Raising The U.S. Flag To Shut Out Cuba's Democrats

Diplomacy: The U.S. flag went up in Havana, and Secretary of State John Kerry mouthed platitudes to avoid offending Cuba's communist dictatorship. The people on the receiving end of offense were Cuba's battered democrats.

Not long ago, the U.S. stood as a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world, a lodestar to the world's most oppressed peoples, and in particular a source of comfort for fledgling democrats who stood up to defy tyrants directly.

During a stroll in Old Havana, John Kerry checks out 

the pride of Cuba's communist economy: 1950s-era 

American cars — this one a Chevy Bel-Air — that still run.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations spent years maintaining contact with and offering support to the democracy advocates in totalitarian hellholes such as China, Russia, Eastern Europe and Cuba.

When an imprisoned Russian dissident in a frozen Siberian Gulag prison cell first heard news of Ronald Reagan calling the Soviet Union a "focus of evil in the world," he said his heart leaped for joy.

No more. With the raising of the Stars and Stripes over a new embassy in Havana — a regime second only to North Korea in totalitarian oppressiveness — the U.S. becomes merely one of the herd, its leaders talking only to each other in the crony-like coziness of the world's ruling classes, with only lip service paid to their purported values and the people they represent.

How disheartening for Cuba's courageous dissidents — such as the Ladies in White's Berta Soler and blogger Yoani Sanchez.

They were affronted by the opening of the embassy according to the Castros' specifications, including surveillance of dissidents entering the compound. Then they were shut out of the flag-raising ceremony to please Castroites, amid phony claims about a lack of space. (There was plenty.) And then, in a sorry afterthought, they were shunted off to a reception at an envoy's house.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

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