Obama's Vapid Speech to Castro's Cuban Subjects

It required an exiled Cuban to expose the rank hubris that was President Obama's "address to the Cuban people" on his recent visit to that devastated island. Carlos Eire is professor of history at Yale and author of the National Book Award-winning memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy and its sequel, Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy . At the invitation of Scott Johnson of PowerLine blog, Prof. Eire wrote an analysis excoriating the President's myths, platitudes and lies passed on to the Cuban people. You'll have to click the link to appreciate his evisceration of the President's words in its entirety, but here is a sample to whet your appetite:

President Obama’s so-called “remarks to the Cuban people” – delivered in Havana and broadcast throughout Cuba on Tuesday the 22nd of March 2016–were not in the least surprising or remarkable.

It was a classic example of Obamaspeak: a complex, interwoven tapestry of vague platitudes, potentially inspiring anecdotes, artificial myths, and outright lies, laced with several references to himself and a few strands of actual truth.

...

The entire speech is addressed to a mythological abstraction, “the Cuban people,” and the entire history of the past six decades is turned into a an unreasonable and highly emotional spat between that abstraction and another one, called “America” “Americans,” or “the American people” – a spat that took place because of a nasty mythical beast called “the Cold War.”

Nowhere in this speech do the Castro brothers show up. Nowhere are their many crimes against humanity mentioned. Nowhere is any blame laid on them for enslaving and ruining “the Cuban people” or for poisoning relations with the United States. In their place, another abstraction shows up to play the part of the villain: “ideology.”

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Never mind the Castro brothers, or the tens of thousands of Cubans murdered by them, the hundreds of thousands imprisoned and tortured, or the two million driven into exile, or the nuclear missiles they pointed at the United States, or the soldiers and spies they’ve sent all over the world, or the terrorists they have sponsored.

No. Never mind any of that. The real problem has always been “ideology.”

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Obama also spoke of “hope” repeatedly. He even had the nerve to tell Cubans of “hope that is rooted in the future that you can choose and that you can shape, and that you can build for your country.”

What hope, as long as the Castro dynasty is in control? What is this amorphous “hope” or this amorphous “future”? What of this “choosing” and “shaping”? How is that to happen when there is no civil society in Cuba, no rule of law, no chance to express oneself freely, no private property, no free market economy?

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Which brings us to the lies in the speech, which are plentiful.

The biggest lies in the speech have to do with history, and all of these falsehoods come straight from the Castro regime’s Ministry of Truth, or from derivatives of its narrative, such as the film Godfather II.

In Obama’s thinly disguised Marxist narrative there is a constant dialectic between an imperialist power (the United States) and an unjustly exploited subaltern (Cuba), and in this poisoned relationship, the United States is responsible for most of Cuba’s ills....

There is more -- oh, so much more -- at the link.

After reading Prof. Eire's full analysis, you may want to go to his own blog and read The speech Obama should deliver in Havana, but never will. It is just as remarkable in speaking the truth to power, as well as for the fact that the Washington Post and the New York Times each declined to publish it.