President Biden should neither ignore Cuba — nor repeat Obama’s mistakes there | Opinion

One of the most important issues facing the Biden administration will be how to relate to Cuba.

Cuba still engages in mass repression using methods of psychological torture employed by far-right, fascist regimes.

In March, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that the Biden administration wants to make human rights “a core pillar of U.S. policy,” but did not promise to continue tough Trump administration policies toward Cuba. Her ambiguous wording — she said a shift in Cuba policy was “not currently among President Biden’s top priorities” — suggested that there might eventually be a softening of the U.S. stance.

This is not acceptable. If the Biden administration is sincere about its commitment to human rights, it will immediately reaffirm unwavering support for liberty in Cuba by rejecting, once and for all, Obama-era policies that allowed the Castro regime to act unchecked.

As a former senior U.S. official at the Miami-based Office of Cuba Broadcasting, I spent almost four years working with Cuban opposition leaders and LGBT activists who were victims of state-sponsored psychological torture.

Cuba is a small island whose prominent citizens often know one another. The Castro regime exploits this by using “neighborhood committees” (Committees in Defense of the Revolution) to intimidate dissidents in “acts of repudiation.” The committees — in reality, state-sponsored gangs — harass the target’s family and commit vandalism under police protection. One of the goals is to prevent civilians from recording them.

Some cases, nonetheless, become known. Here are a few that recently surfaced on video:

On Feb. 22, activist and single mother Anyell Valdes’ home was invaded by members of a neighborhood committee after she supposedly displayed a “counter-revolutionary” slogan on her house. The invaders, who climbed over a fence, thenvandalized Valdes’ home, drugged and threw paint on her dog, poured motor oil onto her porch and shouted insults at her crying children.

On Feb. 23, two men battered Jose Daniel Ferrer, a democracy activist and Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom recipient. He had been offering food to poor people in Santiago de Cuba.

On March 1, neighborhood committees broke into the home of Yeilis Torres Cruz and frightened her elderly mother because the anti-Castro phrase, “Homeland and life,” was displayed on her house.

The Castro regime also uses children in its psychological war against dissidents. They are sent to churches and dissidents’ homes to chant insults and throw rocks, leaving victims reluctant to retaliate.

Just as the Nazis dehumanized Jews by calling them “vermin,” the regime calls anti-Castro activists “worms.” The phrase is painted on dissidents’ houses. Oswaldo Paya suffered this humiliation. He was founder of the Christian Liberation Movement and recipient of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, and later the victim of an apparent state-sponsored assassination.

Cuba also jails people before they have committed a crime, simply on suspicion of “pre-criminal social danger.”

A March 2021 study published by Cuban Prisoner Defenders estimates as many as 11,000 civilians are currently imprisoned for “social dangerousness” while Freedom House reports that the Castro regime last year “unleashed a wave of intimidation, arbitrary detentions and illegal house arrests.”

Incarcerated homosexuals have endured medical experimentation in the form of ‘electroshock therapy,’ and the regime has drawn prisoners’ blood for sale.

All of these state-sponsored acts degrade anti-Castro resisters into an inferior class, based on supposed “political impurity.”

That ideal of achieving political purity is implicit in the effort to create the communist “new man.” In 1966, Che Guevara described the “true revolutionary” as an “effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine.”

Contrary to its Marxist-Leninist image, the Castro regime’s motto, “Within the revolution everything, against the revolution nothing,” was borrowed from Mussolini’s 1927 speech, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

Despite all this, the Obama administration tried to normalize relations with Cuba, whose abuses are reminiscent of history’s most terrible fascist regimes.

It would be counterproductive for Biden to repeat the Obama policy because the Castro regime is, as Ronald Reagan once described the Soviet Union, “the focus of evil in the modern world” — or, at least, within America’s hemisphere.

Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is an attorney and the former director of the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting.