Throughout the political landscape, our elected officials have called for support for the people of Cuba as they protest the tyrannical regime that denies them basic human rights, a communist rump state left over from the 20th-century Cold War.
“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,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “The Cuban people are bravely asserting fundamental and universal rights. Those rights, including the right of peaceful protest and the right to freely determine their own future, must be respected. The United States calls on the Cuban regime to hear their people and serve their needs at this vital moment rather than enriching themselves.”
On Twitter, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, mocked that statement because it did not include the words “communism” or “socialism.” He also wrote, “I am asking @POTUS [and] @SecBlinken to call on members of the Cuban military to not fire on their own people The incompetent communist party of #Cuba cannot feed or protect the people from the virus. Now those in the military must defend the people not the communist party.”
On that, we agree with Rubio. Change will come to Cuba because institutional players, especially the military, stand with the people — Cuba’s military, not ours.
Calls for intervention in Cuba have not come directly from the government there, of course, as they have in Haiti following the assassination of President Jovenel Moise, but in South Florida, elected officials and refugees from the bloody Castro regime have called for overt action on the part of the Biden administration.
In a letter to President Biden, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the Florida League of Cities and the Miami-Dade League of Cities, the mayors of Doral, Hialeah, Hialeah Gardens and Miami Lakes asked that “our nation intervenes to help the Cuban people break the chains that have kept them in shackles for so many years.”
Others have offered more pointed analyses, noting that, should the Cuban government start killing off its own citizens, as it has in the past for far lesser transgressions than mass protest, the United States is uniquely positioned to intervene given our presence on the island at Guantanamo.
These calls for direct intervention are a severe error. We have toppled foreign dictators before, and the results were the longest wars in our nation’s history. Iraq and Afghanistan should have taught us a powerful lesson, but some do not seem to want to learn.
Further, as many of the same people demanding intervention ought to know, the presence of American soldiers on Cuban soil would be exactly the sort of propaganda win the regime would love — no longer would this be the righteous demands of Cuban people for freedom and self-determination, but instead another “yanqui” plot.
The people of Cuba will determine their own destiny. We support human rights and democracy — not just in Cuba, but the world over. But we also know the results when we try to export democracy at the point of a gun.
— South Florida Sun-Sentinel
