Not yet missed

Lost in the pomp and the baseball, and then that bizarre letter from Fidel, who seems to fear an American overthrow of Cuba, President Barack Obama made a telling statement in his March 22 speech in Havana.

“We both live in a new world, colonized by Europeans,” he told the audience. Both countries “can trace their heritage to both slaves and slave owners.”

The president chose to speak of Europeans as colonizers just hours after Islamic terrorists attacked Brussels, killing dozens by daylight at public places frequented by Western travelers, the second such attack on a European capital in under four months.

It’s true that the United States and Cuba were both colonized, but is it not equally true that both attracted revolutions? That’s the more relevant history. One revolution birthed democratic capitalism, the other a communist dictatorship. One now has an annual per capita gross national income of $55,000, the other of $6,000.

Cubans who eke out a living on $20 per month don’t ‘live in a new world,’ as Obama opined.

Cubans who eke out a living on $20 per month don’t “live in a new world,” as Obama opined. They live in an old world of long-standing serfdom the New World promised to overthrow. Americans would have to turn the dial back to before 1940 to live as Cubans live today.

In February New York Times columnist David Brooks bemoaned the “pornography of pessimism” invading the presidential campaign. Deflated by its lack of humanity and decency, Brooks titled the piece, “I Miss Barack Obama.”

Perhaps his sentimentality will catch as this sordid election season drags on. Voters—left and right—might recall the 44th president’s warmth over his aloofness, his deliberation more than his dithering, his even temperament more than his habit of divisive lecturing.

I’m not there yet.

Like Brooks, I welcome the Obama era’s near-absence of sordidness—especially as presidents named Clinton or Trump are waiting in the wings. I’m grateful for a president who is the husband of one wife, a diligent father by all appearances, and not easily given to scandal. To emerge so largely unscathed after nearly eight years in the White House is a feat.

But the lack of tempest does not a day for sailing make. Too often President Obama’s steady self-assurance is the calm masking the storm. Measured divisiveness is divisive still. A decided failure to lead is still failure. Sending condolences to victims of terror, as the president did at the start of his Havana speech, is not the same as calling out the sources of terror that stalk the world, including the Castro regime. I want to applaud a new day in U.S.-Cuba relations, but “what the United States was doing was not working,” the rationale Obama gave for normalization in his speech, is no way to explain six decades of Castro tyranny.

A deep recession is sweeping parts of the Latin world, and the pendulum is swinging away from populist dictators like the late Hugo Chávez and statist authoritarians like Fidel and his brother Raúl—all decided partners in crime benefiting off the poverty of their people.

What a ripe time to spread good news about grassroots capitalism and personal liberty, the bulwarks of U.S. growth and survival.

At home our president has proved more than willing to bury both under federal expansion and identity politics, so it’s no surprise he would call out European colonizers and blame the United States for Cuba’s ills.

When Iran’s Green Movement took to the streets early on in his presidency, Obama said little while the ayatollahs’ basiji paramilitaries moved in to cripple the democracy effort. But when in 2011 Cairo streets filled, Obama quickly demanded the ouster of a longtime U.S. ally, Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Obama stood for street uprisings led by outsiders in both Syria and Libya, all descending into chaos and human catastrophe, welcoming Islamic warlords of the worst order. Yet he stood by as Russia seized Crimea and blatantly challenged NATO airspace in its recent war over Syria.

It’s no marvel we have populist uprisings, including in our own country. Incoherence leads to every man fending for himself. It’s no surprise our allies are alarmed and our enemies emboldened to attack their capitals. It’s only a wonder we ourselves have survived the decency of Barack Obama.

Email mbelz@wng.org