Obama Si! Castro No!

Barack Obama makes his move

By John Hood

If anybody would’ve told me that one day I’d live to see a black Democratic presidential candidate ride into town and address the Cuban American National Foundation, I’d’ve said they were loopy. Had they then gone on to predict not just a rousingly warm welcome, but a nearly unanimous consensus between the foundation membership and said candidate, I would’ve told ’em to take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

But such was the case last Friday, when a man named Obama blew into the Intercontinental Hotel and addressed a luncheon crowd that 10 years ago might never have even given him a place at the table.

I tell ya, foundation founder Jorge Mas Canosa must be rolling in his grave.

But this is not your papi’s CANF, and the reason it isn’t has a lot to do with ex-CANF Executive Director (and former Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chairman) Joe Garcia (who’s running to unseat stalwart hard-liner Mario Diaz-Balart), and current CANF Chairman Jorge Mas Santos, son of the founder, who’s not only determined to restore the foundation to its former glory, he’s determined to do so with some good ol’ fashioned common sense.

Chairman Mas, delivering what almost amounted to a campaign speech (the cat’s a natural), cited his father’s sit-down with Yeltsin and the subsequent “massive scaling down of Soviet subsidies” which resulted from the talk to illustrate the futility of continued silence.

“No negotiations and conversations with Raul Castro until he has ‘released all political prisoners and made moves toward democracy.’” Furthermore, “[w]ishful thinking, with our arms crossed, as spectators with no time table hoping for the reformation of Raul Castro is not a policy: it is surrender.”

Had Mas said something of the sort prior to 1997, they’d’ve banned him from Versailles. As it is, they still might, just as they might ban Obama, who managed to comprehensively cite FDR’s Four Freedoms all the while evoking both MLK and JFK and still come off sounding like a future where hard lines have no place.

“After eight years of the disastrous policies of George Bush, it is time to pursue direct diplomacy, with friend and foe alike, without preconditions,” said the senator, tapping into the new paradigm.

Yes, a President Obama “will maintain the embargo,” but he’ll also “immediately allow unlimited family travel and remittances to the island.”

“It’s time to let Cuban-Americans see their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers,” he said, to a groundswell of applause. “It’s time to let Cuban-American money make their families less dependent upon the Castro regime.”

But ending “the terrible and tragic status quo” of Cuba was only part of Obama’s master plan for all of the Americas, where “the situation has changed, but we’ve failed to change with it.”

Obama said he’d “reinstate a Special Envoy for the Americas,” “expand the Foreign Service, and open more consulates in the neglected regions,” in addition to “expand[ing] the Peace Corps, and ask[ing] more young Americans to go abroad to deepen the trust and the ties among our people.”

Mostly, though, Prez Barack would support “bottom-up growth through micro financing, vocational training, and small enterprise development” and embracing “the Millennium Development Goals of halving global poverty by 2015.”

“[M]y policy towards the Americas will be guided by the simple principle that what’s good for the people of the Americas is good for the United States.”

Still, it was Cuba that was most on the minds at this luncheon, and Cuban-Americans who seemed most heartened by what just may amount to an end to a half-century of failed policy.

Of course, after all was said and promised, Fidel couldn’t resist poking his beard into the soufflé and on Monday the shadow dictator weighed-in with a kinda back-handed endorsement of Obama, calling him “the most progressive candidate” in the presidential race, a remark which surely must’ve given great comfort to those who’d rather stay stuck behind their cold, hard line.

What’s remarkable is that those fogies don’t get that Castro said what he said because an Obama win would be the worst thing that could happen to his crumbling regime.

Just ask the people.