Biden flubs Cuba
We're too distracted to secure our back yard
Our president and his administration just flubbed one of the best chances to improve America’s national security. On July 11, sometime after Joe Biden again alternated between painfully whispering and shouting at reporters but before he accused his lefty buddies at Facebook of killing people, Cubans took to the streets to protest their terrible government.
In so doing, they risked what little freedom they had and even their lives. Many of those involved are now in the Cuban regime’s prisons. And we are still left with the New World’s worst and most destabilizing government just 90 miles from Florida.
Aside from a cut-and-paste statement from Biden that he may or may not have seen after it was drafted by his national security council staff, the White House did nothing to help or encourage Cubans. In fact, the administration did less than nothing. Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security Secretary, told Cubans not to take to boats to come to America. Fine, but what about steps to encourage change in Cuba? They could have included:
Breaking diplomatic relations unless the Cuban government permits peaceful protests and urging other governments in the Americas to do the same
Redirecting funds from pointless U.S. government ventures like the Voice of America to independent Cuban-American content creators who can get persuasive news and information into Cuba
Giving Cuban generals and police something to worry about aside from just repressing their people, including by putting a U.S. naval task force just outside Cuban waters
Jamming Cuban naval and aircraft radar and conducting overflights with U.S. drones
Establishing a multi-billion dollar trust fund to spur capitalist investment in Cuba once the communist regime is replaced
Offering amnesty and a pension for Cuban leaders if they leave the country and never come back (the Ferdinand Marcos suite in Hawaii is available, as is Idi Amin’s retirement pad in Saudi Arabia)
Video: Whiton discusses options for Cuba on Fox News.
The wannabe empire-builders who occupy America’s obese national security apparatus, including our dysfunctional military and human rights complex, have America’s resources and attention sprawled around the world. Our military is still playing Cowboys and Indians in Iraq and Syria. We have pointless bases across Europe and 35,500 troops in Germany defending people who disdain America and refuse to trade fairly with us. (Donald Trump had wisely planned to reduce the deployment but of course failed at execution; Biden has actually increased the troop number.) We bemoan setbacks to liberal dreams for backwaters like Belarus, Burma, Crimea, Haiti, and South Sudan.
As a result, when an opportunity arose to blunt a threat just off the coast of Florida—in a geography that is critically important to American security unlike the aforementioned ones—we apparently had no capacity or inclination to act. Were our generals and admirals all off at diversity training?
The problem isn’t new: during the Cold War, despite the chance to diminish the critical Soviet risk to America, Washington sat dumfounded when revolts against Soviet communism sprouted in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1966). In 1989, when Chinese protested in Tiananmen Square and across the country, the House of Bush mainly sat on its hands and wondered when it could go back to placid and financially lucrative relations with the Chinese Communist Party. Biden himself was vice president when the Obama administration did nothing to help or encourage Iranians protesting their terrorism-exporting Islamist regime in 2009 and 2010.
America’s greatest modern success at political warfare—the CIA’s successful 1953 removal of an Iranian government that would have taken the oil behemoth behind the Iron Curtain—is oddly regarded as a lesson of what not to do. A similar political operation that helped Christian Democrats beat Soviet-funded communists in Italy in that country’s first postwar election is similarly forgotten.
Is there any silver lining to the failure in Cuba? At least those who care to see Cuba with open eyes should now understand that the people of Cuba oppose the regime. This came as a shock to progressives who have lauded Cuba’s communist system. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the spirit animal of today’s Democrats, wrote, “We also must name the U.S contribution to Cuban suffering: our sixty-year-old embargo.” (Note: Cuba is free to trade with 193 other countries and receive investment from them.) Black Lives Matter, another important element of the Democrat coalition, asserted: “The people of Cuba are being punished by the U.S. government because the country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination.”
Nothing really says “I’m a Democrat” today like blaming America for the problems caused by a Marxist regime that has long employed the central planning, statism, and censorship that American progressives want to implement here. Was the passion of this contingent one reason Biden did nothing?