Why Havana? Really?

It was amusing to see that yesterday Fidel Castro directed a letter to Barack Obama.  The 89-year-old communist dictator, who has strangled his homeland for 55 years or more, appeared to throw his brother Raul under the bus, as it were, essentially telling Obama that Cuba did not need to be lectured or taught the right way by the United States, and that the USA had been abusing Cuba all these years and mistreating their country.  They needed nothing from "the empire", as he called us.

I don't know what Barack Obama thought about that, because I hardly ever understand what Obama thinks about anything.  I can only write so many times that his actions are difficult to put together in a rational, cohesive way, other than to presume that he truly intends to beat down the USA into a third-world country with no borders and no standing in the world.  Everything he does is consistent with that, circumstantial or evidentiary.

You want to explain why every single time an Islamic radical terrorist blows up a batch of innocents, his speech -- if he bothers to make one -- has to include some form of direct warning to us not to go picking on Muslims.  That clause is always invoked, even though no one is actually doing that to a degree large enough for the president of the United States to feel obliged to warn us about that over and over.

So Cuba ...

I was in college from 1969 to 1973, being about ten years older than Barack Obama.  It was quite common to see posters of people like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in students' dorm rooms (not in my fraternity house, but we were a bit more rational) or in common areas like coffeehouses and the Student Union.  College kids are like that, and the '60s were the middle of the Vietnam War era, lots of people agitated about things.

I don't know for sure how all that was, ten years after me, when Obama was in high school at Punahou, in college at Occidental and wherever else he went and had his records sealed.  But he was an admitted drug user and casual student.  It is so very simple to imagine that he was simply one of those idealist types without his brains fully formed (and drug-addled) who grew to worship the Cuban leaders and idolize murderers like Che Guevara and the Castros.

What else could explain this -- after an atrocious deal with the Iranians where one of the biggest criticisms is the fact that we got nothing out of it for America, Obama heads to Cuba.  That's Cuba, where there is no compelling reason to do very much with the unrepentant murderers still running the country as if it were 1957 -- and makes deals with no benefit to America, all over again!
 
There is some good, of course, as I wrote here a while back.  Clearly it is worth an attempt to try to open marketplaces there to USA-made goods, if there is ever to be any currency there of any value to pay for them with.  But the current problem there is political, not just economic.  The people are severely oppressed, impoverished and are kept in that state while the Castros stay in power -- even if they're not in apparent agreement with each other.

But I have come to the reluctant conclusion that Barack Obama, in some barely-developed part of his brain, is simply still one of those pot-whiffing college kids with the Che poster, who wakes up one day to discover that he is the president of the United States and has a few months left in power where he can actually meet his heroes in Cuba!  Che is dead, of course, but the pull of the poster is pretty strong.

I conclude that "reluctantly" because I would love to think more of him than to believe that he would act in that way -- but I cannot.  I would love to think more of the USA than to think that we would elect someone that naive and that natively anti-American, twice, but history is not on my side.  I would love to think that we may have learned a lesson over the last eight years.

For that, I still hold out some hope.  Hope for a change.  Ironic, eh?

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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