Opinion

Trump Drops Bomb On Obama’s Cuba Policy

Humberto Fontova Author of The Longest Romance: The Mainstream Media and Fidel Castro
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Now that I am your President, America will expose the crimes of the Castro regime and stand with the Cuban people in their struggle for freedom….For nearly six decades, the Cuban people have suffered under communist domination. To this day, Cuba is ruled by the same people who killed tens of thousands of their own citizens, who sought to spread their repressive and failed ideology throughout our hemisphere, and who once tried to host enemy nuclear weapons 90 miles from our shores. (President Donald Trump, June 16, 2017.)

In a vicious sucker punch to the Fake News Media and Deep State, last Friday from Miami President Trump reminded many Americans (and revealed to others)  that the regime occupying the large Caribbean island 90 miles south of Florida isn’t mostly an innocent provider of free and fabulous healthcare. 

If the term “In-Your-Face” still means anything—then President Trump cranked it up several notches last Friday in Miami. To wit:

Liberals and libertarians constantly whine and whimper about our “shameful gunboat diplomacy” about our discredited and universally-reviled “cowboy diplomacy.”  The Bay of Pigs invasion always ranks near the top instigator of these liberal/libertarian whine-fests. Well, here’s  President Trump last Friday addressing the group (Cuban-Americans) who voted for him at the highest rate of any “ethnic” group in America– at the same rate, in fact, as their bosom- partners  as targets of media-derision “southern whites” : 

“I am so thrilled to be back here with all of my friends in Little Havana!  I love it. I love this city!…One of  the big HONORS….was the HONOR of getting the Bay of Pigs award  (by the Bay of Pigs Veterans Assoc. ) just before the election! (several Bay of Pigs veterans stood behind him on the stage) … and it’s great to be gathered in a place named for a TRUE HERO of the Cuban people! “ 

President Trump gave his address last Friday at Miami’s Manuel Artime theatre. Manuel Artime was among the leaders of the Cuban freedom- fighters who landed at the Bay of Pigs, fought to their last bullet, and inflicted casualties of ten to one against their Soviet-led enemies. This feat of arms by these mostly civilian volunteers still amazes professional military men. “They fought magnificently and were not defeated,” stressed Marine Col. Jack Hawkins a multi-decorated WWII and Korea vet who helped train them. “They were abandoned on the beach without the supplies and support promised by their sponsor, the Government of the United States.”

Indeed, modern history records few soldiers with the burning morale of the Bay of Pigs freedom-fighters. Their goal, after all, was to topple the mass-murdering, terror-sponsoring regime co-headed by Raul Castro, the man Obama high-fived in Havana last year and has greatly enriched with his anti-embargo policies. 

But OK, enough with the pageantry of the event. Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty: You see, amigos, as all that free Venezuelan oil stops flowing to the Castro family and Putin starts demanding actual payment (imagine that?) for Russian oil, the Castro regime was desperately counting on a “boom of U.S. tourists and U.S. hotel-building” as a new economic lifeline. Thanks to Obama’s “rapprochement” (i.e. surrenders and violations of U.S. law as codified in the Helms-Burton Act) this lifeline was already starting to gush.

Well, if the term “putting the kibosh on” still means anything, president Trump cranked it up several notches last week in Miami. Though hardly a comprehensive “rollback” of Obama’s capitulations to Castro as some claim, Trump’s announced Cuba policy still WHACKS the Castro-Family-Crime-and-Terror-Sponsoring-Syndicate (habitually and obscenely mislabeled as “Cuba” by the Fake News Media and Obama State Dept.) smack in the family jewels.

The announced policy, while leaving much of the window dressing intact (embassies open, cruise and airlines free to travel to and from the U.S. and the Castro family fiefdom)–while none of that changes, Trump’s announced policy very shrewdly aims for the very heart (or gonads) of the matter: U.S. tourism, the Stalinist regime’s cherished economic lifeline as all others dry-up.

In brief, the announced policy will tighten the rules for travel to Cuba from the U.S. Though 614,000 people visited the Castro fiefdom from the U.S. last year (depositing $BILLIONS in the coffers of the Castro regime’s military and secret police, who majority-own Cuba’s entire tourism infrastructure)—even given all that travel and spending, tourism to Cuba from the U.S. is technically illegal!

In brief, Trump’s policy will simply enforce U.S. law as codified by the U.S. Congress. (Quite a “revolutionary” concept after the Obama administration! No?).

President Trump’s policy was crafted, word has it, by Cuban-American Republican legislators Marco Rubio and Mario Diaz-Balart. Who better! These gentlemen know exactly what makes the Castro-Family-Crime-Syndicate tick.

Some academic “experts” will try chicken-entrail-reading the Castro regime’s official pronouncements for clues to its (genuine) reaction. We won’t bother with so fatuous an exercise.

Instead we’ll note the discomfiture (panic even!) of the Stalinist regime’s U.S.-based agents and their Obama State Dept. colleagues. The former fear for their paychecks, the latter for their “legacy.” And both of these rewards are now twirling like the contents of a slowly flushing toilet. 

If you need more proof—right on the heels of Trump’s big announcement in Miami last week– Moody’s Investor Service slashed the Castro fiefdom’s already abysmal credit rating to toilet contents level.