President Obama on Tuesday defended attending a baseball game in Cuba immediately following a series of terrorist attacks in Brussels, and compared it to the return to normalcy exhibited by the Boston Red Sox playing their first game after the 2013 marathon bombing.
“[T]he whole premise of terrorism is to try to disrupt people’s ordinary lives,” the president said in an interview with ESPN. “And, you know, one of my most powerful memories and one of my proudest moments as president was watching Boston respond after [the 2013 bombing].”
“That is the kind of resilience and the kind of strength that we have to continually show in the face of these terrorists,” he added.
Obama’s comments came as ESPN covered an exhibition game Tuesday afternoon between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team.
The president is in Cuba this week to meet with Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul, and to discuss efforts to normalize relations between the United States and the small communist country. As part of a broader effort to cool the relationship between the two countries, the Rays are playing the Cuban national baseball team.
Obama continued in his interview Tuesday, referencing a moment in 2013 when the Red Sox’s David Ortiz delivered a pre-game address to a crowd gathered for the team’s first game since the deadly Boston bombings.
“Ortiz went out … [he] talked about Boston and how strong it was and that it was not going to be intimidated,” he said, affirming that the terrorists “cannot defeat America. They can’t — they don’t produce anything.”
“They don’t have a message that appeals to the vast majority of Muslims or the vast majority of people around the world,” Obama added. “But what they can do is scare, and make people afraid. And disrupt our daily lives and divide us. As long as we don’t allow that to happen, we’ll be OK.”
