Obama’s New Cuban Partners, My Old Jailers

Wall Street Journal ^ | 8/20/2015 | Armando Valladares

[Dqban22]

Obama’s New Cuban Partners, My Old Jailers

The regime was built on the blood of dissidents like those the U.S. now avoids acknowledging.

By Armando Valladares Aug. 20, 2015 7:

Thousands of Cubans have died fighting for rights that Americans so freely enjoy. The right to build a church and preach without fear of harassment and secret recording by government hooligans. The right to protest without wondering if your friends will be carted off, never to be seen or heard from again. The right to criticize your government leaders in the opinion pages of a newspaper without fear of being hauled away at gunpoint in the night...

[Dqban22]

"In Cuba, to ask for man’s basic rights is to ask for intimidation, incarceration, torture and death. This persists, despite any fanciful ideas that Americans may have about warming relations with the world’s oldest dictatorship. So it’s a tragedy that our own secretary of state was in Cuba on Aug. 14 and failed to make the simplest of requests for the people of Cuba: freedom of speech and religion. Armando Valladares

[MarvinStinson]

Lefties LOVE their Castro.

[aposiopetic]

While the excerpt does not include the word, I am reminded that the term “thug” — ruthless bully lacking a conscience, regardless of race — accurately describes Cuba’s so-called revolutionaries, who in fact are or were oligarchs or plutocrats far more repressive than those they displaced.

[Dilbert San Diego]

Did Obama negotiate a good deal with Cuba, as we move to normalization of relations?

For example, the human rights abuses noted here — couldn’t those have been discussed as part of the price Cuba had to pay for normalization?

And I have heard nothing about negotiations over the billions of dollars of property owned by Americans which was expropriated by the Cubans after Castro’s revolution.

On the other hand we hear Cuba saying how America owes them some sort of “reparations” for all of the damage they claim was done due to our trade embargo all these years.

And this whole normalization will be a smoke screen to close down Gitmo, not just the prison at Gitmo but the entire navy base there.

From what I’ve heard, i don’t see where we get much of anything out of this normalization process.

Then I read puff pieces in travel sections of newspapers, saying you should travel to Cuba soon, to see the “real” Cuba, before it gets infiltrated by Starbucks and Hilton Hotels and other companies. Sheesh.............

[MarvinStinson]

The main benefit of the Soros/Jarrett/Obama “normalizing” relations with Cuba will be that

Cubsan exiles living in Miami will now be able to visit their relatives in Cuban prisons.

[Fred Hayek]

Keep reminding the Lefties that Castro and Che nearly nuked the United States.

[Don Corleone]

Obama is a Marxist loving Muslim. Starting from that premise all else follows logically.

[livius]

Obama and the Pope. They both betrayed the Cubans and the Pope betrayed the Church. Evil leftists, both of them.

[Dqban22]

Valladares vividly expressed how much it meant the international reaction to the Cuban political martyrdom: “During those years, with the purpose of forcing us to abandon our religious beliefs and to demoralize us, the Cuban Communist indoctrinators repeatedly used the statements made by some representatives of the American Christian churches. Every time a pamphlet was published in U.S., every time a clergyman would write an article in support of Castro’s dictatorship, a translation would be given to us, and that was far worse for the Christian political prisoners than the beatings or the hunger. Incomprehensible to us, while we waited for the embrace of solidarity from our brothers in Christ, those who were embraced were our tormentors.”