ACVDN calls Francis The Hardest Working Pope, ever as he supports Obama on Cuba. What Do You Think? It started way back in 1961 and should have been settled years ago.
Pope Francis had quite a 78th birthday. The pontiff began Wednesday with prayers and a birthday celebration with tango dancers near St. Peter’s Square. His day ended with a historic diplomatic breakthrough between Cuba and the United States — and the disclosure that the Argentine pope played a key role as broker.
Francis is being credited for helping bridge the divide by first sending letters to President Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba, and then having the Vatican host a diplomatic meeting between the two sides in October.
“The Holy Father wishes to express his warm congratulations for the historic decision,” Francis said in a statement issued Wednesday night by the Vatican.
The Vatican’s most senior official after the pope, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, moderated the October meeting after the two countries sought out the Vatican as a trusted broker near the conclusion of their negotiations.
For Francis, the breakthrough on Wednesday burnished his efforts to reposition the Vatican as a broker in global diplomacy. He has already waded into Middle East protests, hosting a prayer summit meeting between the Israeli and Palestinian presidents that bore few tangible results. Soon afterward, Israel began its military assault against
Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, in Gaza.
But Francis has quickly become one of the world’s leading figures, and his role in the United States-Cuba breakthrough undoubtedly is tied to his status as the first Latin American pope of the Roman Catholic Church.
“He knows the Cuban situation by heart,” said Gianni La Bella, a professor of contemporary history and an expert in Latin American Catholicism, as well as a member of the Community of Sant’Egidio, a liberal Catholic group active in international affairs. “He visited when he was a cardinal and has a strong relationship with the archbishop of Havana, who is obviously a strategic player in this.”
In April, the Vatican and Cuba celebrated 79 years of diplomatic relations as they jointly staged a photography exhibition at a church in Rome. Although the Vatican has had problems with Havana, it steadfastly opposes the American embargo and has kept diplomatic lines open.
Fidel Castro visited the Vatican in 1996 and met with Pope John Paul II. Two years later, John Paul visited Cuba, where he criticized the embargo as causing hardship for ordinary people and called for it to be rescinded. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, also visited Cuba, in 2012.
“I was in Cuba for almost two years, and I understand what this news means to the island,” said Msgr. Angelo Becciu, once the Vatican’s ambassador to Cuba. “It opens new scenarios and gives great hope to all Cuban people. The cease of the embargo will encourage and revitalize the island’s perspectives, as well as its economy.”
After he became pope in 2013, Francis was expected to revitalize the church in the Southern Hemisphere. But his background has also helped the Vatican reposition itself as an independent actor in diplomacy, less tethered to European or
American world views than in the past.
Francis’s appointment of Cardinal Parolin as secretary of state was also significant. Long considered one of the Vatican’s most talented diplomats, Cardinal Parolin served as apostolic nuncio in Venezuela, one of Cuba’s closest allies. From that perch, Cardinal Parolin gained a sophisticated understanding of regional dynamics and the Cuban predicament, Professor La Bella said.
“The Vatican’s knowledge of the Latin American situation is at a very high level, and very direct,” he said.
Monsignor Becciu, currently a member of the State Secretariat in the Vatican, added that Wednesday’s announcement, on Francis’s birthday, was certainly a “beautiful present for the Holy Father.”
Climb in the way-back machine and we'll travel to January 3rd, 1961 when it started.
In the climax of deteriorating relations between the United States and Fidel Castro's government in Cuba, President Dwight D. Eisenhower closes the American embassy in Havana and severs diplomatic relations.
The action signaled that the United States was prepared to take extreme measures to oppose Castro's regime, which U.S. officials worried was a beachhead of communism in the western hemisphere. The immediate reason cited for the break was Castro's demand that the U.S. embassy staff be reduced, which followed heated accusations from the Cuban government that America was using the embassy as a base for spies. We now know that that was true, we were using the embassy as a base for spies.
Relations between the United States and Cuba had been steadily declining since Castro seized power in early 1959. U.S. officials were soon convinced that Castro's government was too anti-American to be trusted, and they feared that he might lead Cuba into the communist bloc. Early in 1960, following Castro's decision to sign a trade treaty with the Soviet Union, the Eisenhower administration began financing and training a group of Cuban exiles to overthrow the Cuban leader. Castro responded by increasing his program of nationalizing foreign property and companies. In return, the United States began to implement cutbacks in trade with Cuba. The diplomatic break on January 3, 1961 was the culmination of an increasingly acrimonious situation.
Severing relations marked the end of America's policy of trying to resolve its differences with Castro's government through diplomacy. Just over two months later, President John F. Kennedy unleashed the Cuban exile force established during the Eisenhower years. This led to the Bay of Pigs debacle, in which Castro's military killed or captured the exile troops. After the Bay of Pigs, the relationship between the United States and Cuba was one of the chilliest of the Cold War.
Normalizing Relations and US Politics
President Obama on Wednesday ordered the restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba and the opening of an embassy in Havana for the first time in more than a half-century as he vowed to “cut loose the shackles of the past” and sweep aside one of the last vestiges of the Cold War.
The surprise announcement came at the end of 18 months of secret talks that produced a prisoner swap negotiated with the help of Pope Francis and concluded by a telephone call between Mr. Obama and President Raúl Castro. The historic deal broke an enduring stalemate between two countries divided by just 90 miles of water but oceans of
mistrust and hostility dating from the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill and the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis.
“We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries,” Mr. Obama said in a nationally televised statement from the White House. The deal, he added, will “begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas” and move beyond a “rigid policy that is rooted in events that took place before most of us were born.”
In doing so, Mr. Obama ventured into diplomatic territory where the last 10 presidents refused to go, and Republicans, along with a senior Democrat, quickly characterized the rapprochement with the Castro family as appeasement of the hemisphere’s leading dictatorship. Republican lawmakers who will take control of the Senate as well as the
House next month made clear they would resist lifting the 54-year-old trade embargo.
“This entire policy shift announced today is based on an illusion, on a lie, the lie and the illusion that more commerce and access to money and goods will translate to political freedom for the Cuban people,” said Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida and son of Cuban immigrants. “All this is going to do is give the Castro regime, which controls every aspect of Cuban life, the opportunity to manipulate these changes to perpetuate itself in power.”
For good or ill, the move represented a dramatic turning point in relations with an island that for generations has captivated and vexed its giant northern neighbor. From the 18th century, when successive presidents coveted it, Cuba loomed large in the American imagination long before Fidel Castro stormed from the mountains and seized power in 1959.
Mr. Castro’s alliance with the Soviet Union made Cuba a geopolitical flash point in a global struggle of ideology and power. President Dwight D. Eisenhower imposed the first trade embargo in 1960 and broke off diplomatic relations in January 1961, just weeks before leaving office and seven months before Mr. Obama was born. Under
President John F. Kennedy, the failed Bay of Pigs operation aimed at toppling Mr. Castro in April 1961 and the 13-day showdown over Soviet missiles installed in Cuba the following year cemented its status as a ground zero in the Cold War.
But the relationship remained frozen in time long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, a thorn in the side of multiple presidents who waited for Mr. Castro’s demise and experienced false hope when he passed power to his brother, Raúl. Even as the United States built relations with Communist nations like China and Vietnam, Cuba remained one of just a few nations, along with Iran and North Korea, that had no formal ties with Washington.
Mr. Obama has long expressed hope of transforming relations with Cuba and relaxed some travel restrictions in 2011. But further moves remained untenable as long as Cuba held Alan P. Gross, an American government contractor arrested in 2009 and sentenced to 15 years in a Cuban prison for trying to deliver satellite telephone equipment capable of cloaking connections to the Internet.
After winning re-election, Mr. Obama resolved to make Cuba a priority for his second term and authorized secret negotiations led by two aides, Benjamin J. Rhodes and Ricardo Zúñiga, who conducted nine meetings with Cuban counterparts starting in June 2013, most of them in Canada, which has ties with Havana.
Pope Francis encouraged the talks with letters to Mr. Obama and Mr. Castro and had the Vatican host a meeting in October to finalize the terms of the deal. Mr. Obama spoke with Mr. Castro by telephone on Tuesday to seal the agreement in a call that lasted more than 45 minutes, the first direct substantive contact between the leaders of the
two countries in more than 50 years.
On Wednesday morning, Mr. Gross walked out of a Cuban prison and boarded an American military plane that flew him to Washington, accompanied by his wife, Judy. While eating a corned beef sandwich on rye bread with mustard during the flight, Mr. Gross received a call from Mr. Obama. “He’s back where he belongs, in America with his
family, home for Hanukkah,” Mr. Obama said later.
For its part, the United States sent back three imprisoned Cuban spies who were caught in 1998 and had become a cause célèbre for the Havana government. They were swapped for Rolando Sarraff Trujillo, a Cuban who had worked as an agent for American intelligence and had been in a Cuban prison for nearly 20 years, according to a senior American official. Mr. Gross was not technically part of the swap, officials said, but was released separately on “humanitarian grounds,” a distinction critics found unpersuasive.
The United States will ease restrictions on remittances, travel and banking, while Cuba will allow more Internet access and release 53 Cubans identified as political prisoners by the United States. Although the embargo will remain in place, the president called for an “honest and serious debate about lifting” it, which would require an act of Congress.
Mr. Castro spoke simultaneously on Cuban television, taking to the airwaves with no introduction and announcing that he had spoken by telephone with Mr. Obama on Tuesday.
“We have been able to make headway in the solution of some topics of mutual interest for both nations,” he declared, emphasizing the release of the three Cubans.
“President Obama’s decision deserves the respect and acknowledgment of our people.”
Only afterward did Mr. Castro mention the reopening of diplomatic relations. “This in no way means that the heart of the matter has been resolved,” he said. “The economic, commercial and financial blockade, which causes enormous human and economic damages to our country, must cease.” But, he added, “the progress made in our exchanges proves that it is possible to find solutions to many problems.”
Mr. Obama is gambling that restoring ties with Cuba may no longer be politically unthinkable with the generational shift among Cuban-Americans, where many younger children of exiles are open to change. Nearly six in 10 Americans support re-establishing relations with Cuba, according to a New York Times poll conducted in October. Mr. Obama’s move had the support of the Catholic Church, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Human Rights Watch and major agricultural interests.
“Five and a half decades of history show us that such belligerence inhibits better judgment,” he said. “Two wrongs never make a right. This is a game-changer, which I fully support.”
But leading Republicans, including Speaker John A. Boehner and the incoming Senate majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, did not. In addition to Mr. Rubio, two other Republican potential candidates for president joined in the criticism. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas called it a “very, very bad deal,” while former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida said it “undermines the quest for a free and democratic Cuba.”
A leading Democrat agreed. “It is a fallacy that Cuba will reform just because the American president believes that if he extends his hand in peace, that the Castro brothers suddenly will unclench their fists,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the outgoing chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a Cuban-American.
While the United States has no embassy in Havana, there is a bare-bones facility called an interests section that can be upgraded, currently led by a diplomat, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, who will become the chargé d’affaires pending the nomination and confirmation of an ambassador.
Mr. Obama has instructed Secretary of State John Kerry to begin the process of removing Cuba from the list of states that sponsor terrorism, and the president announced that he would attend a regional Summit of the Americas next spring that Mr. Castro is also to attend. Mr. Obama will send an assistant secretary of state to Havana next
month to talk about migration, and Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker may lead a commercial mission.
Mr. Obama’s decision will ease travel restrictions for family visits, public performances, and professional, educational and religious activities, among other things, but ordinary tourism will still be banned under the law. Mr. Obama will also allow greater banking ties, making it possible to use credit and debit cards in Cuba, and American
travelers will be allowed to import up to $400 worth of goods from Cuba, including up to $100 in tobacco and alcohol products.
“These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s time for a new approach.”
He added that he shared the commitment to freedom for Cuba. “The question is how we uphold that commitment,” he said. “I do not believe we can keep doing the same thing
for over five decades and expect a different result.”
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said Thursday that starting to trade with Cuba "is probably a good idea" and that the lengthy economic embargo against the communist island "just hasn't worked."
The debate over President Barack Obama’s announced changes in U.S. policy toward Cuba will face a tough test at the Senate Appropriations Committee next year.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is expected to become chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State-Foreign Operations, said Tuesday he would mount an effort to prevent the use of funds for a U.S. embassy to open in Havana.
“I will do all in my power to block the use of funds to open an embassy in Cuba. Normalizing relations with Cuba is bad idea at a bad time,” the South Carolina Republican said Wednesday
A fact sheet released Wednesday by the White House said the embassy in Cuba would be among the administration’s priorities.
“In the coming months, we will re-establish an embassy in Havana and carry out high-level exchanges and visits between our two governments as part of the normalization process. As an initial step, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs will lead the U.S. Delegation to the next round of U.S.-Cuba Migration Talks
in January 2015, in Havana,” the White House said.
Of course, U.S. ambassadors are also subject to the Senate confirmation process, meaning that even if the State Department worked around Graham on funding the embassy, there could be a fierce confirmation battle on the floor of the Senate.
Graham’s Democratic counterpart at the subcommittee that funds the State Department, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, has long advocated a more open relationship with Cuba, as well as the release of humanitarian worker Alan Gross, who had been held in Cuba for about five years.
“We already have an interests section in Cuba, so that horse is out of the barn there,” Leahy said, adding that Americans traveling to Cuba would be looking for an embassy in the event they need help.
“I don’t think American businesses, certainly those businesses we’ve talked with, wouldn’t like it,” Leahy said. “It is beneath the United States of America.”
“Six decades after the start of the U.S. embargo, Cuba remains a country where dissent is severely punished. Many brave Cubans have been imprisoned for political reasons. We all want to see a free Cuba whose citizens can choose their leaders, have unimpeded access to information, and criticize their government without fear,” Leahy said in a statement earlier in the day. “But like President Obama and a majority of Americans, I have long recognized that unilateral sanctions have failed completely, and that democratic change will more likely come through a policy of normal diplomatic relations and open engagement with the Cuban people.”
Leahy traveled to Cuba Wednesday morning along with Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., as part of the delegation bringing Gross home.
Here's the question. How long do you continue doing something that is not working? After 54 years of failure Why Not Try Something New? There is very little leadership in politics, just people who take money and direction from their owners.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) is hitting back against Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Cuba in a preview of a possible debate between two presidential hopefuls.
In a series of tweets at Rubio on Friday afternoon, Paul called the Florida senator an "isolationist" for opposing the opening to Cuba announced by President Obama on Wednesday, turning a label often used against himself around.
On Thursday night, Rubio had said that Paul "has no idea what he's talking about" when it comes to Cuba. Paul, who is less hawkish on foreign policy than the traditonal Republican view, has backed Obama's move to establish an embassy in Cuba as well as ease travel and economic restrictions.
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has strongly opposed Obama's move. Both Paul and Rubio appear to think the issue is a winner for them, and are making their messages known. Paul also wrote a Facebook post.
Other possible Republican candidates, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have also opposed Obama's Cuba move, highlighting Paul's contrasting position. Many GOP observers been critical of Paul's support for the Cuba move, fueling their skepticism of his foreign policy.
Paul linked to a Florida International University poll this summer that found a majority of Cuban-Americans support opening up relations with Cuba.
For his part, Rubio argued on Thursday night, in appearance on Fox News's "The Kelly File," that there are "holes" in the embargo that allow money, goods and visitors to flow in, and he pointed to the Cuban government as the problem.
"Look, Venezuela's economy looks like Cuba's economy now," Rubio said. "You can't even buy toilet paper in Caracas. And there's no embargo on Venezuela. What Venezuela has in common with Cuba, is they both have adopted radical socialist governmental policies."
"And I would expect that people would understand that if they just took a moment to analyze that, they would realize that the embargo is not what's hurting the Cuban people," Rubio added. "It's the lack of freedom and the lack of competent leaders."
Jeb Bush just threw his hat in the ring for 2016. He has worked for years for a bank that in 2012 was fined 300 million dollars for doing business with Cuba. The Bank Barclays, paid Jeb Bush over a million dollars a year and he worked for them when they got fined for breaking the sanctions and he still works for them today. This morning Jeb Bush announced that he will step down from his post at that bank two weeks from now. Bush attacked Obama for seeking to normalize relations with Cuba. Jeb Bush is a two bit phoney pandering to the older Cuban Americans who inhabit Miami.
Republicans Up To Their Old Tricks
Republicans Never Learn, they want to fight a war over a woman's reproductive rights and they want to use the womb as the battleground.
A bill proposed by a Republican state lawmaker in Missouri would require a woman seeking an abortion to obtain notarized consent from the baby's father, even if he is physically abusive toward her.
Is Missouri the nations most backward and ignorant state? Does Missouri beat Mississippi and Alabama and Texas out for that honor? The solid republican south seem to live in another zone, another time period.
The bill's sponsor, State Rep. Rick Brattin, told Mother Jones that while the bill has exceptions for rape victims and to protect the life of the mother, women in domestic violence situations are not exempt from having to ask the father's permission. "What does that have to do with the child's life?" Brattin said. "Just because it was an abusive relationship, does that mean the child should die?"
In explaining the bill to Mother Jones, Brattin channeled Todd Akin, the former Republican congressman from Missouri who, during a failed 2012 Senate bid, said that women who are victims of "legitimate rape" have mechanisms in their bodies that prevent them from getting pregnant. Brattin said his bill would require a woman to be able to prove that a "legitimate rape" happened in order to avoid having to ask for a man's consent for the abortion.
The Supreme Court decided years ago (Casey v. Planned Parenthood, 1992) that a woman did not need to notify a spouse to get an abortion. Why do the rubes in the Missouri GOP keep proposing these perverted laws affecting a womans right to reproductive healthcare? Do Missouri voters who elect these clowns spend all their time minding someone elses business? It must be hell to be pregnant in Missouri and have a bunch of busybodies trying to make decisions for you.
"Just like any rape, you have to report it, and you have to prove it," said Brattin. "o you couldn't just go and say, 'Oh yeah, I was raped,' and get an abortion. It has to be a legitimate rape."
The quicker Mr Brattin returns to doing whatever it is that he is qualified to do, the better. This man has no business making laws that affect human beings but it really is not his fault. He was elected and this misjudgement falls on the voters.
Brattin introduced the bill on December 3 for the next legislative session, but it has not moved yet in the Missouri House. He said he was inspired to change the laws around abortion consent because he was required to obtain his wife's consent before having a vasectomy.
There are no laws in the United States, however, requiring men to seek permission from women before having a vasectomy. Mother Jones notes that some individual medical providers in Missouri have a policy requiring the partner's consent. Elizabeth Nash, state issues manager for the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization, told The Huffington Post there are legal reasons some providers might require spousal consent.
"It could be that the physician is afraid of being sued," she said.
If Brattin's bill gains traction in the state legislature and becomes law, it will likely be blocked by the courts. The Supreme Court decided in Casey v. Planned Parenthood in 1992 that requiring a woman to notify her spouse before having an abortion is unconstitutional.
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