Widespread rationing in Cuba

Michael Weissenstein and Andrea Rodriguez report in AP,

The Cuban government announced Friday that it is launching widespread rationing of chicken, eggs, rice, beans, soap and other basic products in the face of a grave economic crisis.

Commerce Minister Betsy Díaz Velázquez told the state-run Cuban News Agency that various forms of rationing would be employed in order to deal with shortages of staple foods. She blamed the hardening of the U.S. trade embargo by the Trump administration. Economists give equal or greater blame to a plunge in aid from Venezuela, where the collapse of the state-run oil company has led to a nearly two-thirds cut in shipments of subsidized fuel that Cuba used for power and to earn hard currency on the open market.

Read more here.

How did Socialism work out in Cuba and Venezuela?

Glenn Reynolds writes about it here.

Cuba tried to deafen US officials stationed there!

Bret Baier's excellent Special Report starts off tonight looking at the crisis with North Korea, then goes to Mueller's pre-dawn invasion of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's home.

Did you hear about Cuba's attempt to deafen US officials stationed in Cuba? I will look into that this evening.

I was pleased to see Bill Bennett on Bret's panel, along with Charles Lane and Eli Lake. They analyzed the relationship between Trump and McConnell, among other news of the day.

Obama's obsession

Alberto de la Cruz writes at the Babalu Blog,

There really is no other word to describe Obama’s fascination with Cuba’s apartheid dictators than an “obsession.” As a country ruled by a despotic, totalitarian regime for more than half century that has completely destroyed its economy and pilfered its resources, Cuba offers very little to the U.S. in its current condition. Nevertheless, Obama is obsessed with richly rewarding and propping up the very regime that has made Cuba into the hellhole it has been since 1959.

Read more here.

"The life that was not lived."

I read something yesterday – something that nobody in Cuba would be able to read. “The greatest evil of the tyranny” it said “was the theft of six generations of life.”

Forget the gulags and the concentration camps and the firing squads. Those are the stories that made the papers at least – stories that were told. No – the most important part of this tragedy is not what happened, but what didn’t happen. The novels that were not written, stories of beach and mountain and freedom and loss; the beautiful paintings that did not come to be, which in turn did not inspire abounding love – the love of storybooks. The cuisine that was not refined; the businesses that did not provide for families; inventions that do not help humanity; diseases that were not cured.

The life that was not lived.

...For those of us who are writers, the unwritten story of Cuba is the saddest of all.

Read more here.

h/t Gerard Vanderleun

Socialist Kleptocrats

At USA Today Glenn Reynolds writes about Venezuela and Cuba. In Venezuela,

...things have gotten worse, and it’s poorer Venezuelans — the very ones that Chavez’s revolution was allegedly intended to help — who are starving. Many are even taking to boats, echoing, as the Times notes, “an image so symbolic of the perilous journeys to escape Cuba or Haiti — but not oil-rich Venezuela.

Well, Venezuela was once rich. But mismanagement and kleptocracy can make any country poor and Venezuela — as is typical with countries whose leaders promise to soak the rich for the benefit of the poor — has had plenty of both. And now, though Hugo Chavez’s family has grown fabulously wealthy, the poor have nothing. As one refugee quoted in the Times article says, “I’m leaving with nothing. But I have to do this. Otherwise, we will just die here hungry.”

...Which brings me to the other story, the death of Cuban dictator-for-life Fidel Castro. Although many among Western political and entertainment elites still think of Fidel Castro fondly, such people are, at best, what Lenin called “useful idiots.” In fact, as Yale professor Carlos Eire notes in The Washington Post, Castro was not a benevolent patron of the poor, but a "brutal Big Brother” who crushed dissent, tortured, imprisoned and executed his critics, and stole everything he cared to steal from his island’s inhabitants. He lived the lifestyle of an emperor, while his people were subjected to poverty. He persecuted gay people and Christians, and exported war and terror.

Oh, he said things about equality and justice, but those were lies. In his country, as in socialist dictatorships everywhere, there were two sets of rules: Those for the connected elite, and those for the subjects. They talk about equality, but what they set up turns out to be an awful lot like a monarchy.

Both Venezuela and Cuba have suffered under leaders who enriched themselves and their families. Chavez’s daughter is the richest person in Venezuela, with a net worth in the billions, while in true “socialist equality” fashion, Cuba is now run by Castro’s brother, Raul.

Yet their poverty and oppression are treated as if they’re just “bad luck.” But it’s only bad luck in the Heinlein sense. As Heinlein also said, a good cook can take wholesome ingredients and produce something much more valuable. A bad cook, on the other hand, can take those same ingredients — valuable in themselves — and produce an inedible mess.

Socialist kleptocrats are like Heinlein’s bad cook, with the added trait of stealing any edible leftovers for themselves and their kin. Perhaps the world will learn a valuable lesson from the fates of Cuba and Venezuela, and avoid such “bad luck” in the future.

Cuba and Venezuela will be absorbing much of Obama's remaining time in office.

William Russell Mead writes at The American Interest about the failing economies of two of America's neighbors, Cuba and Venezuela. Mead thinks these two countries will absorb a lot of Obama's remaining time in office. Read more here.

What was Obama seeking to achieve in Cuba?

Jonah Goldberg writes,

Obama wanted to check off an item on his legacy bucket list and get some photo-ops, not help Cuba or advance American national interests. That’s what he did.

Obma ignorantly mentioned Cuba's emphasis on healthcare. Want to know about Cuba's healthcare? Jonah links to this report.

Apology tour goes south

President Obama has left Cuba. I guess the ballgame is over. Where is he now? Argentina! Rush Limbaugh is confused: what do we have to apologize to Argentina for? "Did we forget to export Madonna to Argentina?"

A game?

Senator Marco Rubio speaks out against Obama's trip to Cuba:

...one of the most disgraceful trips ever taken by a U.S. president anywhere in the world. This is an Obama presidential trip whose ultimate results will be giving away legitimacy and money to an anti-American regime that actively undermines our national security interests and acts against our values every single day. President Obama’s entourage will sleep in hotels controlled by the Cuban military that were confiscated by the regime and are among the $7 billion in unpaid legal claims owed to American property owners. When President Obama arrives in Havana on Sunday, he will visit Catholic Church sights and church officials, yet he’s inexplicably expected to skip St. Rita Church, where the Ladies In White have shed much blood and received routine beatings at the hands of the Castro regime for simply demanding their loved ones’ freedom.

...On Monday, President Obama will showcase the most damaging part of his Cuba policy: the lawless, one-sided weakening of the LIBERTAD Act that seeks to enrich American businesses and the Castro regime’s police state, without any concessions from Cuba that lead to greater freedoms for the Cuban people.

...“On Tuesday, the irony should not be lost on anyone that President Obama will be giving a speech at yet another property confiscated by the Castro regime. President Obama’s decision to end his trip at a baseball game is a fitting symbol of this trip and of his entire Cuba policy: he thinks this is a game. What’s not a game is the repression, intimidation and exploitation Cuba’s baseball players face and that has led to many of them defecting the first chance they get, and that would probably lead some of them, should they be able to meet and speak freely with President Obama, to ask him directly for asylum and a flight to freedom on Air Force One.

“As a whole, President Obama’s trip to Cuba and his policy of one-sided concessions to this regime are as naïve as his world view and as misguided as his foreign policy affecting other parts of the world. America should be standing with our allies and democracy advocates around the world, not embracing, enriching and empowering our enemies, the way President Obama is about to do in Cuba.”

Read more here.

I miss you already, Marco.

Shaming, harassment, humiliation, and kissing up

Daniel Henninger has some thoughts in the Wall Street Journal about the recent get together of Pope Francis and Raul Castro.

For starters, we posit a hypothetical: Let us assume that instead of being the pope, Francis was just a guy in Cuba named Jorge Mario Bergoglio, living in Havana. If this guy no one had heard of summoned the courage to say something in public as harsh about Castro’s communist system as the pope did about capitalism, Raúl would do any number of things to Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

Raúl would have the Cuban police grab him off the street and drive him far outside Havana, where they would beat him up and abandon him. Or they would dump Jorge in prison, where he’d get beaten some more and better not get sick because medical treatment for political dissidents is hard to come by. Or a mob might show up to scream obscenities at him anytime he showed up in public.

Shaming, harassment and humiliation is what Raúl and Fidel have done to, among many others, the Ladies in White, who are wives of jailed dissidents, and who march in Havana to—of all things—Sunday Mass. What they find on the way to Mass is not fellow communicant Raúl but his mobs or police, which routinely attack them.

We know this because Raúl’s brutal modus operandi for critics of Cuba’s system is described at length in reports by the U.S. State Department and Human Rights Watch. But the Castros’ celebrity status with international elites transcends anything they do, and so Cuba is a member of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.

Last weekend German Chancellor Angela Merkel went to Russia to honor the Russian soldiers who died in World War II. But while in Moscow, Ms. Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, said directly to Vladimir Putin: “I would like also to recall that the end of World War II did not bring democracy and freedom for all of Europe.”

Would that one of these men of the world had the guts to say that to Fidel’s face in Havana.

Read more here.

Obama employing Gruberesque tactics

Jonathan Gruber, professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaks during a House Oversight Committee hearing in Washington last year. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)
Marc A. Thiessen writes in the Washington Post,

Remember Jonathan Gruber, the Obamacare architect who as caught on tape boasting how the president had taken advantage of the “stupidity” of American voters to pass his health-care law?

Well it seems, Obama is applying the “Gruber Doctrine” once again — this time to foreign policy.

The Gruber Doctrine is based on the premise that, in the words of the now infamous MIT professor, “lack of transparency is a huge political advantage” and that the “basic exploitation of the lack of . . . understanding of the American voter” is “really, really critical” for enacting your preferred policies.

That is precisely what Obama is doing when it comes to Iran and Cuba.

...Will sanctions relief be front-loaded, as Iran insists, or will sanctions come off gradually, as the Iranians meet certain performance benchmarks? Will there be any transparency into Iran’s past secret nuclear activity, information that is critical to verifying its compliance today? Will there be “snap inspections” and access to all Iranian facilities, both civilian and military? Iran says no. Obama is counting on the fact that Americans won’t be able to follow all the details about “centrifuges” and “domestic enrichment capacity.” He won’t share the details but wants us to trust him that there will be “unprecedented verification.” If you believe that, you probably still think that if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.

Obama is also counting on exploiting the “lack of understanding of the American voter” when it comes to his normalization of relations with the Castro regime in Cuba. At a news conference in Panama this weekend, Obama declared that “There is majority support of our policy in the United States” and that “the American people don’t need to be persuaded that this is in fact the right thing to do.” A new poll commissioned by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Roger Noriega for InterAmerican Security Watch finds that Americans do support Obama’s plan by a margin of 51 to 38 percent . . . until they learn some basic facts about Cuba. When Americans are told that Cuba is hosting Russian ships in its harbors, opposition to normalization jumps to 58 percent while support sinks to 30 percent. When Americans are told of Cuba’s attempts to smuggle 240 tons of weaponry to North Korea, opposition jumps to 63 percent and support drops to 26 percent. When Americans are told that Cuba is harboring a cop-killer and terrorists, opposition jumps to 63 percent, and support plummets to 23 percent. When asked whether sanctions should be maintained pending Cuba’s progress on human rights and free elections, Americans agree by a margin of 64-16. And when asked whether Cuba’s designation as a supporter of terrorism should be maintained because it harbors terrorists, respondents agreed 68 percent to 16 percent.

...Obama and his foreign policy team know what is good for us. And if we’re too “stupid” to catch the deception, that’s our problem, not theirs.

It worked for Obamacare, they figure, so why not Iran and Cuba?

Cuba's military

Did you know that Cuba's senior military officers

are in charge of sugar production, tourism, import-export, information technology and communications, civil aviation and cigar production?

James Bruno was the State Department’s former representative to negotiations with Cuba’s military, and he shares today at Politico his insights gained from that experience. Cuba's military establishment is the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, or FAR.

Bruno writes,

Under Raúl Castro’s leadership from 1959 until he succeeded brother Fidel as president in 2006, the now 60,000-strong military has been widely considered to be Cuba’s best managed and stablest official entity. Furthermore, it has never been called upon to fire on or suppress Cuban citizens, even during the so-called Maleconazo protests in 1994, and most observers believe the FAR would refuse any orders to do so.

Former CIA Cuba analyst Brian Latell believes the pragmatic-oriented FAR will be easier to deal with than the old-guard civilian leaders.

“The generals will either dominate a praetorian successor regime after Fidel Castro dies or is incapacitated, or, like the militaries in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, be the willing accomplices in the demise of Marxism,” according to Latell.

The end of Soviet subsidies also led the FAR to expand into non-military-related economic activities in order to help pay for defense outlays as well as to fund the civilian side of government. It has focused its efforts on three key sectors: agriculture, manufacturing and tourism. Many high-ranking active and retired FAR officers subsequently have turned into “entrepreneur soldiers,” i.e., olive-drab businessmen in charge of large, hard-currency-earning industries, all controlled by GAESA, headed by Raúl’s son-in-law, Luis Alberto Rodríguez, an Army brigadier who speaks English with an impeccable upper-class British accent.

Read more here.

Thanks to Betsy Newmark

Conan in Cuba

Betsy's Page has this:

Carmen Pelaez, a Cuban-American filmmaker and writer, expresses what she thought about Conan O'Brien filming an episode of his show in Cuba.

The Cuban regime, like all dictatorships, depends heavily on propaganda and learning it would take center stage on a late night show filled me with dread. Conan promised that his goal in Cuba was to make people laugh, that he wouldn’t touch the complicated politics of the situation. Ay Conan, if it were only that easy....

You can’t go to Cuba and be apolitical. Traveling there is a political act alone. The brands he joked about at the grocery store were all companies that were appropriated by the Cuban government. That cigar factory he visited was taken from a Cuban family of cigar makers. Cubans cannot afford to eat at paladares because the average Cuban only makes $20 a month, creating an unofficial tourist apartheid where foreigners enjoy Cuba while Cubans endure the regime. The “ruins” that took Conan’s breath away are dilapidated buildings that thousands of people have to live in because they are not free to move out of them without government permission.

Did I expect Conan to go deep? No. That would be unfair of me. He wasn’t there to interview Tania Brugera, a performance artist under house arrest for wanting to place an open mic at the Plaza de la Revolucion for Cuban citizens to express their opinion freely. He wasn’t going to visit artist and performer El Sexto in one of Cuba’s most brutal jails. Also arrested for an intended but not executed performance art piece. He was there to connect with the people. But he was only connecting with the people that work in tourism — which any Cuban will tell you are a small and distinct sector of the population. Even acknowledging that would have been nice, but instead Conan lamented that in a few years there will probably be American stores in colonial Havana. That’s when he lost me.

Why shouldn’t there be a Foot Locker or a Gap in Havana? If Paris can handle multiple Nike stores — I’m pretty sure Havana can too. The idea that commerce would ruin the “ruins” disregards the desperate need for things to change in Cuba. Why shouldn’t Cubans benefit from capitalism the same way Conan does without losing what makes them special? After all, every show clip I clicked on came with an embedded commercial. If Conan really loved the Cuban people as much as he seemed to, why wouldn’t he want the same opportunities for them that have given him such a wonderful platform?

I don’t doubt that Conan’s intentions were sincere. Cubans are awesome. We know how to have fun and have always had a natural kinship with Americans. But by the end of the show I felt I had watched a very friendly stranger go to a party on the third floor of my family’s house, while my family was being held captive in the basement, desperate to escape. I would have loved to have seen him connect with all the floors in that house and not just the ones approved by watchful, very political eyes.

"Cool" Cuban Communism

Have you got your Che Guevara tee shirt yet? Isn't it cool? But wait...Guevara in the name of communism killed lots of people. He said, "We must eliminate all newspapers. We cannot make a revolution with a free press." Although the communist regime in Cuba outlawed labor unions, American teachers wear the cool tee shirt. The ideological fanaticism of men like Guevara is why the people of Cuba have remained poor since the 1959 communist revolution.

Is bankrupt Cuba a beacon of the future, or a museum of the past? No internet access! Michael Moynihan of the Daily Beast discusses it all with John Stossel of Fox News:

Our wonderful new relationship with Cuba

Obama said Cuba was going to release 53 prisoners as part of his deal with the Castro brothers. We, in turn, were going to release three spies (which we have done). Cuba has not released any of the 53. Mary O'Grady comments about Obama's deal:

Now, little by little, what he says he got in the “negotiations” seems to be evaporating while what he gave away appears reckless.

Cuba still supports the FARC, the Colombian terrorist group, it got caught in 2013 trying to smuggle weapons through the Panama Canal to North Korea, and credible intelligence analysts say Cuba has provided Venezuela the technology it needs to falsify identities for Middle East terrorists.

In the weeks since Mr. Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba, reports from the island say that more than 50 dissidents have been arrested, including the husband of the dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez. Most have been released but some remain in prison.

Don’t expect much outrage from Washington. Mr. Obama wouldn’t want to damage his newly reconciled relationship with the police state.

Read more here.
Update: Cuba has released "some" of the 53 prisoners.

Should the Pope consider taking up the cause of freedom?

The apparently key role played by Pope Francis to encourage talks between Obama and the Castro brothers is causing much controversy.

Sen. Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American from Florida who has led the Republicans' criticism of Obama's executive actions on Cuba, also took a swipe at the pope, telling reporters in Washington that he would "ask His Holiness to take up the cause of freedom and democracy."

Read more here.

Givng a Communist regime a new lease on life

The Editorial Board of the Washington Post analyzes Obama's actions last week on Communist Cuba, and concludes:

Mr. Obama may claim that he has dismantled a 50-year-old failed policy; what he has really done is give a 50-year-old failed regime a new lease on life.

Read the whole thing here.

Marco Rubio lets it all hang out in an interview with Mark Levin

Mark Levin interviews Senator Marco Rubio about Obama's reach out to his fellow leftists in Cuba here.

Another concession to tyranny