“She is Cuba. If you want to love her, you have to be with her, but you can’t be with her in her current state. It’s the point of view of all exiles – you have to leave the thing you cherish most.” – Andy Garcia
Foxnews.com reported yesterday that
President Trump, speaking at a Miami theater associated with Cuban exiles, announced Friday he is nixing his predecessor’s “one-sided deal” with the Communist nation – moving to restrict individual travel to the island, crack down on the flow of U.S. cash to the Cuban military and demand key reforms in Havana.
While stopping short of a full reversal, Trump said he would challenge Cuba to come back to the table with a new agreement.
“Effective immediately, I am canceling the last administration’s completely one-sided deal with Cuba,” Trump told a cheering crowd.
Trump cast his announcement Friday as the fulfillment of a campaign pledge to turn back former President Barack Obama’s diplomatic outreach to the country.
“I keep my promises,” Trump said. “And now that I am your president, America will expose the crimes of the Castro regime.”
A cornerstone of the new policy is to ensure Americans traveling to Cuba only support private businesses and services, banning financial transactions with the dozens of enterprises run by the military-linked corporation GAESA.
The Trump administration also says it will strictly enforce the 12 authorized categories allowing American citizens to travel to Cuba – banning one particular type of travel, known as individual “people-to-people” trips, seen as ripe for abuse by would-be tourists.
Most U.S. travelers to Cuba will again be required to visit the island as part of organized tour groups run by American companies. Obama eliminated the tour requirement, allowing tens of thousands of Americans to book solo trips and spend their money with individual bed-and-breakfast owners, restaurants and taxi drivers. The rules also require a daylong schedule of activities designed to expose the travelers to ordinary Cubans.
Trump focused his speech Friday on the crimes and misdeeds of the Castro government, saying his administration would not “hide from it.” He accused the regime of harboring “cop killers, hijackers and terrorists” while casting the policy changes as meant to encourage a free Cuba.
“With God’s help, a free Cuba is what we will soon achieve,” Trump said.
Critics of the United States’ decades-long freeze – and embargo – with Cuba say it failed to spur such changes, and had welcomed Obama’s outreach as a fresh approach. But many Cuban-American lawmakers recoiled.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a Cuban-American lawmaker who helped craft the new policy, spoke before the president in Miami on Friday and took a shot at Trump’s predecessor for his visit to Cuba last March.
“A year and a half ago … an American president landed in Havana to outstretch his hand to a regime. Today, a new president lands in Miami to reach out his hand to the people of Cuba,” Rubio said.
U.S. airlines and cruise ships will still be allowed to continue service to the island.
The U.S. Embassy in Havana, which reopened in August 2015, will remain as a full-fledged diplomatic outpost. Trump also isn’t overturning Obama’s decision to end the “wet foot, dry foot” policy that allowed most Cuban migrants who made it onto U.S. soil to stay and eventually become legal permanent residents.
Trump affirmed in his speech that the U.S. embassy would remain open, in hopes the two countries can forge a “better path.” But he said his administration would enforce the ban on tourism and the embargo, and would not lift sanctions until the regime releases all political prisoners and schedules free and internationally supervised elections.
Trump also demanded the return of Joanne Chesimard, a New York City native wanted in the 1973 killing of a New Jersey state trooper.
The U.S. severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in 1961 after Fidel Castro’s revolution. It spent subsequent decades trying to either overthrow the Cuban government or isolate the island, including toughening an economic embargo first imposed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The embargo remains in place and unchanged by Trump’s policy. Only the U.S. Congress can lift the embargo, and lawmakers, especially those of Cuban heritage like Rubio, have shown no interest in doing so.
Reaction to the changes split largely along partisan lines. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., said in a statement the Trump administration “is right to sideline the Cuban military and make human rights and internet access top priorities moving forward.”
Former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes tweeted that Cubans “will be hurt by a mean spirited policy” meant to keep a “political promise to a few people at their expense.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said the actions “threaten to slam that door shut and revert to a failed policy of isolation that has done nothing to improve the lives of the Cuban people and has harmed the American economy.”
Do you remember how Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) eulogized Cuba’s Communist Dictator, Fidel Castro?
At this time of Fidel Castro’s passing, we extend a hand of friendship to the Cuban people. We know that this moment fills Cubans – in Cuba and in the United States – with powerful emotions, recalling the countless ways in which Fidel Castro altered the course of individual lives, families, and of the Cuban nation. History will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure on the people and world around him. For nearly six decades, the relationship between the United States and Cuba was marked by discord and profound political disagreements. During my presidency, we have worked hard to put the past behind us, pursuing a future in which the relationship between our two countries is defined not by our differences but by the many things that we share as neighbors and friends – bonds of family, culture, commerce, and common humanity. This engagement includes the contributions of Cuban Americans, who have done so much for our country and who care deeply about their loved ones in Cuba.
Today, we offer condolences to Fidel Castro’s family, and our thoughts and prayers are with the Cuban people.
I am certain that the “most refined” among us, “the smartest people in the room” as they refer to themselves, the Modern American Liberals, including the Former Chief Marxist/Alinsky-ite himself, Barack Hussein Obama, are aghast at President Trump’s blunt and factual remarks concerning his cancelling of Obama’s deal with Cuba’s Communist Regime.
Why do Modern American Liberals admire those leaders and societies, like Fidel Castro and Communist Cuba, who would take away their individual freedom, at best, and gut them like a Thanksgiving Turkey, at worst?
How could they be so naïve as to view an oppressor and the poverty-stricken Communist country that he destroyed as being a “Great Leader” who built a “Socialist Utopia”, which they have dreamt of and which Obama tried his best to turn America into, you ask?
Didn’t you know? Being a Marxist is cool.
Just ask the Liberal American Millennials walking around with their Che Guevara t-shirts on.
They remember Che differently than the Cuban Exiles whom the President spoke to in Miami yesterday, that came here seeking freedom from tyranny do.
If these members of the “Young and Dumb” had actually read a book, they would burn those stupid t-shirts.
Cuban children are taught in state-run schools that Che was a doctor, even though he had no medical degree.
They are taught that he was a kind soul who cared for the poor and the oppressed, and a brave guerrilla leader who helped to liberate the downtrodden Cuban People from the oppressive tyrant Batista.
And, Jack the Ripper was a surgeon who made House Calls.
Humberto Fontova’s “Exposing the Real Che Guevara” paints a vivid picture of the real Che Guevara:
In his biography of Che, Fontova quotes a Cuban exile who is identified by the pseudonym of “Charlie Bravo”
I’d loved to have seen those Sorbonne and Berkeley and Berlin student protesters with their ‘groovy’ Che posters try their ‘anti-authority’ grandstanding in Cuba at the time. I’d love to have seen Che and his goons get their hands on them. They’d have gotten a quick lesson about the ‘fascism’ they were constantly complaining about—and firsthand. They would have quickly found themselves sweating and gasping from forced labor in Castro’s and Che’s concentration camps, or jabbed in the butt by ‘groovy’ bayonets when they dared slow down and perhaps getting their teeth shattered by a ‘groovy’ machine-gun butt if they adopted the same attitude in front of Che’s militia as they adopted in front of those campus cops.
In the instruction to that book, Fontova writes that,
If Cuban Americans strike you as too passionate, over the top, even a little crazy, there is a reason. Practically every day, we turn on our televisions or go out to the street only to see the image of the very man who trained the secret police to murder our relatives—thousands of men, women, and boys. This man committed many of these murders with his own hands. And yet we see him celebrated everywhere as the quintessence of humanity, progress, and compassion.
So, last year, while President Obama and his family were jetting to Cuba, on Air Force One, on the American Taxpayer’s dime, celebrating the “Progressive Freedom” that only Marxism can bring (that’s sarcasm, boys and girls), America’s Che Worshippers were back home, wearing their Che T-shirts, brandishing posters proclaiming American Businessman, Entrepreneur, and then-Leading Republican Primary Candidate Donald J. Trump a “fascist”, and a modern “Hitler”, while blocking roads, jumping on people’s cars, and marching lockstep on the streets of New York City, in scenes reminiscent of the Cuban Revolution.
And, the astroturf “Resistance” Movement continues today.
United States President Ronald Reagan once said,
How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.
What we are witnessing among the Far Left Power Brokers, and their “Young and Dumb Foot Soldiers”, is a purposeful obtuseness, as to our Constitutional Rights to arm ourselves and vote for whom we please and the harsh reality of Marxism or “spreading the wealth”.
History repeats itself.
Irony is embarrassed.
Until He Comes,
KJ
Kingsjester's Blog 