One year after Obama recognized their dictator, Cuba’s dissidents cry foul

Mike Gonzalez in Forbes:

One Year After Obama Recognized Their Dictator, Cuba’s Dissidents Cry Foul

It’s been a full year since President Obama announced he would recognize the dictatorship of Raul Castro, and the tally so far is grim. Cuba is further than ever from becoming a democracy where people enjoy normal civil liberties; it is in fact closer to becoming what China specialist have identified as a rival model, a “resilient authoritarian regime.”

Just last week, the Castro regime thumbed its nose at the world by arresting between 150-200 dissidents on Human Rights Day. The dictator, Raul Castro, knows he can act with impunity because the world has never complained about what he does, and now that, too, includes the United States.

For 34 consecutive Sundays—that is, almost since President Obama extended his hand in friendship to the country’s oppressors—regime-organized mobs have blocked a brave group of middle-aged women known as the Ladies in White from marching after church service. These women are always insulted, often beaten and occasionally arrested.

Meanwhile, Castro has put family members in charge of a corrupt regime that can now expect to have durability after the two Castro brothers pass from the scene. Castro’s son-in-law, Gen. Luis Alberto Rodriguez, controls an estimated 90 percent of the Cuban economy through the holding company he leads, GAESA. As Bloomberg put it recently about would-be foreign investors, “wait until they learn all roads lead to Raul Castro’s son-in-law.”

The island’s defenseless dissidents have bitterly denounced what they term Obama’s betrayal of their movement. On the day of the anniversary this week, more than 100 former political prisoners who served close to 2,000 years in Castro’s Gulag signed and prepared to deliver to the administration a letter.

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