Obama in Cuba: A Lover’s Tale

President Obama must be in hog heaven. Not only does he get to add another (dubious) checkmark to his historical legacy by being the first president since 1928 to visit Havana, he undoubtedly sees much to love in Cuba’s communist dictatorship. There, under the oppressive Castro regime, the country has remained well behind the Western world – a shining example of what happens when you throw out the free market and replace it with socialism. In Obama’s ideal America, we would look a lot more like Cuba.

Of course, he insists that we’re ending the embargo as a way of bringing freedom to Cuba. As a way of dragging the Castro family kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. But in his rush to make history, Obama is rewarding this dictatorship for five decades of brutal authoritarianism. Proving that nothing has changed, Cuban police arrested dozens of political dissidents ahead of Obama’s Sunday landing. Can’t have the media finding out what kind of country this really is, can we now? It wouldn’t be the least bit surprising to find out Obama encouraged the arrests.

In a Politico essay, Sen. Ted Cruz lambasted Obama for his visit. “Political prisoners languishing in dungeons across the island will hear this message: Nobody has your back. You’re alone with your tormentors. The world has forgotten about you,” Cruz wrote.

Cruz said that his neighborhood came alive with joy when President Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” in 1983. “This is why it is so sad, and so injurious to our future as well as Cuba’s, that Obama has chosen to legitimize the corrupt and oppressive Castro regime with his presence on the island,” he wrote.

But that’s Obama’s M.O. It doesn’t matter how a country treats its citizens. It doesn’t matter how often they threaten the U.S. or its allies. His reckless approach to diplomacy is based solely on trying to get himself a bigger section in tomorrow’s history books, and he doesn’t care how much damage he does in the meantime. If the end result is to weaken America’s place in the world, so much the better. Liberals like Obama think it’s America – not the Soviet Union – that is the real “evil empire.”

The concept of normalizing relations with Cuba is not inherently bad. But it has to be done in a certain order. Cuba has much more to gain from this than the United States, and they should have been forced to make a great many concessions before being honored with a presidential visit.