Obama’s Cuba policy makes bad situation worse

It’s been almost two years since President Barack Obama announced that he was “charting a new course on Cuba” and lifted numerous U.S. trade sanctions on the island to empower the “Cuban people” and the island’s “emerging private sector.” At the time, reasonable minds could disagree with Obama’s tactics, which ignored the plight of Cuba’s political dissidents, but few could disagree with the president’s purported intent.

Dismal end to Obama’s Cuba legacy

The Castros’ ideological intolerance still reigns

As the Obama administration enters its waning days, the president’s “historic” decision to normalize relations with the Castro dictatorship in Cuba is ending not with a bang, but a whimper.

The Castro regime is having a very bad couple of weeks.

This sets a very important legal precedent.

From Law 360:

Cuba Must Pay $166M To Colombian Terrorist Victims

A Washington, D.C., federal court has granted a $166 million default judgment against the Cuban government for its support of Colombian rebels who captured, tortured and held for ransom for five years three U.S. contractors and killed another.

The Cuban government has announced it will hold five days of nationwide military exercises to prepare for "a range of enemy action".

Cuba did not link the exercises to the victory of Republican candidate Donald Trump in the US presidential election.

But analysts say such exercises have in the past been held at times of tension or to send a signal to the US.

Yesterday, a column in The Wall Street Journal asked, "Will Obama's Cuba Policy Lose Florida for Clinton?"

We now have the answer: Yes.

Donald Trump has defeated Hillary Clinton in the state of Florida thanks to strong support from Cuban-Americans.

Exiles who oppose normalization could give Trump Florida’s 29 electoral votes.

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are in a statistical dead heat in Florida, where the state’s 29 electoral votes will be pivotal in Tuesday’s presidential election. One surprise for Democrats is that President Obama’s December 2014 decision to liberalize U.S. Cuba policy is not helping their nominee as the White House expected it to. Instead, it has become a liability.

Last week, in an article entitled, "In a first, U.S. trial to test Cuban lung-cancer vaccine," The Washington Post's health reporter wrote:

"The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first clinical trial to test a Cuban drug in the United States — a lung-cancer vaccine developed in Havana."

Obama, the Castro regime and its lobbyists also celebrated and sensationalized the story.

In 2011, the Cuban government announced that it would fire up to 1,300,000 workers from their government jobs -20 percent of the workforce - but would magnanimously allow them to become self-employed in 178 trades that would then be permitted by the State. With a high degree of specificity the government outlined the sanctioned activities for example:

Trade No. 23-purchase and sale of used books. Trade 29-attendant of public bathrooms (presumably for tips); 34-palm-tree pruner (apparently other tress will still be pruned by the state)...

Today, for the first time ever, the United States abstained in the annual United Nations General Assembly vote to condemn the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Needless to say, President Obama is very proud, Ben Rhodes is very proud, John Kerry is very proud, and our ambassador to the U.N., Samantha Power, is especially proud.

Power’s remarks to the General Assembly were a perfect rendition of the Obama approach to Cuba, which is to say they were full of apologies about the United States and falsehoods about Cuba. Let’s take a look.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-CA) released the following statement after the Obama administration chose not to defend U.S. law pertaining to Cuba at the United Nations:

“Today the Obama administration turned its back on U.S. law and the suffering Cuban people.  Worse yet – on a world stage – the administration allowed the Cuban regime to claim moral equivalence between its brutal rule and our democracy.  This is wrong, and it undermines Cubans fighting for basic freedoms..."