather than
leverage the transition in our favor, the Obama administration decided to start
negotiations with Raul in the mistaken belief that he would prove more
reasonable than his brother (an unfortunate pattern they repeated with Kim
Jong-un, Hassan Rouhani, and Nicolas Maduro). Efforts to be diplomatically
polite about Fidel’s death suggest the administration still hopes Raul can be
brought round.
All historical evidence points to the opposite
conclusion. Raul is not a “different” Castro. He is his brother’s chosen
successor who has spent the last eight years implementing his dynastic plan.
Unlike Cuba, however, the United States has an actual democracy, and our recent
elections suggest there is significant resistance among the American people to
the Obama administration’s policy of appeasement towards hostile dictators. We
can — and should — send clear signals that that policy is at an end. Among
other things, we should halt the dangerous “security cooperation” we have begun
with the Castro regime, which extends to military exercises, counter-narcotics
efforts, communications, and navigation — all of which places our sensitive
information in the hands of a hostile government that would not hesitate to
share it with other enemies from Tehran to Pyongyang. And we should insist that
no United States government official attend Castro’s funeral unless and until
Raul releases his political prisoners, first and foremost those who have been
detained since Fidel’s death. I hope all my colleagues will join me in calling
for these alterations.
A dictator is dead. But his dark, repressive legacy will
not automatically follow him to the grave. Change can come to Cuba, but only if
America learns from history and prevents Fidel’s successor from playing the
same old tricks.
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