Rubio Doesn't Know Cuba's History

As the leading opponent of President Obama's move to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, Rubio invokes an era before he was born to justify retaining a Cold War freeze on trade with our Caribbean neighbor.
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Sen. Marco Rubo says it's time for "a new generation of leaders." So why is this 44-year-old Republican presidential candidate still stuck in the 1950s?

As the leading opponent of President Obama's move to restore diplomatic relations with Cuba, Rubio invokes an era before he was born to justify retaining a Cold War freeze on trade with our Caribbean neighbor.

"Just as when President Eisenhower severed diplomatic relations with Cuba," Rubio said when the President announced his plan, "the Castro family still controls the country, the economy and all levers of power."

Rubio not only harkens back to an all-but-dead generation of leaders to promote his youthful approach, he gets his history wrong. The senator makes it sound as though Eisenhower cut relations because of the Castro brothers' dictatorial control of the country.

History lesson number one, senator: The United States has supported plenty of iron-fisted despots. And we need look no further than Cuba itself for a prime example. Before Fidel Castro took power in January 1959, the island was ruled by a close American ally, Fulgencio Batista, a military dictator whose regime executed many thousands and tortured countless more for their opposition to his government, which certainly controlled "all levers of power."

Perhaps what really irks Rubio about now retired Fidel Castro and his brother, Raúl, who currently holds the reigns of power, is not that they too staged public executions of their enemies, but how they chose to run the Cuban economy.

The rich did well under Batista, when Cuba was an anything-goes playground for U.S. tourists. The American Mafia openly ran gambling, drugs, and prostitution businesses, with Batista being sure he was dealt in for a good share of the take. Castro put an end to the good times, and the corruption, closing casinos and nationalizing American businesses.

Another history lesson Rubio needs to learn is that Eisenhower cut diplomatic relations in January 1961 primarily out of concern that the Castro government was a puppet of the Soviet Union intent on spreading Communism in Latin America.

The Cold War is over, senator. We won.

None of this is to say that the Castro brothers are saints. Raul Castro was quoted in Life magazine on July 18, 1960, as saying, "My dream is to drop three atom bombs on New York." Some two years later, Fidel Castro agreed to let Cuba become a launching pad for Soviet nuclear missiles aimed at the U.S. Like his brother, he was prepared to see American cities turned into radioactive rubble.

Nuclear annihilation must have seemed the only way to defeat the great and powerful enemy to the north. And the enemy we were. The U.S. trained, equipped and launched an army of Cuban exiles to invade Cuba and topple the government and repeatedly attempted to assassinate Fidel.

That's the history of another generation now. The reasons for our break in diplomatic relations are rooted in Cold War animosities that bear no resemblance to current conditions. And we have no need for "a new generation of leaders" who dwell in the past while lacking the wisdom to learn from history.

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