A leftover from yesterday. My first thought after watching the clip below was that the idea is nutty. At this very moment we’re learning another painful lesson in how the best-laid, most lavishly funded plans for foreign military intervention can amount to nothing in the end. Why we would launch a new intervention in our own backyard?
But Francis Suarez has a point about double standards. What’s the argument for leading an international coalition to depose Qaddafi 10 years ago but not leading one to depose Raul Castro and Miguel Diaz-Canel?
As I recall, we were lured into Libya by the prospect of the regime slaughtering the country’s rebels en masse. Under international law the west had a responsibility to protect a defenseless population at risk of violent persecution, we were told. Well, Cubans are facing that risk too after rising up against Castroism. Do we stand by and let them be gunned down in the streets because post-war Libya has turned into a predictable mess?
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez on bombing Cuba:
“That option is one that has to be explored and cannot be just simply discarded as an option…And there’s a variety of ways the military can do it. But that’s something that needs to be discussed…”
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) July 13, 2021
Suarez isn’t the only politician endorsing military action. Brian Stack, a Democratic state senator from New Jersey, is ready for Cuba libre:
There’s grassroots support too, notes Breitbart:
Protesters around the country have escalated their calls for military intervention against the Castro regime to defend the lives of unarmed, peaceful Cuban protesters. In front of the White House, protesters on Monday called for “urgent military intervention” in remarks to Univisión. In Miami, a group of protesters demanding military intervention blocked the Palmetto Expressway, the main highway in the city, on Tuesday.
“The longer we wait the more people will die. The longer that America waits to intervene the more people will die,” one Miami protester told a local ABC News affiliate…
A petition at Change.org urging military intervention has attracted nearly 400,000 signatures as of Wednesday, suggesting the idea is more popular than many establishment media outlets in the United States have suggested.
America’s attempts at nation-building have gone so astonishingly well over the past 20 years, why not give it another go off of Florida’s coast?
Marco Rubio, one of the Senate’s biggest hawks, warned this morning that if America doesn’t intervene in Cuba, someone else will:
“These guys talk about ‘Diplomacy’s back,’ ‘America’s back,’ Rubio said in a morning interview on Fox & Friends. “Great, do me a favor. Convene the United Nations Security Council. Convene the Organization of American States and use your diplomatic heft, the fact that America is back, and go to all these countries and say, ‘OK guys, we have a massacre about to happen 90 miles from our shores. We want the international community to condemn it, isolate it and be prepared to take action.’”…
“This is a blood bath 90 miles off our shores,” he added. “It’s destabilizing, and I want to know what Joe Biden is going to do when a thousand special forces from Russia arrive on Cuban territory to help the Cuban regime. That’s what’s coming next.”
Rumors are circulating that Venezuelan troops are already there. But that’s one reason why Biden is hesitant, of course: He doesn’t want Cuba spiraling into a multinational conflict with great powers on either side. There’s less risk of dire consequences from that than there would have been 35 years ago, but at a minimum it would cause a massive refugee crisis that would land in America’s lap. That’s the difference between liberating Tripoli and liberating Havana — Tripoli isn’t a short flight from the U.S. coast.
Politically it’d be dicey for the White House too. Biden would make a lot of friends in Florida’s Cuban-American community if he took a swing at Castro but he’d lose some in the left wing of his own base, which would want to know why a Democrat was bent on ending Fidel’s revolucion when various hawkish Republican presidents over the past 60 years managed to leave well enough alone. If anything, the Democratic trajectory with Cuba and Castro has been rapprochement with the regime to try to coax it into liberalizing. Obama famously visited five years ago. For Biden to turn around now and start taking potshots at the government from the air would be like, well, like the U.S. turning around and attacking Qaddafi after it had reached out to him to denuclearize during Bush’s presidency.
And what if the U.S. Air Force attacked, wounded the regime, but didn’t do enough to give protesters the upper hand? Another round of bombing? Ground troops? How many casualties would the U.S. need to take before Suarez’s party, the GOP, began to complain about a new “forever war”?
Rubio’s right, though, that thus far the Biden White House has been all talk on Cuba. Biden issued a reasonably strong statement of solidarity with Cuban demonstrators on Monday but since then there’s been little public action. Last night his secretary of state sounded more eager to get the UN involved in policing racism in the United States than he did in getting it involved in Cuba:
Responsible nations must not shrink from scrutiny of their human rights record. Rather, they should be transparent with the intent to grow and do better. That is why I'm announcing a formal invitation for @UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism to visit the U.S.
— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) July 14, 2021
Call a meeting, Tony. Send a stern letter to Putin and Maduro reminding them what the Monroe Doctrine is. Do something.
I’ll leave you with this, which shows you what Cubans are up against. Exit question: How much of the tough talk on Cuba from Florida pols, of which Suarez’s is the toughest, is about actual policy recommendations versus protecting their path to higher office by trumpeting their disgust for the regime? Suarez is probably thinking of running for governor someday. There are worse things to be known for in his state than wanting to bomb Castro.
The regime has shut off the internet,power & water in #Cuba
They are barging into homes & killing in the streets
On Monday I asked @potus to immediately mobilize an international response
If he doesn’t,we will see a bloodbath 90 miles off our shores.
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 14, 2021
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