Secretary of State John Kerry grew annoyed Wednesday with a House Republican who suggested that President Obama is going to break a promise not to visit Cuba until the Castro regime honors more human rights.
In a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Kerry insisted that while Cuba hasn’t made dramatic human rights progress yet, some progress was being made.
“We always said that component is not going to change as rapidly as other components, but it’s changing,” he said. The secretary of state repeatedly cited the 53 political prisoners released as part of the agreement that normalized relations between the United States and Cuba.
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., pushed back and said many of those prisoners were re-arrested. “We believe they will be released as is appropriate and that signifies some listening,” Kerry replied.
But that wasn’t enough for Diaz-Balart, the nephew of Fidel Castro’s first wife. He used the hearing to pick apart Kerry’s various claims about economic or human rights improvements in Cuba while inviting Kerry to “reassure” him that Obama would keep his word, in an attempt to suggest the president is wrong to travel to Cuba.
“I’m trying to reassure you, but you don’t want to be reassured,” Kerry shot back at one point.
Diaz-Balart reminded Kerry of “the 200 arrests, every Sunday, of the ladies in white, the beatings of these women who are just trying to go to church on Sundays” as well as the 8,000 political prisoners who have been arrested since the Obama-Castro deal. “In anybody’s math, fuzzy math or not, that’s not a pretty good ratio,” he said.
Kerry also insisted that there have been economic improvements in the country. “One in four people in the country are now engaged in private sector [activity],” Kerry said. “There are an increased number of private businesses, there’s a capacity to provide finance, there are people who are now being able to open businesses who weren’t before.”
Diaz-Balart disputed that claim as well. “The licenses of these so-called private independent businesses, the numbers have decreased,” the House Republican said. “Again please, if you could get back to us, reassure us that the president is not breaking this redline when he said he would not visit until there was a substantial improvement in human rights, sir. We have yet to see it.”
