Free Republic

Add this report to the growing list of grievances the American people have against the Obama administration. Washington Free Beacon says the extent of Cuba’s ‘mystery attack’ against U.S. diplomats in Havana may have been covered up by the Obama administration. Washington Free Beacon reports: The number of U.S. government personnel targeted by a mysterious illness in Cuba last year is greater than the Trump administration has publicly acknowledged, according to multiple U.S. officials who told the Washington Free Beacon the Obama administration may have misled Congress about the full scope and nature of the attack. U.S. officials disclosed earlier...

"Cuba is resolutely opposing the U.S. sanctions and pressure against North Korea and expressing full support for the just steps of North Korea in bolstering up defense capabilities including ICBM test-fires…we express our deep thanks to the Korean people who are sending  solidarity to the Cuban people's just cause."That was Ulises Rosales Del Toro, Stalinist Cuba’s  “Vice President of the Council of Ministers”  (i.e. eunuch  apparatchik) conveying his master’s (Raul Castro’s) support to  Kim Yong Nam, Stalinist North Korea's "President of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly," (another eunuch apparatchik.) The shout-out between these Stalinist eunuchs took place this week...

The U.S. State Department says it expelled two Cuban diplomats earlier this year after several Americans at the U.S. Embassy in Havana experienced strange medical symptoms and were either recalled to the U.S. or allowed to come home.

The two-year-old U.S. diplomatic relationship with Cuba was roiled Wednesday by what U.S. officials say was a string of bizarre incidents that left a group of American diplomats in Havana with severe hearing loss attributed to a covert sonic device. In the fall of 2016, a series of U.S. diplomats began suffering unexplained losses of hearing, according to officials with knowledge of the investigation into the case. Several of the diplomats were recent arrivals at the embassy, which reopened in 2015 as part of former President Barack Obama’s re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba. Some of the diplomats’ symptoms were...

“Cuba’s new relationship with the United States has opened ways of exploring its complex history and culture… cruise from culturally diverse Santiago de Cuba to Havana aboard the 64-passenger sailing yacht Le Ponant.  Return from this 11-day adventure with a new appreciation of Cuba.”Well? What could be more historically fitting than the New York Times helping Americans “appreciate” (and further enrich) the Castro Family Fiefdom?This Potemkin excursion by the mother of all fake news purveyors on Cuba to Cuba is titled the “History, Culture and Contemporary Life of Cuba.” Fine let’s start with the New York Times’ splendid history of...

“They saw in Castro and Che Guevara the hipster who in the era of the Organization Man had joyfully defied the system,” wrote President Kennedy’s adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr back in 1961. Indeed, this “hipster” cachet hovers around the leaders of the Cuban Revolution and persists to this day, despite a half century of Stalinist crimes. Then thanks largely to President Obama’s recent “rapprochement” with these “hipsters,” Stalinist Cuba became the absolute “coolest” place on Earth. Last year close on the heels of Katy Perry, the Rolling Stones and the Obama family itself, Karl Lagerfeld showcased his Chanel “cruise line”...

If someone would have told me a month ago that I'd spend my recent trip to Cuba obsessing over a missile crisis I would have told them I'm not that kind of historian. But there I was in Old Havana in early July, thinking about whether another missile crisis half way around the globe would lead to the world war that was so narrowly averted here five decades ago. Of course the missiles in question today are in North Korea, not in Cuba. But the fact that 55 years after the Cuban Missile Crisis and over a generation removed from...

The opposition MUD is subjected to tremendous challenges, all coming from the fact that they need to face off a criminal-narco-state without any help from the outside police. Why the world is not acting on Veneuela knowing very well that it risks receiving a refugee wave of millions is the subject of another text. Never mind that if the regime manages to hold power at the cost of a dictatorial communist "constitution" and thousands of deaths this will set a bad precedent for regimes dreaming of such a perpetuation of outcome, like Bolivia, the FARC in Colombia, Nicaragua, to name...

The legend of King Robert the Bruce, exiled from Scotland in a cave off the Irish coast in 1306, resembles a similar story in the Bible about King David when he was a boy. King Robert watched a spider finally manage to make a web after failing in several attempts. Thus the child’s rhyme: “If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try, try again.” Our Lord’s parable of the unjust judge (Luke 18:1-8) is about a poor widow who persisted in getting the judge to hear her case. The refined translation says that the judge wearied of her importuning, but...

“Now that I am your President, America will expose the crimes of the Castro regime and stand with the Cuban people in their struggle for freedom….For nearly six decades, the Cuban people have suffered under communist domination. To this day, Cuba is ruled by the same people who killed tens of thousands of their own citizens, who sought to spread their repressive and failed ideology throughout our hemisphere, and who once tried to host enemy nuclear weapons 90 miles from our shores.” (President Donald Trump, June 16, 2017.)In a vicious sucker punch to the Fake News Media and Deep...

Reflections on the Trump Administration's changes to our Cuba policy: In 1959, following six years of organized Marxist-Leninist rebellion, mostly run by Fidel and Raul Castro and their partner Che Guevera, the Battista government of Cuba was overthrown and Fidel Castro claimed dictatorial powers, which he eventually turned over to his brother Raul, in 2008. The Castros spent their sixty years not only oppressing their people – robbing, raping, beating, imprisoning, torturing, and killing, as all communist governments do – but they also spent those years, particularly the years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, spreading violent revolution across...

Joy Reid, radical leftist news commentator, went Tweet crazy when President Trump announced on Friday he was rescinding much of President Obama’s order loosening diplomatic relations with communist Cuba. And although most of them amounted to outrage that yet another imprudent Obama administration policy was going by the wayside, there is one President Trump should print out and tape to his office wall. “Trump name checks Assata Shakur (calls her by her former name, Joanne Chesimard) as a dog whistle to his people. #Trumping Cuba,” she tweeted. Reid is angry Trump not only rescinded what he called the “completely one-sided...

Trump slams Obama's deal with Cuba and says he is 'cancelling it' as he puts Castro on notice to the delight of Little Havana's exiles Trump will announce Cuban policy change at the Manuel Artime Theater, which is named of a Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veteran Break with Obama is primarily over tourism (his administration looked the other way) and spending at military-run establishments (it will be barred) Commercial flights and cruise liners will still be allowed to ferry Americans to the island nation 90 miles south of Florida Passengers will face the threat of a Treasury audit if they...

In Miami, the heart of America’s Cuban exile community, President Donald Trump sounded the death knell of predecessor Barack Obama’s “normalization” policy towards Cuba, vowing,” we will not be silent in the face of communist oppression any longer.” Opening with a recognition of recent victims of leftist violence – U.S. citizen Otto Warmbier, recently released by Cuba ally North Korea, and Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) – Trump called for the audience to pray for them and all the American and Cuban people. He then listed some of the Cuban dissidents present for his speech in Florida, including Jorge Luis García...

In Miami, the crowd was standing and cheering Friday as President Trump smiled broadly after pledging to reverse key provisions of the Obama administration’s historic Cuba opening. A world away, in Portland, Maine, Ben Rhodes could not contain his frustration. “The few people in Miami enabling Trump in carrying out this charade should be embarrassed/held accountable,” Rhodes wrote on Twitter. “He could care less about Cubans.” It was the first of four tweets Rhodes, a foreign policy aide to former president Barack Obama, fired off attacking Trump as the president was speaking. Rhodes was in Maine to attend the wedding...

It's an expensive thorn-in-the-side to the Castro regime. The moozlem prisoners cost a million bucks apiece per year to incarcerate. Rent is $5k/yr. I say turn it into a penal colony and staff it with foreign guards, including Cubans. Put those land mines back into place that Bill Clinton removed without reciprocation-the Cubans have their own mines still there. Prisoners can be the illegals(ms-13 types) waiting to finish out there terms in the continental US. Bring the navy ships and their families back home. Trump can thereby DEAL with the next Government for total withdrawal. The moozlems? Build the same...

Fans of Cuban rum and cigars can rest easy. So can the Starwood chain, which has a deal to manage a historic hotel in Havana. But Americans who want to vacation in Cuba or start doing business there will find it harder as a result of President Trump’s misguided decision to slam the brakes on a two-year-old diplomatic opening with the island. Mr. Trump told a cheering crowd in Miami on Friday that his goal is to achieve a “free Cuba.” In truth, his new policy is just the latest chapter in a spiteful political crusade to overturn crucial elements...

RUSH: Trump is getting standing ovations down in Miami. He has announced he’s reversing much of the Obama legacy vis-a-vis Cuba. He is going to double down on the Cuban embargo. He’s going to reinstitute the travel ban. He just said that any change in American policy is gonna be dependent on the Cuban government, not the United States. So another aspect of the Obama legacy is being unraveled here today to wild applause down in Miami. I don’t know what this means for Cuban cigars, which have become legal in a way. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: So Trump has made...

...The NSC memo obtained by The Hill stated that reverting back to the pre-2014 policy on Cuba would have shown “a strong commitment to human rights and democracy” and pleased anti-Castro “interest groups,” but would have also come with a number of risks.  “Global adversaries, such as Iran, Russia and China, would likely develop an even stronger footing in Cuba” if ties with the island were severed, the NSC document says.   The memo warned that cutting off relations would have eliminated economic and political leverage over Cuba to extract reforms, damaged U.S. objectives in Latin America, hurt U.S. businesses...

President Donald Trump offered the most forthright criticism of Cuba since John F. Kennedy when he addressed a crowd in Miami ahead of signing an executive order reversing the Obama administration’s policy of normalization. In a speech frequently interrupted by applause, and by cameo appearances from Cuban-American activists, Trump laid out a moral case against the Castro regime and its policies that few previous presidents have dared to make. “We will not be silent in the face of communist oppression any longer,” Trump said. He laid out his principles and policies, including regime change: “With God’s help, a free Cuba...