House speaker Paul Ryan has issued a statement condemning President Obama’s decision to lift trade restrictions with Cuba, the Carribbean island nation still controlled by Fidel and Raúl Castro’s Communist regime. Obama announced Friday the United States would be lifting the limits to importing cigars and rum, among other goods, from Cuba.
Ryan, a Republican, cited the Cuban government’s continued authoritarian actions against its own people in his statement criticizing Obama.
“The Castros continue to jail pro-democracy activists at a rate of hundreds per month, yet it is full steam ahead for the Obama administration’s efforts to appease this oppressive regime,” said Ryan. “President Obama’s latest move will only help finance the Castros’ grip on power and jeopardize the intellectual property rights of American businesses. As the past two years of normalizing relations have only emboldened the regime at the expense of the Cuban people, I fully intend to maintain our embargo on Cuba.”
Elliott Abrams recently wrote about the “blindness” of Obama’s Cuba policy. Read an excerpt below:
Two things are striking about [Obama’s new policy directive]. First, what the United States gets in return from the Castro regime is exactly and precisely nothing. This is not a bargained-for exchange; Castro makes no promises, allows no one to get out of prison, does not even make a vague allusion to reform. Nothing. This is because Cuba policy is, for the President, less an exercise in statesmanship than the true product of ideological politics. This policy is a remedy, a medicine, an apology, to make up for what he sees as decades of American sin toward Cuba. Of course, in Mr. Obama’s imagination “Cuba” means “Castro;” the Cuban people are really not an actor here. The benefits of all the commerce that will now grow go directly to the regime. For example, the hotels that Mr. Obama wishes to fill with American tourists are owned by the Cuban military. No matter, it seems. One can see glimpses of all this in the actual text of the Directive. For example, take these lines: “we are not seeking to impose regime change on Cuba; we are, instead, promoting values that we support around the world while respecting that it is up to the Cuban people to make their own choices about their future.” Later in the text we see this again: “We will not pursue regime change in Cuba. We will continue to make clear that the United States cannot impose a different model on Cuba because the future of Cuba is up to the Cuban people.” This is blindness, because the real problem facing the Cuban people is precisely that the future of Cuba is NOT up to them, but is under the control of a tyrannical communist regime. They are not permitted “to make their own choices about their future,” and when they try they are beaten and jailed. Mr. Obama’s failure to recognize and admit this is at the heart of the moral abdication that is his Cuba policy. And it is at the heart of his administration’s broader failures in human rights policy: when he sees “Iran,” he sees the regime, not the people, so he remains silent in June 2009 when they rise up in the Green Revolution. In truth the people of Iran were getting in the way of his Iran policy, so they had to be ignored. This is the precise phenomenon we see as well in Cuba.
