Ambrose: Trump is right to reject Obama’s approach to Cuba

All give, no get

After his trip to make this deal that was all give and no get, he headed down to Argentina to provide further evidence of his sophisticated incompetence. He talked to a group called Young Leaders of the Americas and said they should not get involved in intellectual arguments about capitalism versus communism. They should simply choose what works for them. He went on to say that Cuba provided a good education for its people and good health care.

Now let’s visit with reality and point out that the regime of Raul Castro and his late brother Fidel has murdered people left and right, mainly on the right, those who aspire to freedom. There are still political prisoners, the elections are fake and protest can get you in deep trouble. It is a desperately poor country not for a lack of trade that exists with many other nations but because of socialistic malfeasance. The good health care goes mostly to those with money and political power, and much of the education is sheer propaganda.

The deal Obama made with Cuba is not trade with the people but trade that cheats the people. It is trade with the Cuban government, those of high rank and with a further empowered military. There is little if any trickle down to the still-deprived.

What you get from Castro is assertions that there is nothing to reform in this blessed land that once may have looked at Obama’s options and chose communism. After all, he leads the good life, doesn’t he?

Playing hardball

Then we have President Donald Trump saying he is discontinuing the deal but would be happy to renegotiate the terms.

You want trade, Cuba? Fine. How about releasing political prisoners. How about easing up the oppression generally, you know, with real free speech? And how about the trade being general, something that also goes into the pockets of entrepreneurs and their workers?

Naturally enough, Trump took a bruising because this is oh, so awful, and there was a chance for something good growing out of the Obama mission and now it is gone, liberals said.

Nonsense.

Cuba’s only chance resides in ditching socialism, not in bolstering it. That’s what Obama did, and this Washington star is thereby reminiscent of a Hollywood star, actor Sean Penn, when he praised Venezuela’s socialist dictator Hugo Chavez and, after he died, Nicolas Maduro, his replacement.

These self-adulating thugs took a country with one of the noblest records in Latin America and converted it to a land of starvation, imprisonment and death everywhere you look. That’s the record of ultra-socialist regimes, you know — 100 million dead as a result of their policies over the last century.

I don’t know about those young people lectured in Argentina, but I would choose a free market over socialism any day of the week. I would also point out to Obama that niceness can sometimes abet evil.