Handshakes and Short Memories - And Who Are The Cubans Anyway?

The Handshake - Obama and Raul Castro

At the recent memorial service for Nelson Mandella, leaders from around the world came out to pay tribute to one of the most recognized men in history.  Not all of these people like each other but in instances such as this they put aside grievances and focus on the tribute at hand.

In the course of being directed to his seat Barack Obama came face to face with Cuban President Raul Castro.  They shook hands and seemingly exchanged pleasantries.  Of course there is much controversy over Raul and the Castros in general.  His brother Fidel has been a lightning rod for decades now.  He has ruled Cuba with a pretty firm hand since he and his communist guerilla forces ousted Fulgencio Bautista, one of the most corrupt dictators in the history of our hemisphere.

Cuban Dictator Fulgencio Bautista

Since taking over for his brother in Cuba, Raul has begun a series of free market reforms.  It could be argued and is being argued by some that the time for a detante with Cuba is at hand.  If it weren't for an entrenched resistance in the Cuban-American community there would have been an easing of tensions and loosening of embargos long ago.  Our relationship with Cuba is a Cold War relic that has long outlived its usefulness for either side.  More on that later.

What has the right wing talk machine atwitter is that Obama would publicly recognize Raul Castro at all, much less shake his hand.  The weight of criticism is being directed by Castro's most ardent critics in our Congress, Republicans Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida.

Before we get to them let's look at a history of handshakes, some controversial and some that should have been but were ignored by the right wing because they made Republicans look bad.

Hitler and Chamberlain in 1938

The one to which right wingers most like to refer is the infamous handshake in Munich in 1938 when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain shook hands with Adolf Hitler.  The agreement allowed the Germans to take over part of Czechoslovakia that was primarily inhabited by German speaking peoples.  The act would forever be known as the archetype of appeasement.  The right wing likes to compare Obama to Chamberlain on, well almost daily actually.  There's always a reason in their minds to make the comparison.  Any time any diplomacy is involved the characterization raises its head.  It comes up as many times as the comparisons between Obama and Hitler or Obama and the Antichrist.

Nixon and Fidel Castro in 1959

So here are some examples of handshakes that, if it were a Democrat doing the shaking, would make the right wing talk machine go absolutely crazy.  First is the handshake between future U.S. President Richard Nixon and the original Castro, Fidel.  In 1959 Castro came to the U.S. following his ouster of Bautista.  He didn't get to meet then President Eisenhower but, after a meeting with a group of policy wonks in New York City, did get to meet then Vice-President Richard M. Nixon.  The administration in Washington at the time was hoping to get Castro to be less radical and take aid from them to tame him but that never happened.  Instead Castro went to the Soviet Union for assistance and the rest is history.  Of course Nixon would also go on to shake hands with Mao Tse Tung on his famous visit to China in 1972.  Nixon actually did do some things for the better on the international scene in my opinion.

Rumsfeld and Saddam in 1983

The next famous handshake, and one of my personal favorites is between the special envoy to Baghdad for the Reagan administration, Donald Rumsfeld, and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 1983.  The U.S. during the Cold War and now and in the past in our defense of Israel has made for strange bedfellows.  From 1980-1988 Iraq and Iran were engaged in one of the fiercest wars of modern history.  For many years the U.S. had backed the Shah in Iran.  He was a dictator in the mold of the Bautistas and Somosas we had backed on the Latin American front of the Cold War but with a royal lineage.  Funny how many royal families we've backed in the years after we cut ties with King George III.  He was hand picked and kept things kosher for the American oil companies.  When he was tossed for the Ayatollahs the U.S. put its money on Saddam Hussein to try to overthrow them and put our interests back in control.  It wasn't until the ingrate grew uppity that trouble started with Iraq and all of our behind the scenes puppeteering came back to bite us.  But this photo goes into the bad handshake hall of fame.

W and Prince Abdullah in 2005

Then we get into the whole Bush family ties with the Saudi royals.  The Bush family has long been involved in the oil business.  Even back to when one ancestor with an interest in the oil fields of Baku in southern Russia backed Hitler in his push to take those fields for the Fatherland.  It's widely known that, despite the fact that most of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi and nobody was allowed to fly in our country immediately following that event, a large group of Saudis was allowed to fly out without question.  Add to that that the Saudi regime has been one of the most repressive and corrupt in recent history and this makes for a questionable, near man crush appearing, hand holding incident when George W. Bush received Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah at his ranch in Crawford, Texas in 2005.

It's such a hard decision between this one and the Rumsfeld thing but I guess my all time favorite is from 2009.  Early on as president, Barack Obama had a meeting with some Saudi folks and had "bowed" to them.  Although it was merely what was perceived by the Obama people to be protocol, the right wingers jumped all over this.  Obama bowing before foreign rulers.  You know, Americans should never bow before anybody and that sort of thing.  As part of a delegation to Libya in 2009, U.S. Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman met with Libyan leader Muammar Qadafhi.  I'm not going to get into all the different spellings of that man's name.  We'll go with the one McCain used in his tweet from that evening.  His tweet, "Late evening with Col. Qadafhi at his 'ranch' in Libya - interesting meeting with an interesting man."  Yea, the same Qadafhi who most considered to be responsible for several major terrorist acts and the same man known as the "Mad Dog of the Middle East".  He had been working toward some form of mainstream acceptance for some time.  Putting himself out there as a leader of the African Union.  Of course all that came to an end with him being shot dead and dumped into a ditch following the NATO backed push to oust him in which McCain accused Obama of "leading from behind".  The funniest thing about the McCain/Qadafhi handshake which is seen in the video but not as much in this screen grab is the slight bow McCain made to the man.

So as we can clearly see, the right is very selective with their outrage.  Sure we knew that but I mean, come on, Raul Castro is a far cry from Saddam Hussein or Qadafhi.  So why is it that ties with Cuba have remained at their current impasse for so long?  Well that's a rather obvious story and it deals with the swing state of Florida with its 29 electoral votes.  As seen in the 2000 election in which Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the election to George W. Bush based on a few hanging chads in Florida, that state carries huge weight in presidential elections.  It can make or break a candidacy.

Mario Diaz-Balart

The Bautista regime in Cuba was firmly backed by the U.S.  Once upon a time Havana was the Las Vegas of the Caribbean.  Casinos, organized crime, all that.  The politicians of the Bautista regime were as bought and paid for by organized crime as the sleaziest Las Vegas has to offer.  One such man was Rafael Diaz-Balart.  Ironically his sister was Fidel Castro's first wife, making him Fidel Castro's brother-in-law.  But he was a staunch anti-communist.  Castro was a dire threat to the casino and plantation culture on which Cuba's elite depended.  He fled Cuba in 1959 to sell insurance and real estate in Spain.  Of course the capital to do this was off the backs of Cuban workers and from political kickbacks.  His son, Mario Diaz-Balart, House representative from Florida's 25th  Congressional district, carries on the anti-Castro legacy.  Most of the anti-communist and anti-Castro Cubans in power in South Florida came from that old Havana society.  They were representatives for the mob in keeping the status quo in Cuba as a playground and center for money laundering.  They backed the murderous and torturing regime of Bautista to keep it so.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is a different story.  She is a politician of a different stripe, still conservative, but different from Diaz-Balart on a few fronts.  She has come to power by pandering heavily to the Cubans in South Florida, yes, but also in being fervently pro-Israel and pro-gay and LGBT in general, she has the demographics of South Florida taken care of in large strokes.  But she wouldn't be in power were it not for the backing of the anti-Castro crowd and she tows that line well.   She and Diaz-Balart are the current heads of the Cuban-American lobby in D.C. and, make no mistake, if you want Florida you want the Cuban community.

But the fact that Obama won Florida in 2008 and 2012 have shaken that bloc to its roots.  The aging group of people who once benefited from the dictator, Buatista, are finally dying off.  The embargos against Cuba are making less sense with each passing year and the steps toward more of a free market economy being taken by Raul Castro aren't making it any easier to keep the anti-communist flags waving.

So as maybe ten years ago the handshake between Obama and the leader of Cuba would have been a bigger deal, the outrage just seems a little half-hearted these days.  Maybe if it wasn't Obama it wouldn't have made the news at all.  Certainly we've seen from history that Republicans are pretty much welcome to shake hands with the Devil if they see fit.  Rush Limbaugh might even applaud them on that.