It is becoming increasingly difficult to understand the White House‘s reopening of relations with Cuba.
In addition to the renewed presence of Russian naval and intelligence facilities on the island nation and continued repression of the island’s population, the Castro regime has refused to make any significant concessions to the U.S., and indeed, has pressed baseless financial claims against America. There has been no progress on any restitution of private assets nationalized during the Cuban Revolution.
An example of the bizarre nature of President Obama’s relations with the Castro regime was seen on September 30, when a political dissident who was recently released, according to Cuban Exile Quarter attempted to escape into the U.S. embassy. Carlos Manuel Figueroa was returned to Cuban authorities, who reportedly beat him. According to Cuban Exile Quarter, “The human rights situation in Cuba has been steadily deteriorating during the Obama administration with rising levels of violence and the extrajudicial execution of opposition leaders since 2009. Equally concerning is the claim made by Ivan Hernandez Carrillo over twitter that Carlos Manuel Figueroa is a U.S. citizen of Cuban origin. The claim made by the Obama administration that human rights would be a priority with the new policy on Cuba would be laughable, if it were not so tragic.”
Human Rights Watch reports “The Cuban government continues to repress dissent and discourage public criticism. While in recent years it has relied less on long-term prison sentences to punish its critics, short-term arbitrary arrests of human rights defenders, independent journalists, and other critics have increased dramatically. Other repressive tactics employed by the government include beatings, public acts of shaming, and the termination of employment.”
This occurs despite the December 2014 announcement by President Obama that the United States would normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba and ease restrictions on travel and commerce with the island in exchange for several concessions by the Cuban government.
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Security officers virtually never present arrest orders to justify the detention of critics and threaten them with criminal sentences if they continue to participate in “counterrevolutionary” activities. In some cases, detainees are released after receiving official warnings, which prosecutors can then use in subsequent criminal trials to show a pattern of delinquent behavior. Dissidents said these warnings aim to discourage them from participating in activities seen as critical of the government.
Detention is often used preemptively to prevent individuals from participating in peaceful marches or meetings to discuss politics. In the days leading up to the summit meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), for example, which took place in Havana on January 28 and 29, 2014, at least 40 people were arbitrarily detained, and 5 held under house arrest until the conference had ended…
Members of the Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White)—a group founded by the wives, mothers, and daughters of political prisoners and which the government considers illegal—are routinely detained before or after they attend Sunday mass…Even after the conditional release of dozens of political prisoners in December 2014, dozens more remain in Cuban prisons according to local human rights groups. These groups estimate that there are more political prisoners whose cases they cannot document because the government prevents independent national or international human rights groups from accessing its prisons…Cubans who criticize the government continue to face the threat of criminal prosecution. They do not benefit from due process guarantees, such as the right to fair and public hearings by a competent and impartial tribunal. In practice, courts are “subordinated” to the executive and legislative branches, denying meaningful judicial independence…The government controls all media outlets in Cuba and tightly restricts access to outside information, severely limiting the right to freedom of expression. Only a very small fraction of Cubans are able to read independent websites and blogs because of the high cost of, and limited access to, the Internet…A May 2013 government decree directed at expanding Internet access stipulates that the Internet cannot be used for activities that undermine “public security, the integrity, the economy, independence, and national security” of Cuba—broadly worded conditions that could be used against government critics.”
The Menges Hemispheric Security Symposium held in October concluded: “The powerful, fact-based and analytically rigorous interventions by …world-class authorities underscore a reality lost on most Americans: The stakes regarding developments in Cuba and Venezuela – and, indeed, in much of the Western Hemisphere – could not be higher for the United States. The Castro brothers’ regime is a metastasizing cancer in our region, as is its client in Venezuela. President Obama’s much-ballyhooed rapprochement with the former is national security fraud. His administration’s ongoing efforts to achieve a similar outcome with the latter would greatly compound that act of malfeasance.”