The White House won’t yet say which political dissidents President Obama plans to meet with during his upcoming historic visit to Cuba, or whether any of those dissidents include prisoners the Castro regime is holding.
Obama will arrive in Cuba on Sunday, and with less than 48 hours before he leaves, the White House is putting off providing a list of dissidents it invited for a meeting with Obama. Instead, White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Friday he hasn’t seen the list, which the administration plans to release at an unspecified time over the next few days.
“I haven’t seen the list [of dissidents] that the president will meet with … so I’m not able to vouch for the status of those people,” he said.
Still, Earnest and other administration officials stress that Obama will meet with prominent dissidents of his own choosing, a demand the Castro government has grudgingly allowed.
“The president is going to move forward to have a conversations about human rights” with the people he chooses, Earnest said.
Earlier this week, Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security, said the meetings will include “a diverse and important set of voices in Cuba — prominent dissidents, people who have made enormous sacrifices.”
But Earnest repeatedly dodged questions Friday on whether Obama administration officials requested meetings with prisoners of the Castro regime. Instead, he stressed that the president will advocate for broad human rights improvements in a speech to the Cuban people Tuesday morning, and press the issue during a meeting with Cuban President Raul Castro.
“What we’ve seen for the last 50 or 60 years is the Cuban government wantonly detaining people … who have criticized the Cuban government,” he said. “For more than 50 years, we tried a strategy that said, ‘Why don’t we ignore the Cubans and see if they release the prisoners on their own … That strategy didn’t really work.”
Critics say Obama’s decision to meet with Raul Castro instead of Fidel is a distinction without a difference.
“Raul Castro was responsible for many of the brutal and targeted killings in the years after the revolution,” said Marion Smith, executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to educating people on the harsh legacy of communist regimes.
Smith also accused the White House of obfuscating about which dissidents its meeting with to avoid negative press in advance of the trip.
The fact that Obama is offering “legitimacy” to the Castro regime by agreeing to meet with Raul Castro should be balanced by a U.S. acknowledgement of the dissidents and prisoners of conscience in just as public of a way, he told the Washington Examiner.
“This heehawing about not releasing the dissidents they plan to meet with — they are trying to keep our role standing up for liberty hush, hush, which will only serve to shove the pro-democracy movement into the shadows in Cuba,” he said. “This is a real disservice and one that reverses the very public role that the U.S. has playing in standing up for human rights for decades.”
Meanwhile, Cuban-Americans in Congress are assailing the trip as a “legacy-shopping” series of photo-ops that will only further empower the Castro regime.
“… The leader of the free world has chosen a legacy-shopping photo-op enjoying a baseball game with a murderer and a thug,” Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., said in statement Friday. “The exile community of Miami, which has welcomed many of Castro’s political prisoners, is painfully aware of the human rights abuses still going on today. This is not a fun trip for peaceful dissidents.”
After his meeting with dissidents set for Tuesday and his speech to the Cuban people, Obama will attend a Major League Baseball game between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team.
Cuban-American critics of the president’s policy argue that if Obama is serious about pushing for greater human rights in Cuba as part of his diplomatic thaw, he should meet with members of the island’s black dissident community, who have suffered particularly harsh subjugation under the Castro regime.
Some critics of the trip point to Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet, a physician, anti-abortion activist and winner of numerous human rights awards, including the United States’ 2008 Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. Under a 25-year sentence, Biscet has been held in some of the harshest conditions of any prisoners in Cuba. He first ran afoul of the Castro regime in the 1990s after he investigated Cuban abortion techniques and revealed in a report that numerous infants had been killed after being delivered alive.
In 2006, Biscet smuggled a letter out of his prison titled “Civil Disobedience,” which urged all Cubans should continue to pray and fast until the government signs the human rights treaties that have been established by the United Nations.
Critics of Obama’s decision to renew diplomatic ties with Cuba say more than 300 dissidents have been arrested on the island since March 8 in advance of the president’s visit.
Last fall, Amnesty International chronicled nearly 1,500 political arrests or arbitrary detentions of peaceful human-rights protesters in November alone, the highest one-month tally in years. On Dec. 10, the group has said, the government arrested an estimated 200 dissidents and in some cases beat the prisoners, including members of the Ladies in White, an organization founded in 2003 by wives and female relatives of jailed dissidents.
Ros-Lehtinen says the Cuban government has made 2,555 arbitrary detentions of peaceful protesters in January and February of this year, and more than 8,000 last year.
Marion Smith on Friday highlighted the plight of what he called “The Forgotten 51,” prominent political prisoners who the Castro regime has imprisoned for protesting the regime’s policies.
“This list is regrettably not exhaustive — the number of Cuban political prisoners held today is thought to be more than 100,” Smith said in a Friday letter to journalists urging them to cover the plight of dissidents during the president’s trip. “But these are 51 prisoners of conscience whose names we know and whose stories are verified. They stand witness for the rest.”
The Forgotten 51 include political dissidents, former Communist Party loyalists, the son of a Christian jailed in attempt by the government to force his mother to inform, and a rap artist declared a “danger to society,” Smith said.
“The families of the Forgotten 51 are kept in the dark about the legal status and the health of those unjustly imprisoned,” he wrote. “Most have been detained without acknowledgment of the crimes for which they are charged. A fair defense is nonexistent in Cuba’s authoritarian political system.”
