When making political prognostications, sane people are often compelled to pray they are wrong. But often our prayers aren’t answered in the way we hoped.
In January, I wrote an American Greatness piece titled, “It’s ‘Cuba Libre!’, Mr. Biden.” In it, I averred:
Biden and his fellow leftists are not merely wrong in their approach but willfully complicit in propping up a totalitarian regime: Communist Cuba . . .
Due in large measure to Biden’s deliberate neglect of this locus of totalitarianism 90 miles from our shore, genocidal Communist China and other rogue governments are assisting the Cuban regime in ramping up its repression of imprisoned dissidents, whose only “crime” is demanding their God-given rights.
Sayli Navarro and her father, Felix, were offered as examples of dissidents whose human rights were being abused by the Cuban regime. Their plight was related by Lincoln Diaz-Balart:
Felix was rounded up last July 11th, during the spontaneous mass protest day. Sayli went to the police station the next day to ask about him and demand his release. She did not make it out of the police station. She is still in a dungeon, as is her father. This week they are ‘in trial’. The state is requesting an 11 year sentence for Sayli. I can only imagine how long for her father—25 years? There are close to 1000 known July 11 demonstrators who are being detained. The ‘sentences’ have been as high as 30 years for those who have been ‘charged’ and ‘tried.’
Echoing champions of Cuban freedom, such as Diaz-Balart and Rosa Maria Paya, I warned the Biden Administration would sell out Cuban dissidents when they perceived the press had lost what little interest it showed in the July 11, 2021 protests. Why? For over 60 years the American Left has continued to pretend Cuban communism works because they share so much in common with them in their support of socialist policies and, as is increasingly evident, an oppressive aversion to dissent.
Alas, my assessment of soulless Joe Biden has proved correct. Breitbart’s Frances Martel reports:
The administration of leftist President Joe Biden announced late on Monday that it would undo measures implemented under his predecessor Donald Trump to keep American money from enriching Cuba’s communist regime and would expand travel to the country and remove limits on cash flows to the regime in the form of remittances.
The move came on the same day that the Communist Party implemented a new penal code that allows the state to imprison a Cuban national for three years for the crime of ‘insulting’ a regime official. The Castro regime previously imprisoned Cubans for insulting officials but typically had to resort to imprisoning citizens on shaky legal grounds, accusing them of ‘crimes’ like ‘desacato’ (‘disrespect’) or public disorder. The new penal code, which created 37 new ‘crimes,’ eliminates the need for the regime to attempt to justify or whitewash its political repression.
One cannot help but wonder if soulless Joe’s Departments of Justice and Homeland Security will be utilizing the Communist Cuban regime’s definitions of insulting or disrespecting speech to censor American dissent of the Biden Administration as “disinformation”—or worse.
In the blunt assessment one observer relayed to me:
While being painted as ‘support for the Cuban people,’ the concessions only serve to enrich the military regime at a critical moment when it hardens repression . . . Without question, U.S. influence in the region will be weakened and undermined. These measures are a capitulation to attacks on U.S. sovereignty and national security.
At best tone deaf and at worst complicit, the administration’s actions come just 48 hours after the Cuban regime hardened its ‘legal code’ to crack-down on dissidents. These include at least 1,000+ political prisoners arrested since last year’s July 11th mass pro-freedom protests. In effect, the Biden administration’s measures will fund Cuba’s latest wave of human rights violations.
One also cannot help but wonder if this sellout was a precursor to soulless Joe inviting the Cuban regime and its equally noxious tyrannical comrades from Venezuela and Nicaragua to the Ninth Annual Summit of the Americas to be held this June in Los Angeles?
Cuba’s Foreign Relations Ministry’s reaction to soulless Joe’s concessions was tepid gratitude: “Positive but of very limited reach . . . alleviating [the effects] of inhuman decisions taken by the government of President Trump.” Obviously, the Communist Cuban regime merely views this as a down payment on further appeasement.
There have been no reports of how soulless Joe’s concessions to the regime were received by Cuban dissidents.
When soulless Joe Biden was mumbling and bumbling about down in his basement during the 2020 presidential campaign, one of the key “character” traits his operatives hyped was his “empathy.” Yet, could a person who had spent more than 50 years, first in the U.S. Senate and then as vice president—in sum, someone who stood astride the apex of America’s political class—feel the utter powerlessness and invisibility of, say, an imprisoned and tortured dissident whose only crime was seeking freedom?
Today, we have an answer. After spending over a half-century hobnobbing with his pals in the self-anointed ruling class, soulless Joe’s affinity is for the powerful not the powerless. This makes a great deal of sense, given his penchant for sending his troubled son (and bag man) to peddle influence with corrupt, oppressive regimes in return for “ten percent for the Big Guy.”
Soulless Joe’s concessions also serve the Left’s need to pretend Cuban Communism works. Thus, Cuba’s dissidents continue to be sacrificed on the socialist altar of the Left’s obstinate refusal to recognize the historic failure of their false secular religion.
No, God doesn’t always answer our prayers as we’d hoped—well, not immediately, anyway. But in His own due time and loving wisdom, His will shall be done.
And, soulless Joe, it will still be shouting “Cuba Libre!”