CUBA
Communist Cuba continues to repress the Cuban people while simultaneously undermining democracy in the region, according to the State Department’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Michael Kozak. He said the United States is increasing pressure on the Castro regime to “stop the repression of its citizens and its intervention in other countries, particularly Venezuela.”
The country’s leadership is unable to produce the resources it needs to feed its population. Kozak noted that “Its economy is parasitic, depending for years on massive subsidies from the Soviet Union, and later on depending on a revenue stream from its essentially colonial relationship with Venezuela.” The extreme poverty of Venezuela is now impacting Cuba as its communist economic advisors find themselves facing extreme shortages under the government-controlled economy.
US policy toward Cuba is designed to restrict their other key sources of revenue to force the regime to face up to the deficiencies of its own model and allow some major freedom to its own people. The US is exposing the truth about the Cuban medical missions program, a moneymaking scheme disguised as humanitarian assistance, according to Kozak. The State Department also is discouraging travel that involves staying in hotels run by the Cuban military to break the monopoly of the Cuban military as established on processing remittances.
VENEZUELA
Elliott Abrams, the US Special Representative for Venezuela, said that there were roughly 7,000 extrajudicial killing over the last year in the country. He quoted the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, Michele Bachelet, as saying that the UN “remains concerned about the lack of independence of the justice system in Venezuela,” and “is concerned about the continuing use of the military justice system to try civilians.”
The UN report stated that “Relatives of victims also reported various forms of intimidation, threats, and reprisals by members of the security forces to stop them from seeking justice. In the most serious cases, this led to forced and prolonged displacement of family members or even, in some cases, their killing” and “Documented cases included severe beatings with boards, suffocation with plastic bags and chemicals, submerging the head of a victim underwater, electric shocks to the eyelids, and sexual violence in the form of electric shocks to genitalia.”
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CHINA
No foreign policy human rights problem the US faces is greater than that posed by China, according to Secretary of State Michael Pompeo. In a recent interview he cited the enormous risk to believers of all faiths inside of China and offered the mass genocide suffered by the Uyghur people at the hands of the communist regime as an example of China’s egregious behavior. He added that Christians have been under pressure inside of China for a long time and that the situation is deteriorating. Pompeo pointed out that Beijing appears to be hacking Vatican websites to get a jump on negotiations with the Vatican about the appropriate role for the Catholic Church inside of China.
He believes this type of behavior is typical of the regime as it threatens total rule by the Chinese Communist Party. Pompeo said: “They can’t allow religious freedom because people of conscience understand that those freedoms that they value would be at risk.” The party “understands that the things the CCP leadership want to keep people from doing would be a risk if they permitted any dissent or exercise of individual conscience rights,” he said.
In his final comment to a reporter Thursday, Pompeo said: “Weakness breeds risk and strength is respected with respect to the Chinese Communist Party. So, you can see that in how China has responded to President Trump just being candid, just being honest. This isn’t about being angry. This is about rebalancing a relationship that has fallen out of balance over 40 years and demanding that the Chinese Communist Party participate on the global stage in the way that we demand every country does.”
DARIA NOVAK served in the United States State Department during the Reagan Administration, and currently is on the Board of the American Analysis of News and Media Inc., which publishes usagovpolicy.com and the New York Analysis of Policy and Government. Each Saturday, she presents key updates on U.S. foreign policy from the State Department.
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