Cubas communist regime lashed out at the Obama Administration over the weekend following bilateral meetings in Havana.
A visit by a senior State Department official — Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Craig Kelly marked the highest-level contact thus far. The chief aim of the visit: a discussion of migration issues.
Ambassador Kelly also tested the political waters by meeting with prominent Cuban dissidents and civil society figures.
The Cuban reaction was swift and predictable.* The Castro regime fulminated:
from the very day he [Kelly] arrived in the country, [he] was warned that a visit with dissidents would not be tolerated.* *This meeting ”demonstrated anew that (U.S.) priorities are more related to supporting the counterrevolution and the promotion of subversion to destabilize the Cuban revolution than with the creation of a climate conducive to real solutions to bilateral problems.
To reinforce its message of repression, the regime prevented prominent dissident Jorge Luis Garcia Perez Antunez from attending the Kelly meeting; roughed up demonstrators supporting the 76-day hunger strike of gravely-ill prisoner of conscience Oscar Zapata Tamayo, and continued to hold U.S. citizen and government contractor Alan Gross on trumped-up spying charges.
The Obama Administrations attempt at better relations with Cuba flounders upon rocky shoals. *Like its predecessors, the Administration is unable to make headway against a regime committed to defending the absolutism of its Marxist-Leninist system and preserving the unchecked rule of the Castro brothers.
Cubas broadside against Ambassador Kelly again demonstrates the real limits of engagement with the gaggle of anti-American tyrants stretching from Havana and Caracas to Damascus and Tehran.