DeSantis Puts Biden Admin to Shame with Fiery Statement on Cuba's 'Tyrannical Regime'
When it comes to the political unrest in Cuba, it only took one Twitter post for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to back up the reason he’s being looked at so seriously as a potential nominee for president.
And it only took one post for President Joe Biden’s administration to demonstrate it’s even more cynical and inept than the mainstream media will ever admit.
But the American people are going to see the difference between the two.
DeSantis — governor of a state with millions of Cuban immigrants, their families and their descendants — made no bones about his government’s backing for the throngs of Cubans who stormed through the nation’s capital and other cities Sunday demanding an end to the communist dictatorship that has ruled the island for more than six decades.
Florida supports the people of Cuba as they take to the streets against the tyrannical regime in Havana. The Cuban dictatorship has repressed the people of Cuba for decades & is now trying to silence those who have the courage to speak out against its disastrous policies#SOSCuba pic.twitter.com/H71EYoKdUZ
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) July 11, 2021
“Florida supports the people of Cuba as they take to the streets against the tyrannical regime in Havana,” DeSantis wrote in a tweet published Sunday evening. “The Cuban dictatorship has repressed the people of Cuba for decades & is now trying to silence those who have the courage to speak out against its disastrous policies.”
That’s the kind of statement that should come automatically to any American politician — regardless of party affiliation. The Cuban dictatorship has been a fact of life for decades only 90 miles from American shores. But contemporary Democrats remain willfully blind to that reality.
And contemporary Democrats, to the country’s shame at the moment, are in charge of American foreign policy. Which is how the country can see nonsense like at Twitter post published Sunday by a Biden State Department functionary that blamed the unrest exclusively on worsening conditions from the coronavirus pandemic.
The fact that it was published only five minutes before DeSantis’ stirring call for freedom might have been just an unhappy coincidence, but there’s no denying that DeSantis’ post put Biden to shame.
Peaceful protests are growing in #Cuba as the Cuban people exercise their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising COVID cases/deaths & medicine shortages. We commend the numerous efforts of the Cuban people mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need.
— Julie Chung (@WHAAsstSecty) July 11, 2021
“Peaceful protests are growing in #Cuba as the Cuban people exercise their right to peaceful assembly to express concern about rising COVID cases/deaths & medicine shortages,” the State Department’s assistant secretary for the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.
“We commend the numerous efforts of the Cuban people mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need.”
The cynicism of trying to explain a political eruption through the coronavirus pandemic that put Biden into office is almost painful. The ineptitude of a supposedly professional foreign service trass to pass off self-evident twaddle as the truth is shameful.
Even CNN didn’t frame the Cuban protests like that, with a headline declaring, “Cubans take to streets in rare protests over lack of freedoms and worsening economy.”
“Demonstrators complained about a lack of freedom and the worsening economic situation during the rare protests, according to people who spoke to CNN and videos from multiple cities, including capital Havana,” CNN reported.
“Many chanted for ‘freedom’ and called for President Miguel Díaz-Canel to step down.
The coronavirus wasn’t even mentioned until the 10th paragraph, which noted that, “In some of the videos, people shouted they ‘weren’t afraid’ or that they wanted liberty or access to coronavirus vaccines.”
Not a word about “mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need.”
In fact, as a statement of ludicrously obvious obfuscation, the State Department’s tweet would be staggering, if Democrats didn’t already have a well-established pattern of distorting reality.
This is the party that championed as “mostly peaceful” protests the riots that tore a swath of destruction through too many American cities last year. It’s the party that harps on the imaginary evil of “systemic racism” to explain the universal failures of its policies in areas of the country that have been under its control for decades.
And it’s the party of a doddering, almost certainly corrupt Joe Biden in the Oval Office, a man whose son is a world-class grifter whose pretensions to an artistic career have just become a very well-publicized way for “anonymous” art lovers to pony up cash to show their support. Mafia families couldn’t do it better.
Literally nothing about this White House or the Democratic Party that won it can be taken as an honest assessment of the situation. So a Twitter post describing the rage of a population oppressed by dictatorship chanting “freedom” in the streets as a coordinated display of discontent with COVID-19 restrictions is almost to be expected.
(The cloying line about furious Cubans “mobilizing donations to help neighbors in need” is almost off the scale, though.)
DeSantis wasn’t the only Republican politician to lash out, of course. Reliable conservative voices like Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida (the son of Cuban immigrants), and Sen. Ted Cruz (the son of a Cuban immigrant father and American mother) also chimed in.
But DeSantis is the governing executive in the American state that is essentially the front line in the country’s faceoff with Cuba’s communist dictatorship. He’s also one of the most talked-about names in the early chatter about the 2024 presidential race.
The fact that he weighed in so early, and with such clarity of purpose, is enough to make decent Americans realize how weak the man who’s in the White House now really is.
Possibly understanding just how pathetic the administration response looked on Sunday, Biden himself issued a statement Monday, according to NBC News.
It still featured the coronavirus in a featured role, but allowed as how “decades of repression” under an “authoritarian regime” might have something to do with it.
“We stand with the Cuban people and their clarion call for freedom and relief from the tragic grip of the pandemic and from the decades of repression and economic suffering to which they have been subjected by Cuba’s authoritarian regime,” the statement said, according to NBC.
“The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves,” he added.
That’s a pretty thin gruel from the man who’s supposed to be the leader of the free world.
But coming as he does, from a political party that’s lurching increasingly leftward, with major figures openly sympathetic to the evils of socialist rule — it’s sadly to be expected. The fact that Biden served as vice president in the Obama administration that essentially normalized relations with Cuba’s communists before President Donald Trump restored sanity to the country’s Cuban policy makes it all but inevitable.
Americans expect more from their presidents — at least Americans who take their country’s role in the world seriously do.
And DeSantis’ post was a good example of just what that “more” looks like — clarity, resolution, and a commitment to freedom that used to be the calling cards of American leaders, and will, God willing, be again before too long.
It put the Biden administration’s post to shame, of course. But only five minutes earlier, the administration brought the shame upon itself.
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