Krauthammer: Obama’s Ideological Holiday In Havana

Charles Krauthammer offers his take on President Obama's trip to Cuba in his column at the Washington Post.

The split screen told the story: on one side, images of the terror bombing in Brussels; on the other, Barack Obama doing the wave with Raúl Castro at a baseball game in Havana.

On one side, the real world of rising global terrorism. On the other, the Obama fantasy world in which romancing a geopolitically insignificant Cuba — without an ounce of democracy or human rights yielded in return — is considered a seminal achievement of American diplomacy.

Cuba wasn’t so much a legacy trip as a vanity trip, vindicating the dorm-room enthusiasms of one’s student days when the Sandinistas were cool, revolution was king and every other friend had a dog named Che.

When Brussels intervened, some argued that Obama should have cut short his trip and come back home. I disagree. You don’t let three suicide bombers control the itinerary of the American president. Moreover, Obama’s next stop, Argentina, is actually important and had just elected a friendly government that broke from its long and corrupt Peronist past.

Nonetheless, Obama could have done without the baseball. What kind of message does it send to be yukking it up with Raúl even as Belgian authorities are picking body parts off the floor of the Brussels airport?

You can read the rest of the column via the below link:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/obamas-ideological-holiday-in-havana/2016/03/24/4402a6ee-f1f0-11e5-89c3-a647fcce95e0_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_opinions

Lowry: In Cuba To Make "History," Obama Stands In The Shadow Of Tyranny

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, offers his take on President Obama's visit to Cuba in his column in the New York Post.

President Obama inadvertently found the perfect photo op for his Cuba visit at a wreath-laying ceremony at the José Marti Memorial in Havana.

A news photo at Revolution Square caught Obama standing together with American and Cuban officials with an enormous mural of the iconic revolutionary Che Guevara looming over his shoulder on the adjacent Ministry of the Interior building.

Che, of course, is ubiquitous on dorm-room walls and T-shirts in the United States and a hero of the Cuban revolution. He also was a coldblooded killer who set up the Cuban gulag and presided over summary executions of political prisoners. (Trials were, per Che, “an archaic bourgeois detail.”) No doubt, he would have been astonished at the Yanqui president coming to Revolution Square to pay his respects — and exceedingly pleased.

You can read the rest of the column via the below link: 

http://nypost.com/2016/03/22/in-cuba-to-make-history-obama-stands-in-the-shadow-of-tyranny/