Now that the murderous Communist regime in Cuba knows that to the Obama administration the word “easement” means “A deal for which the U.S. gets nothing in exchange”, they want more.
Who wouldha thunk it!
How much more?
The whole enchilada (YES, I KNOW ENCHILADAS ARE MEXICAN. Bear with me here!):
- Ending what’s left of the embargo
- Ending all TV and radio broadcasts to the island
- Cutting off support to dissidents
- Removal from the states sponsors of terror list
- Giving Guantanamo Base to Cuba
and (drumroll please)
- Reparations! “just compensation to our people for the human and economic damage that they’re suffered.”
Since Communists love slogans, Gimme, gimme, gimme Gitmo!
Lest you believe that gifting Gitmo to Russia and all of these concessions are unlikely to come about, keep in mind that Obama is obsessed with his “legacy”. Take it away, Ed!
Only if one believes that these conditions will discourage Obama. He’s desperate for a foreign-policy achievement that will allow him to claim a legacy, and Castro knows it. (So does Iran.) Castro isn’t anywhere near as desperate for normalized relations with the US; he gets plenty of hard currency from the rest of the world, and exchanges it with the near-worthless Cuban peso with which he pays Cubans. Castro wants to strengthen his regime, and humiliating Obama will raise his prestige immeasurably at home.
Gifting Gitmo already has support among some, but as Joshua Treviño commented on Facebook (emphasis added),
We need to establish a new rule of thumb: anyone arguing that major bargaining points should be ceded in exchange for unforced goodwill does not understand basic power dynamics and should be ignored in policymaking henceforth. The Cuban regime isn’t going to be any more grateful or well-disposed toward us after occupying Guantanamo than they are now. They’ll just feel, with some justification, like they’ve won — and moreover won cheaply. What good that does us, well, ask the Israelis about the goodwill garnered after leaving Lebanon and Gaza.
As for the hand-waving dismissal of the modern importance of “conventional hemispheric defense,” that is the sort of thing one writes when one’s historical horizons are confined to an exceedingly small slice of history.
The small slice of history, in this case, “is all about the O.”
Somewhere in Cuba, Fidel’s amanuensis is gloating,
Yesterday Jorge Ponce and I were talking about this in Silvio Canto’s podcast
