In its dealings with Iran, the White House has been abundantly clear that President Obama does not want to mix issues. Nuclear negotiations, the Obama administration maintains, are about nuclear issues only — centrifuges, uranium and the like.
Working under these guidelines, Obama’s negotiators have resisted demanding concessions regarding Iran’s backing and funding of paramilitary terrorist organizations, the right of Israel to exist and Iran’s atrocious human rights record. They have not even made the apparent no-brainer request for the release of Saeed Abedini, the Idaho-based Christian pastor and American citizen who has been unjustly imprisoned in Iran since 2012.
For all of these decisions, Obama’s negotiators have been roundly criticized. But no matter how wrong-headed this approach may be, at least their dealings with Iran have had a certain consistency. Nuclear talks are about nuclear issues, and perhaps someday — in theory — other important issues related to Iran’s malicious behavior could be addressed as well.
But if you were getting used to Obama’s tactics in dealing with Iran, then his approach to Cuba is simply baffling. Having already opened the door to warmer relations with the communist dictatorship of Raul Castro, Obama has now agreed to remove it from the State Department’s list of international sponsors of terrorism without making any demands about Cuba’s harboring of terrorists.
Cuba has long been and remains today a haven for terrorists — especially left-wing terrorists who are homegrown products of the United States.
The Daily Beast’s Jamie Kirchick reminded Americans this week that Cuba still harbors JoAnne Chesimard, alias Assata Shakur. Along with fellow Black Panther militants, she participated in the execution of a New Jersey state trooper in 1973. She broke out of prison six years later and turned up with her comrades in Cuba.
Charlie Hill, another self-styled militant, murdered a policeman in 1971, then hijacked a plane to safety and freedom in communist Cuba. Cuba is believed to host yet another American Marxist terrorist in William Morales, a Puerto Rican separatist bomb-maker for the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional (FALN). He fled to Cuba to avoid the 89-year prison sentence that he earned for his involvement in terrorism in the United States.
Cuba was added to the State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism during the Reagan administration, thanks to its documented attempts to foment communist revolution in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and throughout Latin America. The Cuban legacy in this hemisphere is one of murder, savagery and oppression.
In more recent times, and as Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., pointed out on the Senate floor not long ago, Cuban troops have gone to aid the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro in his violent oppression of the Venezuelan people and especially his political opposition.
In keeping with Obama’s Iran strategy, Cuba should first be forced to make concessions related directly to terrorism if it wants to be de-listed as a terrorist sponsor. That should begin with the repatriation of the many American terrorists it is currently protecting, whose senseless crimes in the name of a long-moribund ideology cry out to heaven for justice. It is disgraceful and disappointing to see Obama turn his back on the victims of these self-styled revolutionaries and their families.
