Saturday Politics : Cuban Refugees, Obama's Final Trashing of Human Rights?

Saturday Politics is sometimes about mouthing platitudes about human rights while denying them to those who need them most. • • • CUBAN REFUGEES. President Barack Obama has spoken often of Cuba and its Castro regime -- a regime he has always referred to as the Cuban "government." In March 2010, President Obama issued a White House statement condemning Cuba’s treatment of its citizens : “Cuban authorities continue to respond to the aspirations of the Cuban people with a clenched fist.” Back in 2011, Obama was talking tough on relations and is quoted by the BBC during a White House event : “And they certainly have not been aggressive enough when it comes to liberating political prisoners and giving people the opportunity to speak their minds.” But, in a March 2015 interview with Reuters, Obama spoke of the changes that he thought were already happening : “We are going down a path in which we can open up our relations to Cuba in a way that ultimately will prompt more change in Cuba. And we’re already seeing it.” In his first meeting with Raul Castro in Panama City in April 2015, Obama said of the relationship : “It was important for us to engage more directly with the Cuban government and the Cuban people.” • Americans are so used to President Obama saying one thing and doing another that these words on Cuba may seem ordinary, just as Obama's words on human rights have become meaningless and cynical, given his actions : "So on this Human Rights Day, let us rededicate ourselves to the advancement of human rights and freedoms for all, and pledge always to live by the ideals we promote to the world." • • • OBAMA REFUSES CUBAN REFUGEES THEIR SPECIAL STATUS. The Washington Post on Friday published a March 22, 2016 photo of President Obama speaking at the Grand Theater of Havana, Cuba. Many of us will remember that photo as a shameful moment for an American President because Obama was standing beneath the crossed flags of the United States and a Cuba suffering greatly under the tyranny of the Castro regime. On Thursday, Barack Obama drove a huge stake into the hearts of Cubans -- both in The United States and in Cuba -- when he unilaterally ended in one of his final foreign policy initiatives the special status accorded to migrants fleeing Cuba who, upon reaching America were automatically allowed to stay. Cubans are still covered by the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, which grants them permanent residency -- a green card -- after they have been here for one year, even though they may have entered the US without a visa, which was impossible to get in Cuba. Until now, they were given temporary “parole” status while waiting for that year to pass. That will no longer be granted, making the act meaningless for most by denying them entry on arrival. President Obama said in a statement : “Effective immediately, Cuban nationals who attempt to enter the United States illegally...will be subject to removal...the same way we treat migrants from other countries.” • Given Obama's open-door policy to illegal immigrants and his refusal to routinely deport even illegal criminals, that last comment seems particularly ludicrous. • More than a million Cubans have come to the US, many of them in dangerous efforts by sea, since Cuba’s 1959 revolution. More than 250,000 have been granted residency under the Obama administration under the law, which can only be repealed by Congress. But, the new rule applies to Cubans attempting to enter the United States without visas by sea or by land through Mexico or Canada. It ends the “wet-foot, dry-foot” policy, adopted by the Clinton administration in 1996 at a time when illegal seaborne migrants were flooding across the Florida Straits. That policy differentiated between those reaching US soil -- who were allowed to stay -- and those intercepted at sea by the US Coast Guard, who were returned to Cuba or sent to third countries. • The new Obama policy was agreed upon with the Cuban regime, which issued a statement calling it “an important step in the advance of bilateral relations” that will guarantee “regular, safe and orderly migration.” The Castro regime has long complained about the special status for Cubans, particularly the “wet-foot, dry foot” policy, which it said encouraged illegal travel in unseaworthy vessels, homemade rafts and inner tubes. As part of the accord announced in both capitals, Cuba will allow any citizen who has been out of the country for up to four years to return. Previously, anyone who had been gone for more than two years was legally said to have “emigrated.” The Cuban statement said efforts to “modernize” immigration policies would continue. • • • AMERICAN REACTION SWIFT AND NEGATIVE. The White House described the changes as a logical extension of the normalization of relations with Cuba that began in December 2014 when Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro announced they would end more than 50 years of estrangement. Since then, US-Cuba diplomatic relations have been re-established, and Obama has used his regulatory authority to ease long-standing restrictions on commerce and trade, as well as travel by US citizens to the island, under the continuing US embargo that only Congress can end. • President-Elect Donald Trump has indicated his dissatisfaction with increased Cuba ties and threatened to reverse normalization after his election in November : “If Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban/American people and the US as a whole, I will terminate deal.” If Trump chose to do so after taking office, he could order the Department of Homeland Security to reinstitute special treatment for Cuban migrants. • Lawmakers long opposed to the new relationship with Cuba expressed anger at the new policy. Senator Robert Menendez, long an opponent of Obama's opening up to Castro Cuba, said : “Today’s announcement will only serve to tighten the noose the Castro regime continues to have around the neck of its own people. Congress was not consulted prior to this abrupt policy announcement with just nine days left in the administration. The Obama administration seeks to pursue engagement with the Castro regime at the cost of ignoring the present state of torture and oppression, and its systematic curtailment of freedom.” • • • CUBA AND OBAMA ARE HAPPY. The Cuba refugee move is yet another Obama slight of hand kept secret until unveiled by fiat, undoubtedly for fear of substantial American backlash. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, said that plans for the change were kept quiet in large part to avoid a new flood of Cubans trying to enter -- many of them trying to beat a deadline they feared was the inevitable next step in US-Cuba rapprochment under the Obama administration. • This is patently untrue, because Cubans were already worried about Obama deciding to change the US policy on Cuban refugees. The total number of Cubans admitted after reaching here without visas by land or sea was 4,890 in 2013, according to Customs and Border Protection, but 2016, the number was 53,416. [Talk about people voting with their feet.] According to the Coast Guard, 1,885 people traveling by sea have either arrived here or been intercepted -- and sent back -- in fiscal 2017, which began October 1. Thousands of others have joined a growing stream of Central Americans who have made the arduous journey through Mexico, often after paying hefty sums to smugglers, to reach the US border, where they were admitted, while others without visas, largely from Guatemala and El Salvador, have been turned back. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson says : “The aim here is to treat Cuban migrants in a manner consistent to migrants who come here from other countries...equalizing our immigration policies...as part of the overall normalization process with Cuba. Our approach to Cubans arriving [at the border] tomorrow will be the same as those arriving from other countries.” Josefina Vidal, the Cuban foreign ministry's chief for US affairs agreed : "Today, a detonator of immigration crises is eliminated. The United States achieves legal, secure and ordered migration from Cuba." El Salvador's foreign ministry also welcomed the move, saying "there cannot be migrants of different categories." Honduras said it would wait to see if the flow of Cubans actually reduced. • Rhodes made another argument, saying the change was also justified because, while many Cubans in the past left the island : “for political purposes...I think increasingly over time the balance has shifted to those leaving for more traditional reasons, such as 'economic opportunity.' That is not to say there are not still people who have political cause to leave Cuba.” As with other countries, Rhodes said, “political asylum continues to be an option.” And, in fact, if a Cuban can get into the US and ask for asylum, adjudication of the asylum claim of political or other persecution normally will take several years, allowing time to be granted a green card under the Cuban Adjustment Act before there is even a ruling on the claim. A US lottery that gives green cards to 20,000 Cubans on the island each year remains in place, Rhodes said. • Rhodes and Obama obviously either do not know -- or, more likely, do not care -- that the Castro regime continues to arrest and torture dissidents and restrict civil liberties, including political and press freedoms. Neither it seems does Senator Patrick J. Leahy, who has long advocated rapprochement with Cuba. Leahy said in a statement : “this is a welcome step in reforming an illogical and discriminatory policy that contrasted starkly with the treatment of deserving refugees from other countries. Refugees from all countries should be treated the same way, and now they will be. That’s the American way.” Engage Cuba, a coalition of private US companies and organizations working to end the trade embargo still in place against Cuba, called it “a logical, responsible, and important step towards further normalizing relations with Cuba.” • • • DEAR READERS, we can put aside the self-interest of the Engage Cuba group -- they simply don't let freedom and human rights interfere with their bottom line. But, Barack Obama goes on incessantly about human rights and freedom and democracy. Do those words mean anything to him? Obviously, very little. His action Thursday to remove the possibility of freedom from tyranny for Cubans -- and, worse, to agree that some Cubans in America could be repatriated to a country run by violent thugs seems to put him firmly on the side of those who believe human beings are good for only one thing -- to further the interests of the state that "owns" them. • Go to Miami and talk to the Cubans who have escaped Castro -- ask them about the conditions their families still in Cuba live under -- listen to their stories of famine, of having life reduced to what, if anything, they will have for their next meal. Talk to Europeans who have "vacationed" in Cuba -- hear their stories of police goon squads keeping Cubans from talking to them -- listen to their amazement at the reality of the poverty-stricken, terrorized Cuba that differs so fundamentally from the picture painted by their own leftist socialist governments. • Ask yourself -- why would people risk their lives trying to cross by means of the flimsiest of boats and inner tubes a 90-mile stretch of ocean so dangerous that it has seldom been swum successfully, or even attempted, by professional swimmers. And then repeat the stench-soaked words of Barack Obama -- “We are going down a path in which we can open up our relations to Cuba in a way that ultimately will prompt more change in Cuba. And we’re already seeing it.” -- “It was important for us to engage more directly with the Cuban government and the Cuban people.” -- "So on this Human Rights Day, let us rededicate ourselves to the advancement of human rights and freedoms for all, and pledge always to live by the ideals we promote to the world." • Just as Obama disgracefully allowed Syria to become a killing field, found the moral imperative to prosecute only one person for the Benghazi attack after four years, ignored Russia taking over Crimea and invading Ukraine, paid the Iranians to develop nuclear weapons and support terrorism, allowed China to take over the South China Sea, refused to even try to keep North Korea under control, spoke glowingly of the Venezuela regime that has become a tyranny that cannot even feed its own people, and ignobly trashed Israel as he was packing up to leave the White House -- now Obama has cast the people of Cuba into outer darkness, giving one more brutal regime the benefit of the doubt at the expense of the human rights of its citizens. Yet, Obama allowed Kerry to call the Netanyahu government in Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, “the most right-wing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by its most extreme elements.” Obama has been both cooperative or toothless against ISIS, Bashar al-Assad, North Korea, Iran, Russia, China -- the world’s worst and most ruthless regimes. But as for Netanyahu and democratic Israel, he abandoned them just as he is now abandoning the people of Cuba. The Obama foreign policy record is one that should make many Americans feel sick at their stomachs -- especially those who could have spoken out but closed their eyes to the truth and instead bashed political leaders who speak for freedom, the Constitution and human rights.