For over 50 years, American presidents have been enforcing an embargo against Cuba to force regime change, embarrassingly, to no avail. This is why I’ve been in the vanguard of those urging President Obama to end it; especially given that it has done nothing more than relegate generations of innocent Cubans to lives of systematic penury.
I am convinced that, if re-elected, Obama will seal his legacy by lifting the embargo and normalizing relations with Cuba…
The United States is the only country that has steadfastly enforced this trade embargo. Therefore, it speaks volumes about its economic power that trade with the rest of the world has been insufficient to lift Cuba out of its 1950s stagnation.
(“Fifth Summit of the Americas: Managing Expectations,” The iPINIONS Journal, April 17, 2009)
Therefore, imagine my dismay when I read reports last week that, instead of taking steps to lift the embargo, the re-elected Obama had been waging his own covert operation for regime change.
Instead of aping his predecessors with twentieth-century methods like funding guerillas (aka the Bay of Pigs) or using poison cigars, however, Obama opted for the twenty-first century method of having American geeks set up a secret “Cuban Twitter”…?
Existence of the program came to light Thursday when The Associated Press published a lengthy story detailing how ZunZuneo [which is slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet] was developed to cause social unrest, attempting to recreate the sort of pro-democracy, Twitter-empowered protests that fueled the Arab Spring in 2011 and toppled corrupt governments in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere.
(CNNMoney, April 3, 2014)
Except that he ended this program in 2012 for unspecified reasons. Unfortunately, revelations about it are bound to undermine the heroic efforts of Cuban dissidents to bring organic – even if barely noticeable – change to their country, and might even endanger their lives.
“I think the Cuban government is going to say [of any dissident activity], ‘You see, this is probably funded by some of the U.S. AID funding,'” said Andy Gomez, a retired Cuba scholar from the University of Miami and senior policy adviser with the law firm Poblete Tamargo.
(The Associated Press, April 6, 2014)
Of course, every president since Eisenhower has tried to overthrow or kill the Castros. The irony is that Democrats JFK and Obama, the two presidents one would’ve thought lest likely to do so, are the ones now most associated with this shameful legacy.
On the other hand, apropos of irony, being exposed in this fashion might just compel Obama to move aggressively to lift America’s plainly feckless and hypocritical embargo and normalize relations with Cuba – not only to erase this blot on his presidency, but also to finally make himself worthy of that affirmative-action Nobel Peace Prize he won in 2009.
Hope springs eternal.
Related commentaries:
Fifth summit…
Obama Nobel prize…