President Obama and the first family stuck to their schedule in Cuba and attended a baseball game Tuesday afternoon — and even did “the wave” in the crowd along with Cuban President Raul Castro — despite Republican calls for Obama to cut his trip short and return to Washington in the wake of the Brussels terrorist attacks.
The White House gave no indication that it would change plans after news broke that the Islamic State had claimed responsibility for terrorist attacks in Brussels that killed more than 30 people and injured hundreds more.
While the rest of the cable news networks focused on the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, ESPN showed images of Obama and the first family doing the wave, shaking hands with players on the two teams and sitting next to Castro before the game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team Monday afternoon.
Yep, Obama does the wave. pic.twitter.com/BOIyL2Wqx7
— Comiskey Park Hitmen (@CPHSox) March 22, 2016
Obama defended his decision to attend the game in an interview with ESPN in which he cast the move as an act of defiance of the terrorists’ goals.
“The whole premise of terrorist is to try to disrupt people’s daily lives,” he said. He added that one of his proudest moments as president was watching Bostonians go back to Fenway after the marathon bombing in 2013.
“Ultimately, this game is about a recognition of goodwill” between our two countries, he said. “People are people.”
In an op-ed Obama penned for ESPN’s website, the president called the Major League Baseball exhibition game “something extraordinary.”
“Today, I’m taking Michelle and our girls out to a ballgame,” he wrote. “That’s something Americans do all the time, but this game is something extraordinary.”
The game is the first of its kind in 17 years and it’s only the second time an MLB team has visited Cuba since 1959.
“Most importantly, it’s a symbol of the bonds between Americans and Cubans despite decades of isolation – a small step that shows that our nations can begin to move beyond the divisions of the past and look toward a future of greater connections and cooperation between our countries,” he wrote.
Later, the president traded golfing and retirement jabs with retired New York Yankee Derek Jeter.
“I took his money so he wants it back,” Jeter said of a golf win against the president in an interview with ESPN.
On retirement, he said he advised Obama, “Don’t be afraid of it – you have to look forward.”
“I’m sure he’ll be just fine,” he said.
With U.S. cable news filled with images of attack and the list of fatalities growing, earlier in the day Obama dedicated just 51 seconds to a statement condemning the attacks ahead of his pre-planned address to the Cuban people.
After that speech, the president met with a group of 13 Cuban dissidents who have protested the Castro regime and argued publicly for better human rights and more freedom in the communist island nation. He is set to travel to Argentina later Tuesday for a two-day visit.
Republican candidates for president, including Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, quickly called on Obama to cut short his historic visit to Cuba and return to the United States.
“President Obama should be back in America keeping this country safe or President Obama should be planning to travel to Brussels,” Cruz told reporters in Washington, D.C. “In the wake of the Paris terror attacks, world leaders came together in solidarity with the people of Paris, and yet strikingly absent was Barack Obama — a visual manifestation of President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s retreat from the world, abdication of leadership in the world.”
Kasich assailed the president for attending a baseball game in the immediate wake of the terrorist attack on a major U.S. ally.
“If I were president, I would have cut short my visit and gone home,” he said, “… to assemble teams of people, intelligence experts to look at [the] serious breaches we have in intelligence.”
