It took the Joe Biden government nearly a week, but it finally — under some pressure — admitted that the Cuban people are rising up against their communist government. Take a look.
It’s not as if the Democrats were not aware that Cuba’s government is communist. The Castro kleptocrats have been in power for 62 years. That’s just a few years longer than Joe Biden has occupied political office grifting and grinning in the Senate and now the White House. But after a week of badgering, mostly by that lone Fox reporter Peter Doocy, Psaki finally admitted that yes, Cuba’s government is communist and that’s a failed ideology. She also had to justify her lies about the protest from earlier in the week by discussing shortages, which only point out her moral failing since the protests began: Cubans have dealt with shortages for about 62 years now, ever since the communists took over. Those shortages didn’t start last week or last year or last decade. They started last century, before Psaki was even born, and as noted, just a few years before Biden’s tenure in politics.
Before admitting that Cubans are protesting their communist government, which is brutally cracking down on them, the Biden government instituted one of the most egregiously inhumane policies ever to come from a United States administration. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, a Cuban refugee at one time, announced that even if Cubans manage to make the hazardous journey successfully across the 90 miles of ocean that separates Cuba from Florida, this country will not accept them.
“Let me be clear: If you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States.”
That policy might superficially be justified on safety grounds. The trip across from Cuba to Florida is often attempted in rickety boats and rafts, often homemade, that are not up for the journey. The Straits of Florida are shark-infested. It’s a treacherous trip.
But so is walking across Mexico, as thousands of migrants have done in direct response to Biden’s campaign rhetoric and his Oval Office policies that effectively sounded the call for a land rush. Mexico is a failing state. The drug cartels are often far better funded and outgun Mexico’s military and law enforcement. Some cartels have their own version of special forces. The trip across Mexico is far from safe. Add in the coyotes and the weather and terrain as well. Factor in the fact that many of the migrants wind up indebted to the cartels and coyotes who help them cross, in effect indenturing them to years of servitude. Add in the human trafficking that the porous borders facilitates. Add in the ongoing national security threat that an effectively open border is. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of migrants are known to have died making the journey during the current border crisis. On all these grounds and more, the Straits have to be judged far less of a threat to Americans than Biden’s ongoing border crisis.
So the Biden administration has little to stand on in making a distinction between the two journeys on safety or security grounds. Of the two, in fact, it’s easy to argue that the southern border’s porousness endangers migrants and Americans far more than the Straits of Florida. Fentanyl is flooding across the southern border at record rates. We now have an opioid overdose epidemic in our cities. That ramped up during the height of the pandemic. Biden’s border policies have allowed more drugs to flood in than ever before. Do the math. Drugs are not pouring into the United States across the Straits at anywhere near the rate they are across the catastrophic southern border.
Meanwhile, in and around Florida, Biden could have ordered the U.S. Navy to stop its woke-a-thons and go help Cubans who want to flee. They meet the textbook United Nations definition of refugees:
Refugees are persons who are outside their country of origin for reasons of feared persecution, conflict, generalized violence, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order and, as a result, require international protection. The refugee definition can be found in the 1951 Convention and regional refugee instruments, as well as UNHCR’s Statute.
Once Cubans are on rafts off the island, how are they not refugees? They clearly are.
The United States has the largest military surface fleet in the world by far. Biden, who called the Cuban uprising a “call for freedom,” could have done the obvious and moral thing and sent the Navy to help. It has a long history of aiding people in crisis, including the Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s who are analogous to today’s Cuban refugees. Helping refugees from Cuba would be easy even given the Navy’s current state of unreadiness. In fact, a real-world mission might help the Navy brass refocus back to their core missions.
Biden has not given that order.
The reason seems obvious: Cubans settle in the United States, assimilate, thrive, and become some of the most patriotic Americans — and they tend to vote Republican. Two of our most prominent senators, Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas, are some of the most outspoken patriots and most articulate critics of Biden. The Cubans flying American flags as they risk imprisonment and death battling the Castro regime provide evidence of what they believe and why they are fighting. These are not economic refugees protesting shortages. They are not attempting the journey in response to Biden’s campaign rhetoric. They are aligning themselves with the United States and the American Revolution, and in so doing, alienating the leftist Biden government, at least until polls tell them that they made the wrong move.
Unless and until that happens, Joe Biden is presiding over a government that’s starting to get its rhetoric right, but is keeping its policies in line with what the communists want: words, but no meaningful assistance. This is brutal and inhumane. Cubans have deserved freedom for decades. Communism has destroyed that country and kept it decades behind the rest of the world. America is the best-positioned country in the world to help Cubans seeking freedom. They are seeking it now, more directly than ever since the communist takeover, knowing the risks they are taking.
The world’s most powerful republic is just 90 miles away and its powerful navy could be far closer than that. We have a Marine base on Cuba itself. If Biden fails to lift a finger to help them, he should be ashamed and so should anyone who voted for him.