We Opened to a Cuba That Has Not Reformed

For John, BLUF:  The opening to Cuba was overdone.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Cuba Kills Another Dissident

Sub-headline is "After Obama’s detente: More tourists on the island and more repression." This is The Wall Street Journal, from Opinionator Mary Anastasia O'Grady, on 5 March 2017.

Score another kill for the Cuban military dictatorship: Last month it eliminated Afro-Cuban dissident Hamell Santiago Más Hernández, an inmate of one of its most notoriously brutal prisons.

The remarkable thing was not the death of a critic.  That’s routine in a police state that holds all the guns, bayonets, money and food.  What’s noteworthy is that the world hardly blinked, which is to say that two years after President Obama’s detente with Raúl Castro, the regime still dispatches adversaries with impunity.  It also routinely blocks visitors to the island, even of the leftist stripe—more on this in a moment—in order to keep the population isolated.  “Normalization” to the contrary, Cuba is the same totalitarian hellhole that it has been for the past 58 years.

Regards  —  Cliff