Engaging Cuba’s communist dictatorship will fail, as it has failed countless times in the past

Over the decades, several U.S. administrations have tried engaging with the Castro dictatorship, and each time has been an utter failure. Nothing has changed in Cuba over the past 64 years, so the results will always be the same.

Logan Williams explains in The GeoPolitics:

The United States Should Be Wary of Engaging Cuba

We’ve been down this road before as a nation and the results weren’t promising.

The Wall Street Journal recently published several revelations regarding Chinese spying operations targeting the United States from Cuba, as well as the impending construction of a Chinese military base on the island, which sits just over ninety miles from the United States’ coastline. These reports have thrust Cuba back into the center of our national political discourse and have catalyzed a new call for United States’ re-engagement with Cuba. The members of this movement (foreign policy scholars, elected officials, and lobbyists of various stripes) justify their demands by promulgating the notion that a U.S. détente with Cuba would serve as an effective counterbalance to increasing Chinese influence on the island.

This idea is not new; America’s enemies have had a strong presence in Cuba since Fidel Castro seized control of the island on Jan. 1, 1959, through a violent revolution, and interested parties in the United States have been insisting upon the adoption of a soft foreign policy towards the brutal dictatorship for just as long. However, this argument for rapprochement rests upon the belief that the United States’ efforts at accommodation would be matched in-kind, and that greater cooperation will eventually lead to a growth of U.S. influence on the island — which couldn’t be more wrong. The United States has been down this road before and the resulting historical record couldn’t be more harrowing.

In the early seventies, Nixon’s administration attempted to re-establish relations with Castro’s Cuba, utilizing Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as an intermediary. Unfortunately, the United States – under President Nixon – began discussions with Cuba, only to be forced to abandon these efforts during the early years of the Ford administration due to Castro’s dedicated support for terrorism abroad and due to Cuba’s various disastrous international interventions (e.g., Angola in 1975).

In the nineties, Bill Clinton attempted his own version of re-engagement with Cuba, which, unbeknownst to the US government, was simultaneously operating a large spy network in the United States, known as the Wasp Network. This spy network was tasked with collecting damaging information on the United States, but it was also tasked with planning terrorist attacks on American targets, and conducting assassinations of American citizens. The Cuban government also responded by shooting down two unarmed American civilian aircraft, resulting in the death of 4 American citizens.

When Obama first began to restore Cuban relations in 2009, Cuba responded by seizing and imprisoning Alan Gross, an American citizen performing human rights-related work on the island. In 2013, Cuba was caught smuggling weapons to North Korea, in violation of a litany of international sanctions. In 2015, Cuba was caught receiving smuggled weapons from China. Additionally, in 2015 when an American diplomatic delegation was visiting Cuba, the island’s government invited a Russian spy ship into Havana’s harbor as a symbol of Russia’s and Cuba’s unbreakable alliance. Finally, during Obama’s “Cuban Thaw,” multiple human rights organizations reported a drastic increase (rather than the expected decrease) in Cuban oppression of its citizens.

Continue reading HERE.