The U.S. snubs Cuban dissidents

The Post's View

The U.S. snubs Cuban dissidents
By Editorial Board August 13

THE AMERICAN flag is a powerful symbol of the country's long and noble
struggle to defend the values of freedom and democracy. When Secretary
of State John F. Kerry raises it over the U.S. embassy in Cuba on
Friday, the ceremony will mark an end to a half-century of hostility
between the two nations. President Obama has gambled that establishing
normal relations with Cuba — commerce, information, culture and "soft
power" — is the best way to change the isolated island, still in the
grip of the Castro brothers and their sclerotic revolution.

What's unfortunate about the scenario planned for Havana is that Mr.
Kerry has decided to omit the very people in Cuba who embody the values
that the American flag represents: human dignity, the wisdom of the
individual above the state and free access to basic rights of expression
in speech, assembly and thought. These people — the dissidents in Cuba
who have fought tirelessly for democracy and human rights, and who
continue to suffer regular beatings and arrests — will not be witnesses
to the flag-raising. They were not invited.

The official U.S. explanation for excluding the dissidents is that the
flag-raising ceremony is a government-to-government affair. This is
lame. Inviting the dissidents would be a demonstration to Raúl and Fidel
Castro of what the flag stands for: people freely choosing their
leaders, a pluralism of views and a public engaging in the institutions
and traditions of a healthy civil society. Not inviting them is a sorry
tip of the hat to what the Castros so vividly stand for: diktat,
statism, control and rule by fear.

It would not have been hard to find witnesses to this turning point who
have been muzzled and physically injured in their quest to be heard:
dissidents Jorge Luis García Pérez and Antonio Rodiles, the blogger
Yoani Sánchez, members of the Ladies in White, to name just a few. Mr.
Kerry offers to meet with some of them separately, out of public view.
It is insulting and acquiesces in the Castros' desire that the
dissidents be hidden away.

In a sense, the "government-to-government" excuse exemplifies what has
been wrong in Mr. Obama's outreach from the start. Engagement could help
spark change in Cuba; most Cuban democrats agree. But it won't happen
automatically: Just look at China, with its capitalism and wealth
blended with increasingly repressive rule.

Mr. Obama could have designed an engagement policy that made room for
human rights and its courageous advocates, as he once promised them he
would do. Instead, he's bestowed all legitimacy on a government that can
claim none in its own right — that rules through force, and not the
consent of the governed. Maybe Mr. Kerry can at least leave an empty
chair at the ceremony to symbolize the people, and the values, that will
be kept outside the fence.

Source: The U.S. snubs Cuban dissidents - The Washington Post -
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-outrageously-snubs-cuban-dissidents/2015/08/13/1f1f81ec-41f8-11e5-846d-02792f854297_story.html