Even Obama Can't Open Cuba's Clenched Fist

Even Obama Can't Open Cuba's Clenched Fist
Posted February 23rd, 2010 at 10:00am in American Leadership

Cuba's communist regime lashed out at the Obama Administration over the
weekend following bilateral meetings in Havana.

A visit by a senior State Department official — Principal Deputy
Assistant Secretary Craig Kelly – marked the highest-level contact thus
far. The chief aim of the visit: a discussion of migration issues.

Ambassador Kelly also tested the political waters by meeting with
prominent Cuban dissidents and civil society figures.

The Cuban reaction was swift and predictable. The Castro regime fulminated:

from the very day he [Kelly] arrived in the country, [he] was
warned that a visit with dissidents would not be tolerated. This
meeting "demonstrated anew that (U.S.) priorities are more related to
supporting the counterrevolution and the promotion of subversion to
destabilize the Cuban revolution than with the creation of a climate
conducive to real solutions to bilateral problems.

To reinforce its message of repression, the regime prevented prominent
dissident Jorge Luis Garcia Perez "Antunez" from attending the Kelly
meeting; roughed up demonstrators supporting the 76-day hunger strike of
gravely-ill prisoner of conscience Oscar Zapata Tamayo, and continued to
hold U.S. citizen and government contractor Alan Gross on trumped-up
spying charges.

The Obama Administration's attempt at better relations with Cuba
flounders upon rocky shoals. Like its predecessors, the Administration
is unable to make headway against a regime committed to defending the
absolutism of its Marxist-Leninist system and preserving the unchecked
rule of the Castro brothers.

Cuba's broadside against Ambassador Kelly again demonstrates the real
limits of engagement with the gaggle of anti-American tyrants stretching
from Havana and Caracas to Damascus and Tehran.

Even Obama Can't Open Cuba's Clenched Fist | The Foundry: Conservative
Policy News. (23 February 2010)
http://blog.heritage.org/2010/02/23/even-obama-cant-open-cubas-clenched-fist/