The United States has an opportunity to open Cuba to freedom and a democratic political system, but President Obama’s recent trip has unfortunately obscured the brutality of the communist regime.
That Obama realized the futility of the 56-year-old embargo on Cuba is laudable. For too long, American policy toward Cuba has kept it isolated from American influence to the detriment of the Cuban people and gave Fidel Castro a scapegoat for any problem in the country.
“What the United States was doing was not working. We have to have the courage to acknowledge that truth. A policy of isolation designed for the Cold War made little sense in the 21st century,” Obama said on Tuesday.
However, when he spoke of Cuba’s education system, his reliance on cliché to find common ground ignores the deep problems of Cuba.
“Cuba has an extraordinary resource — a system of education which values every boy and every girl,” he said.
“Cuba has an extraordinary resource – a system of education which values every boy and every girl” – @POTUS #CubaVisit
— Valerie Jarrett (@vj44) March 22, 2016
The Cuban education system has succeeded in maintaining high literacy rates, but at the cost of making schools into indoctrination factories. Further, their “free education” isn’t the lofty, egalitarian dream that its supporters portray it.
When government propaganda isn’t the source of information, the Cuban education myth falls apart. The Cuban education system before Castro took power was already successful, and quality has declined since the communist revolution. “School attendance is compulsory in Cuba, and with the regime’s totalitarian apparatus and full control over the population, it is very easy to make everyone comply,” Rosa María Payá wrote.
Cuba values every boy and girl inasmuch as the state can use them to further its control over the population. Let those boys and girls grow up to be dissidents who oppose the regime, and the state apparatus will imprison, harass, and torture them.
“The so-called free education and free medical care come at the cost of slavery,” Carlos Eire, a Cuban exiled when he was 10 and now a professor of history at Yale University, said.
Rhetoric about Cuba’s commitment to its people is nothing more than lies to appease the gullible who live outside of Cuba.
Literacy rates and free medical care is meaningless when citizens can only read government-approved publications and low-quality hospitals.
Useful idiots were plentiful for the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and they remain to support the communist regime in Cuba, willfully ignorant of the brutal conditions Cubans live under. That extends to well-respected media outlets who refuse to accept the reality of the situation.
“Above all, and I don’t feel good saying this, I want to convey that the Castros and their criminal allies have made Cuba a nation of lies. Their deceit permeates far and wide, from the socialist propaganda that litters the nation to the misleading tourism advertising that lures foreigners in. While those in charge scapegoat their home-grown problems on the United States and the embargo, the people suffer and the capital, Havana, struggles on as a dirty, smelly, and pitiful ruin of a city,” Fergus Hodgson, editor in chief of the PanAm Post, wrote after visiting the country.
Cuba is a failed communist backwater. Its government engages in repression, imprisonment, and torture. Its communist leaders reject the fundamental Western idea that the state is subservient to the individual. As Obama said, “Cuba has emphasized the role and rights of the state; the United States is founded upon the rights of the individual.”
The United States has a rare opportunity to embrace the Cuban people and aid them in building a political system that respects the individual and allows them to live in a fully human manner. President Obama, in referring to dictator Raúl Castro as “President Castro” and obscuring the inner workings of the Cuban state, threatens that opportunity.
