Cuba blackmails U.S. with exodus. Biden responds with a weak, ill-timed policy | Opinion
After promising voters he would take a fresh look at U.S.-Cuba policy, President Joe Biden has delivered, 16 months into his term, ill-timed, mostly mediocre change that portends to help the Cuban people.
But consider the moment.
Biden is reopening travel and expanding flights to the island that inevitably will turn into dollar-churning tourism at a time the ruthless regime is sentencing adolescents, musicians, artists, and ordinary Cubans to long incarceration for nothing more than peacefully demonstrating to show their dissent.
Whatever happened to Biden holding the regime accountable for its crimes against the people during the historic July 11 protests and beyond?
No act is too small to go unpunished in Cuba.
In fact, the regime just approved a new penal code that establishes jail time and stiff fines for publicly criticizing a government official, in real life or virtually, in speech or writing.
It was likely a response to the clobbering Cuba’s appointed dictator, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and his wife took on Twitter after she called him “dictator of my heart.” Faced with widespread agreement that he was a dictator, the couple doubled down the corny talk, revealing themselves clueless and out of touch.
Cubans used the opportunity to air grievances. Díaz-Canel, intolerant, responded as he always does — quashing people as if they were bothersome mosquitoes.
READ MORE: Swooning wife calls Miguel Díaz-Canel what he is — a dictator
Rewarding Cuba’s oppressor?
Into this absurdly repressive scene, steps the Biden administration to reward the oppressor, the U.S. enemy still on a state-sponsors of terrorism list with support measures that amount to generous cash flow — and, in exchange for what, exactly?
To stem the mass exodus Cuba has unleashed to get rid of the opposition and blackmail Biden into rushing to the negotiation table, as the administration has done?
Cuba has already profited from the migration big time.
By land, air, and sea, the growing opposition seen during the protests has left the island and is still leaving, crossing the US-Mexico border and arriving by rickety boat on Florida shores. Once established abroad, Cubans regularly send remittances to the island — and Biden has now lifted the Trump restrictions on the amount.
Is Biden gifting Cuba travel dollars for the sake of pleasing the American left pressuring him, the one that turns a blind eye to repression, especially that of brave Black dissidents, for the sake of undertaking privileged visits to Commie Disneyland?
READ MORE: Dem members of Congress, you have no credibility on Cuba when you ignore repression
Or, is the goal simply to reverse Trump’s hard-line isolation — liberals’ turn! — to opt for an Obama-styled engagement redux, a policy that despite some success, didn’t bring democratic change to Cuba either?
The Biden administration says that by allowing Americans to invest in private businesses in Cuba — a first in six decades — it’s giving the Cuban people “tools to pursue a life free from Cuban government oppression and to seek greater economic opportunities.”
If it were only that simple.
When President Obama allowed Cuban Americans to do just that, and they invested, even buying properties, the Cuban government stepped in, shutting down some of the fledgling enterprises.
They don’t want people to be successful. It goes against dogma.
The regime always calls the shots. A line on a State Department position paper doesn’t guarantee Cubans what the administration says is its priority: “their human rights and their political and economic well-being.”
Some Dems reject policy
Democrats who know how Cuba operates aren’t happy with Biden’s sudden change.
“I am dismayed to learn the Biden administration will begin authorizing group travel to Cuba through visits akin to tourism,” Sen. Bob Menendez, a Cuban-American Democrat from New Jersey, said in a statement. “. . . those who still believe that increasing travel will breed democracy in Cuba are simply in a state of denial.”
He’s right. Just as the U.S. embargo hasn’t choked Cuba into political or economic change, neither did the American, European and Canadian tourist invasions.
Biden was expected to deliver a more thoughtful, calibrated approach. This isn’t it.
“For years, the United States foolishly eased travel restrictions, arguing millions of American dollars would bring about freedom and nothing changed,” Menendez added. “And, as I warned then, the regime ultimately laughed off any promises of loosening its iron grip on the Cuban people, and we ended up helping fund the machinery behind their continued oppression.”
Interestingly, neither Biden (tweeting about baby formula) nor Secretary of State Antony Blinken (tweeting about Guatemala attorney general undermining democracy) have mentioned their new Cuba policy on Twitter.
Only Juan S. Gonzalez, senior director for the Western Hemisphere at the National Security Council, posted State Department fact sheets on the announcement and a news story. With no comment of his own.
He got an earful of criticism.
“These concessions help build a class of Cubans that relies on the survival of the dictatorship,” tweeted a person with the handle @cubanexile.
One saving grace to policy
Yeah, yeah, I get it.
Diplomacy and engagement are preferable to hopelessness.
President Donald Trump’s hard-line Cuba policy did nothing for Cubans on the island or in exile. Nothing for Venezuela nor Nicaragua. In fact, he harmed families already here and in the process of legal reunification when he stopped consular services in Havana and restricted immigration.
Biden now has restored the family-reunification parole program and is increasing visa processing, so reestablishing regular migration channels, the saving grace to his policy announcement.
But righting Trump’s wrongs doesn’t make Biden right in his approach to a new U.S.-Cuba policy.
I and many other Cuban Americans expected that Democrats, with the mixed results of Obama’s engagement policy, had learned something of value.
Apparently not.
Same old talking points are all I hear.
History shows that lofty aspirations of “empowering the Cuban people to determine their own future” turn into nothing but Cuban cigar smoke.
This story was originally published May 17, 2022 at 3:33 PM.