President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden will skip the funeral of former Cuban dictator Fidel Castro this week, the White House said Monday.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest ruled out the possibility that Obama or Biden would travel to Havana on Tuesday to join other foreign leaders in bidding farewell to the communist revolutionary. Asked if Secretary of State John Kerry or another top administration official will attend, Earnest said: “Stay tuned.”
A handful of Republicans have encouraged the Obama administration to refuse to send any U.S. official to the ceremony for Castro, who died at the age of 90 over the weekend.
“I would hope they would send no one to the funeral,” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American who has been critical of Obama’s posture toward Cuba, told Fox News.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whose father grew up under the Castro regime in Cuba, said Americans should hope “we don’t see any U.S. government officials going to Fidel Castro’s funeral.”
“I hope we don’t see Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and Democrats lining up to lionize a murderous tyrant and thug,” Cruz told ABC News.
In a statement Saturday, Obama declined to mention Castro’s most brutal acts, saying only he “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,” the president said.
Earnest told reporters on Monday that the administration has never attempted to “whitewash” Castro’s religious repression or crimes against humanity “that go against the very values that our country has long defended.”
Obama met with Cuban President Raul Castro, brother of Fidel, during a historic trip to the communist island in March, during which he declined to pursue a meeting with the elder Castro.
